And yes, much fishing and aquaculture is presently unsustainable, but that can be said about agriculture too. It's not nearly an adequate argument for abandoning it entirely.
The argument for full veganism has to be that animals are people. Sustainability arguments won't cut it. If animals aren't people, you never get to full veganism, and if animals are people the sustainability argument is redundant anyway.
Eating fish is not sustainable. Overfishing and by-catch is a real problem (already more than 90% of sharks are exterminated), and in near future the seas could be totally devoid of life (except for jellyfish).
[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seaspiracy ]
> The argument for full veganism has to be that animals are people
I don't agree.
(1) We shouldn’t be cruel to animals, i.e. we shouldn’t harm animals unnecessarily.
(2) The consumption of animal products harms animals and Earth.
(3) The consumption of animal products is unnecessary.
(4) Therefore, we shouldn’t consume animal products.
Every time I see that title I ask myself why they didn't go for "conspirasea"
Again: No matter how bad harvesting of sea resources is, it can't be enough to abandon the oceans entirely, any more than the vast land-use impact of agriculture can be used as argument for abandoning agriculture.
I probably don't understand your point (sorry english is not my first or second language).
At this moment we're seriously overfishing our oceans and killing it's population, that's what i have beef with (pun intended).
So your argument is - let's continue fishing?
> any more than the vast land-use impact of agriculture can be used as argument for abandoning agriculture
I'm arguing for changing agriculture (or better land management practices), not its abandonment.
- They are unnecessary. Humanity lived thousands of years without them.
- They harm billions of animals.
- But not using them would condemn us to a subsistence economy.
Edit: though for thought lmao
Totally agree.
Cca 75% of pesticides/herbicides are used for meat & dairy production (we need 75% of agriculture land for it).
> They harm billions of animals.
And they harm people, too. Pesticide bioaccumulation in milk has been linked to Parkinson's disease, for example.
> But not using them would condemn us to a subsistence economy.
I'm not sure that's true.
There is a lot of regenerative agriculture styles not needing pesticides/herbicides. Current agriculture practices are oriented on mass scale and low prices - when you modify that need, you can have much greater yields, but have to change your way of thinking about it.
One example (sorry, have to return to work process). We've all seen the large fields of wheat, so large, you can see the earth curvature. And not a single tree in sight.
If you remove all the nature, tile it, seed large swaths of land with a monoculture, you remove a place for wildlife to live in.
Without predators (foxes, owls) your crop gets all eaten by mice, which overpopulate easily. So you have to use pesticides (which we then eat in our food & drink in our water).
If you have a monoculture, then bugs easily propagate and there is nothing to stop them and you'll have a large loses. But if you stop planting monoculture (maybe alternating rows of crops with rows of trees, and some bushes & flowers between them), bugs will have harder time to infect whole harvest and there is enough natural predators from the bug world to take care of them.
Biodiversity is the key.
[https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8969332/ - The Biggest Little Farm, sustainable farm on 200 acres outside of Los Angeles talks in some lengths about this] [https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/may/07/secret-w...] [https://www.agricology.co.uk/field/farmer-profiles/iain-tolh... - a single person from previous article]
Meat eating is a complex matter - no time & space to cover it extensively here.
As I'm convinced, without forests the water cycle gets disrupted and the climate won't be able to support life as we know it [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKL40aBg-7E - The Biotic Pump: How Forests Create Rain].
With cows, there is not enough land to even have forests.
And if we can agree that we don't need cows and dairy (plants can replace it easily), why not also remove all the suffering that's connected to the meat industry?
Sorry for the detour.
What's the current academic consensus on nutritional deficiencies of vegan / lacto-vegeterian diet?
I grew up on a lacto-vegeterian diet in India. I can't shake off the feeling that I would've had a better physique and growth if I had access to non-vegetarian food during my youth.
Most people don't eat a "normal >healthy< diet with animal products". It takes as much work to have a meat based healthy diet as a vegetarian based healthy diet.
Regardless, the bigger problem is the lack of long term research we have on mindful omnivores vs mindful vegetarians vs mindful vegans, etc. Most comparisons are between mindful vegans and omnivores living off of incredibly poor diets.
There is no sense in reducing the entire human experience to the lowest common denominator one in order to fit more people on the planet. If that's in your plans, you have a literal fight on your hands.
