this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2023
307 points (69.8% liked)
Vegan
2979 readers
13 users here now
An online space for the vegans of Lemmy.
Rules and miscellaneous:
- We take for granted that if you engage in this community, you understand that veganism is about the animals. You either are vegan for the animals, or you are not (this is not to say that discussions about climate/environment/health are not allowed, of course)
- No omni/carnist apologists. This is not a place where to ask to be hand-holded into veganims. Omnis coddling/backpatting is not tolerated, nor are /r/DebateAVegan-like threads
- Use content warnings and NSFW tags for triggering content
- Circlejerking belongs to /c/vegancirclejerk
- All posts should abide by Lemmy's Code of Conduct
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
But why continue to exploit fellow earthlings at that point? If mother's are left to their own devices, the minimal amount of milk left over from the calf's rightful share will never be enough to sustain dairy industries. You only get any significant amount of mother's milk because the calf is either slaughtered immediately or kidnapped and sustained on some soy slurry. Cut out the middle man and drink the soy milk yourself. Chickens were selectively bred into unnatural and painful amounts of egg-laying for our benefit, let them brood in peace, which allows them to stop laying painful periods. Imagine if we forced women to sustain and repeat their periods for full months, quite vile.
Also most fishing and hunting is propped up on subsidaries and breeding programs, literally shooting fish in a barrel. ("most" being an operative word here. Please don't return with bad faith tired "indigenous peoples" argument)
You might be on to something
I wonder about having backyard chickens then, that otherwise live happy stress free lives. That seems like a trade off of their "work" for being safe well fed and taken care of, but I haven't thought into it super deeply. I think if I were that chicken I'd rather be alive than not exist.
If you didn't exist you wouldn't have cared about not existing. It's only once you have existed that you wish to continue doing so. It's no use making up conscious beings that don't exist and concerning yourself with what they might have wanted had they existed. It isn't comparable to asking yourself "If there was a button I could push that would make me never have existed..."
It would be possible, in theory, to have an ethical chicken egg, but by the time you jumped through all the hoops to manage that at any appreciable scale you will have realized why it makes more sense to simply not. For a start you would have to reverse hundreds of years of selective breeding so they're comfortable and healthy and not laying eggs every 12 hours.
Or you could have some of my kickass tofu scramble which totally looks and tastes the part.
What's your recipe?
It's pretty standard. I take some medium to firm tofu and crumble it up in a hot, dry, well seasoned cast iron pan and dry it for just a moment, then I add black salt (special salt that tastes like eggs), a little nutritional yeast, and some turmeric for color, as well as black pepper, garlic and usually some smoked paprika. Then when it's cooked a little bit I like to add a little corn starch slurry to mimic a runnier scrambled egg.
I usually have mushrooms, spinach, diced tomatoes, maybe onions in there too!
Distilled down to the essentials mine is: 1- 12oz pack extra/firm tofu (also like the 14oz ones from KS). Only remove from the liquid, no need to drain Crumble by hand and heated for a few minutes medium heat, then add all at once for another minute~ish: ~1tbsp soy sauce 1tsp each turmeric, black salt, curry powder.
Beyond that it's just modifying to taste. I always saute some bell peppers and onions before the tofu. Makes two hearty portions and reheats well. Usually tater tots air frying in the background.
Tofu scramble is one of those things that blew my mind when I found out how easy it was to make. I haven't even tried the black salt; it's good with just salt, pepper, and turmeric. I'll try it out when I find some, though.
I can't comment on how egg laying affects their mood/daily experience, but it seems laying for healthy hens should only very rarely be painful https://peteducate.com/does-it-hurt-a-chicken-to-lay-an-egg/
I think I'd agree we want to reverse the selective breeding. However I've seen backyard chickens that seem really happy, curious, and have a huge area to walk around in with a big variety of food, and in return lay an egg every 24-36 hours. It's hard for me to say raising chickens like that is immoral, but I could be wrong.
It's already getting pretty stretched, so why not just have a delicious vegan meal instead?
Even if you accept the premise that so-called ethically raised meat is ethical, there's just not enough land to farm meat at the scale which people in developed countries demand it, unless it's factory farmed. Ethically farmed, free range animals require much more space than caged up factory farmed animals, and the grass they feed on requires yet more land.
That means that there's a limit on the supply, so I'm pretty sure that if someone tries to solve the whole animal rights issue by buying ethical meat, they'll only push the ethical dilemma on to someone poorer than them (the one who would be priced out, due to the increased demand). That person would then have to be the one to make the decision of whether to go vegan or to buy factory farmed meat.
Admittedly, I could be wrong about this? But I'm pretty sure that increasing land use of meat, whether by regulation or economic demand, would necessarily lead to increased prices, so I don't see how it possibly wouldn't just shift the problem on to the less wealthy.
Meat is the problem, though. If you haven't realized, vegans don't think killing sentient beings is okay as long as they're killed on muh uncle's ethical farm.
but what if you didn't kill living creatures for your enjoyment?
You just don't realize you're on a vegan comm, I guess? You'll never get anyone here to agree with your
carnist ”actually, we should just kill fewer sentient beings” stance.
We fixed the B12 thing. Vitamins.
There's no such thing as a "good" animal farm. There's no humane way to murder a healthy creature which wants to live.
How dare you say that about my uncle's cattle ranch where he puts a little birthday hat on all the calves and feeds only the finest quality oats!