Just being a stirrer, actually...Brian Peacock wrote: ↑Fri Aug 16, 2019 10:49 pmI'm interested in what might be at the root (!) of some of the anxiety about vegan food choices expressed here recently?
No. But there isn't an equivalence that makes that relevant.
I'm not here to regulate anyone's food choices, and I hope I'm not obliging anyone to defend their culinary choices either, I'm just interested in why vegans' chopices are said to demonstrate an intellectual or cognitive impairment, or they're hypocrites because crops need spraying or because they have Marmite or supplements for B12, or that they're in nutritional deficit because they avoid dairy - even when meat eaters can suffer that same malady. As with vegetarianism there are a number of arguments for veganism: economic, health, environmental, ethical, and political. The arguments for veg*nism certainly challenge the preference hedonism of those who find pleasure in eating meat and dairy, but at the same time the majority of vegetarians don't give up meat because they don't like the taste - they just find the arguments compelling enough to take action in their lives. The same goes for vegans.JimC wrote: ↑Fri Aug 16, 2019 11:08 pmJust being a stirrer, actually...Brian Peacock wrote: ↑Fri Aug 16, 2019 10:49 pmI'm interested in what might be at the root (!) of some of the anxiety about vegan food choices expressed here recently?
I could imagine myself being vegetarian, in that I like a lot of vegetarian food, but they'll prise my cheese out of my cold dead hands. Also, no honey because it's mean to bees?
Indeed.Brian Peacock wrote: ↑Fri Aug 16, 2019 10:49 pmI'm interested in what might be at the root (!) of some of the anxiety about vegan food choices expressed here recently?
Why do people hate vegans?
From the hunger strike to the edible projectile, history offers abundant examples of food being used for political ends. Even so, the crowd of vegans who gathered in central London earlier this year are unlikely to forget the moment when Gatis Lagzdins skinned and ate a raw squirrel.
Along with his co-conspirator Deonisy Khlebnikov, Lagzdins performed his stunt at the weekly Soho Vegan Market on Rupert Street. He would subsequently demonstrate at VegFest in Brighton (although this time his snack of choice was a raw pig’s head) as part of a self-proclaimed “carnivore tour” intended to highlight the evils of a plant-based diet. At the London event, he wore a black vest emblazoned with the slogan: “Veganism = Malnutrition.”
The war on vegans started small. There were flashpoints, some outrageous enough to receive press coverage. There was the episode in which William Sitwell, then editor of Waitrose magazine, resigned after a freelance writer leaked an email exchange in which he joked about “killing vegans one by one”. (Sitwell has since apologised.) There was the PR nightmare faced by Natwest bank when a customer calling to apply for a loan was told by an employee that “all vegans should be punched in the face”. When animal rights protesters stormed into a Brighton Pizza Express in September this year, one diner did exactly that.
A charge commonly laid against vegans is that they relish their status as victims, but research suggests they have earned it. In 2015, a study conducted by Cara C MacInnis and Gordon Hodson for the journal Group Processes & Intergroup Relations observed that vegetarians and vegans in western society – and vegans in particular – experience discrimination and bias on a par with ethnic and religious minorities...
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The 2015 study conducted by MacInnis and Hodson found that only drug addicts were viewed more negatively among respondents. It concluded: “Unlike other forms of bias (eg, racism, sexism), negativity toward vegetarians and vegans is not widely considered a societal problem; rather, [it] is commonplace and largely accepted.”
In 2011, sociologists Matthew Cole and Karen Morgan observed a phenomenon they called “vegaphobia”, demonstrating that the British media consistently portrayed vegans in a negative light. In the days after her story broke, Selene Nelson, the freelancer at the centre of the Waitrose magazine row, was called “humourless”, “combative” and “militant”. In 2017, residents of the Swiss town of Aargau reportedly called for a vegan foreign resident to be denied citizenship because she was “annoying”, and the glee with which the global media retold the story revealed a widespread and casual prejudice.
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In March this year, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was discussing the Green New Deal on Showtime’s Desus & Mero US TV talk show when she observed: “Maybe we shouldn’t be eating a hamburger for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Like, let’s keep it real.” An apparently innocuous comment, rooted in the same common-sense good science that informed the Lancet report on meat and environmental degradation published around the same time? Not if you asked the Republicans, it wasn’t.
Representative Rob Bishop of Utah seized on Ocasio-Cortez’s comment, claiming that under the Green New Deal the eating of burgers would be “outlawed”. Former White House adviser Sebastian Gorka went one better, using a speech at the Conservative Political Action conference to proclaim: “They want to take away your hamburgers! This is what Stalin dreamed about but never achieved!”
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The vegan conversation, then, is a stand-in for much bigger things. When we talk about veganism we are talking about environmental and social change; we are also contemplating the erasure of tradition (Texas barbecue! The Sunday roast! The sausage roll!). We are also tabling a long-overdue referendum on how our food choices affect us and the world around us. And as much as its popularity has been pumped up by concepts like flexitarianism, ultimately veganism’s goal is a world in which the annual per-capita consumption of animal products is precisely zero. No wonder things have got so heated.
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But the body of evidence suggesting that we eat too much meat is approaching the point where it becomes undeniable. This summer, a UN report identified destruction of forests and emissions from cattle and other intensive farming practices as major factors driving the climate crisis towards a point of no return.
Some are proposing urgent action, such as the QC Michael Mansfield, who recently suggested (in a speech given at the launch of the Vegan Now campaign) that meat-eating could become illegal. He drew a parallel with the smoking ban, and it is indeed eminently possible that in time meat (especially red meat) becomes the new tobacco – a vice enjoyed by a small number of people in full awareness of its negative health consequences.
But in coining the term “ecocide” – and classing it as a crime against humanity – Mansfield framed the debate in different terms. We might portray the current moment as a precipice, and the growing interest in plant-based diets as the surest way back to safety. In this interpretation, the war on vegans is the act of a doomed majority fighting to defend its harmful way of life. Vegans might well be vociferous and annoying, holier-than-thou, self-satisfied and evangelical. But as their numbers grow beyond the margins, perhaps the worst thing they could be is right.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyl ... ate-vegans
they milk the sacred kine?rainbow wrote: ↑Fri Aug 16, 2019 8:18 amIn India they live in the streets and eat rubbish, which they convert into a useful heating and cooking fuel.pErvinalia wrote: ↑Fri Aug 16, 2019 6:32 amCows don't "stand in buildings" in Australia, Africa, South America and probably a lot of North America.
...and milk.
Only the priestly caste.Svartalf wrote: ↑Fri Oct 25, 2019 10:57 amthey milk the sacred kine?rainbow wrote: ↑Fri Aug 16, 2019 8:18 amIn India they live in the streets and eat rubbish, which they convert into a useful heating and cooking fuel.pErvinalia wrote: ↑Fri Aug 16, 2019 6:32 amCows don't "stand in buildings" in Australia, Africa, South America and probably a lot of North America.
...and milk.
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