You could say, that the only way to have the entire human experience, is to eat carnivores (lions, anyone?).
With carnivore diet how many people you think the planet would support?
Would there be a place for yourself, now?
What about your children and children of your children? For wildlife? For nature?
Come on, grow up, people.
A line in the sand will be drawn somewhere, here's mine. I don't believe in infinite growth, it will result in us all drinking Soylent in cages.
The objective for me is to have a high quality of life for a reasonable number of people, not a low quality of life for the maximum amount possible.
We don't even have enough room to supplement the current population on western version of meat-eating diet. We already use more land for beef production, than we have forests.
> until we have tens of billions of humans
Agree, we have to abandon our current notions of growth, if we want to preserve life for future generations. On our current path we're going to hell (too many things to enumerate here).
> a high quality of life for a reasonable number of people
Plant-based diet means a higher quality of life for everyone - people, animals, wildlife.
I for one would rather have more forests, than beef burger packaged in plastic.
If you think that we handle animals humanly, please see Dominion (2018) movie [https://www.dominionmovement.com/watch]. If you can watch it till the end and still have the same opinion about putting meat above your taste buds, please, let me know. You'd be the first.
Care to clarify what this means, if not a hyperbolic statement about how much you enjoy eating meat?
Instead it's the very wasteful food culture especially the west has, let's take steak as an example, for the around 5 steaks a family of 3 will eat you could easily make a stew for 4 with only 3 of those steaks.
Is it a waste for me to use a nice keyboard because a cheap 5 quid one will do?
Pretty sure the bigger problem is still the tons of food we throw away after going through everything to grow and ship it.
You can't just leave meat and eat the rest and call it vegan diet. Most anti-vegans never had a real vegan meal. We all have an idea of vegan meals - but your mum's vegetable dish, which left you hungry after eating it, is not a real representative of vegan diet.
You'll just need to learn to cook differently - or better, what to substitute with what.
No need to invent new recipes. There is a lot of vegan meals in India, Mexico, Greece, Ethiopia, even your country for sure has some. Just make sure you eat diverse food and don't forget your B12 supplement (in vegan variant, because B12 is from earth bacteria or seaweed, not from meat).
When searching for a recipe (burger recipe) on the net, just add "vegan" (vegan burger recipe) and you'll certainly find something you'll enjoy.
[https://www.peta.org/living/food/vegan-egg-replacer-guide/ - 24 Ways to Replace an Egg] [https://html.duckduckgo.com/html?q=vegan%20replace%20meat] [https://html.duckduckgo.com/html?q=vegan%20milk%20recipes]
But nobody likes to eat baked vegetables and porridge all the time. Just because we have meats, milks and cheeses, it does not mean we're after the taste. We're after variety in taste and structure. We also have favorite foods from our time not being vegans, and recreating them in plant-based version is satisfying. And no, it does not taste 100% like the "real" thing. If it would, some (I) would not eat it.
And plant-based meat does not have to be frankenfood [1] [2]. Take some plant-based protein (wheat, peas, what have you), marinate it in some vegetable broth and soya sauce, maybe color it with beet root, and you've got perfectly healthy meat replacement [3].
[1] https://www.peta.org/living/food/meat-contamination/ - Meat Contamination [2] https://sogoodsoyou.com/6-lessons-eating-plant-based-dr-greg... - The best way to minimize your exposure to industrial toxins may be to eat as low as possible on the food chain, a plant-based diet”. Pollutants that find their way into the soil will eventually work their way up the food chain. When you eat meat from an animal, you must consider the thousands of pounds of (potentially contaminated) plants it consumed before being slaughtered. Avoid these pollutants entirely by eating lower on the food chain [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yY2YN6krVtk - Washed Flour Seitan Recipe from Start to Finish
Conversation might be a bit limited though. The need to tell everyone you meet, within 5 minutes of meeting them, that you're a vegan would be removed.
I don’t think I’ll ever be pure vegan but I’ll see how far I can get. Except for cheese as noted elsewhere, most meals are not lacking anything in terms of taste or satiation.
So - it's already true! We grow all the barley we need to sustain ourselves, and the rest is given over to other produce that provides the other nutrients we need, as well as some luxury. Yay vegan sustainability!
