What if Vegans are Actually Right?

[Brian Peacock]

While agreeing with all that Brian has posted, it remains true that, on average, impoverished groups in Western society do tend to have poor diets, and a lot of that diet consists of fast foods, typically with a fair amount of low quality processed meats. Partly it's habit, reinforced by blanket advertising...

Don't say that as if I was disagreeing or saying otherwise That's one of the reasons I posted the link to the Wiki page about food deserts.

[Brian Peacock]

Well done Brian. Take a gold star.
You have once again done a lot of text but proved fa. I am sorry but you are giving a load of people far too much credit. They dont think like that. You are talking about the middle class who understand things like... Oh FFS Brian just go down to West Pilton, Muirhouse, Grantham or Wester Hailes and see how they live. The last time I was there the chippy was still the most important shop.
Healthy living? They have never known the term.

Now your just upbraiding the poor. I bet you think they spend all their money on beer, tabs, and scratch cards too.

[Brian Peacock]

Hey Brian what's with the: "veg*ns". Is this the cover you hide behind because you are not a vegan?
Very middle class.

What rot. Despite your unfounded assumptions about my motivation and character it's just a way of referring to vegetarians and vegans at the same time. Pretty easy to figure out in context I reckon despite the lame attempt at class shaming.

[Scot Dutchy]

Well done Brian. Take a gold star.
You have once again done a lot of text but proved fa. I am sorry but you are giving a load of people far too much credit. They dont think like that. You are talking about the middle class who understand things like... Oh FFS Brian just go down to West Pilton, Muirhouse, Grantham or Wester Hailes and see how they live. The last time I was there the chippy was still the most important shop.
Healthy living? They have never known the term.

Now your just upbraiding the poor. I bet you think they spend all their money on beer, tabs, and scratch cards too.

Have you actually been in those areas of bonnie Edinburgh? Makes the houses in Train Spotting look palatial. There always four shops in the so called "shopping area"; the chippy, bookies, pub and fag shop which also sells the scratch cards. They all have heavy metal doors and protected windows. But that is not only in Edinburgh.

The Honest Travel Guide to Edinburgh

The centre of Edinburgh functions as a Scottish themed Disney land tourist trap, serving up popular Scottish myths. Having no other value than fleecing foreign tourists, there are 5 B&Bs, 2 youth hostels and a hotel on every street with a ready supply of bullshit and marketing this became the sole industry of the city. Major exports include tartan bonnets, green nessies, shortbread in a tin, I Love Scotland T-shirts, depression in a jar and STDs.

Edinburgh is a city of extremes, while being surrounded with a ring of council estates, the centre of Edinburgh is vibrantly multicultural and cosmopolitan with tourists and foreign hospitality staff who are here because they have a warrant for their arrest in their home EU countries. The tourist is easy to spot in Edinburgh as they are the only good looking people to be found in the city. The city centre is fractured and broken with no community, but offers many opportunities to speak Polish, Lithuanian, Latvian, Estonian, Spanish, Russian, Romanian, Hungarian, Albanian or any language you can think of except English which is frowned upon.

Edinburgh’s city dwellers remain isolated into their own racial, cultural, and linguistic groups staying only briefly to distract and waste everybody else’s time, until their money is spent, the boredom finally hits them or a hotelier somewhere offers them an extra 50p on top of their £5 an hour.

So true Jimmy.

[pErvinalia]

When was the last time you were there?

[Brian Peacock]

...
Have you actually been in those areas of bonnie Edinburgh?

Why is that relevant? Not that it's any of your business, or that anything I've said depends on it, but I get around a fair bit and volunteer with a community arts organisation in Muirhouse. So yes, I know what's at the end of the number 8, 19, and 33 bus routes. Let's also not pretend I haven't acknowledged that far too many people are nutritionally impoverished, food insecure, and live in food deserts, and that this is a problem predominantly associated with poverty not production .

Now, you said that vegetarianism was a middle-class luxury, that "poor people can't afford to be vegetarians", and then chided veg*ns for basically being snobby and precious about food while going on about how you only eat the best organic produce made out of angel farts or whatever. Do you see the problem here?

Here's two assumptions I've challenged recently that you've made no attempt to address: simple economics - when you take the meat out of the average shopping basket the price of that basket will fall, and; veg*ns don't have to swap the meat in the average shopping basket for expensive, novel or difficult to source foodstuffs to maintain a well-balanced diet. Would you care to address this specifically?

Previously I've challenged assumptions that meat protein is a 'better' kind of protein than plant protein; that veg*ns rely on soya to maintain their nutrition; that the responsibility for the environmental consequences of soya production falls predominantly on veg*ns; that veg*ns are rendered puny or dull-witted by their dietary choices; that processed veg*n food items are intrinsically unhealthy, and; that my use of an asterisk is somehow malicious or malign. While I accept that you have a low personal opinion of veg*nism that opinion in itself is not a data point, or; one's intuitions or convictions that one is right is not in itself evidence that one is right. Objective, categorical, or declarative statements should be logically and evidentially supportable. What says you to any of this?

At this point I'd like to reiterate my broader view: that what we each put in our bodies should be, as much as possible, a free choice for which we carry personal responsibility - accepting that 'choice' is a loaded term and the supposedly 'free' nature of that choice often depends on factors beyond our personal and/or social control.

If you hadn't noticed I'm still trying to have a discussion with you here. Would you like to take part?

[Scot Dutchy]

What discussion? You are making claims without facts. If you take out steak and other top quality cuts of course it will fall. How about a packet of sausages? Do you think those people have time, knowledge and the money to go into a vegetarian diet and never mind a stupid vegan one. Where are they going to buy all this lovely vegetarian food? Poverty Brian does not allow such fallacies as the one you are pushing. You are arguing from the luxury of the middle class. Those people dont think of food in the same way it is for them filling stomachs.

[Scot Dutchy]

??? Brian.

[pErvinalia]

I don't know why you are bothering, Brian. The guy is incapable of constructing a rational argument.

[Brian Peacock]

Do I look bothered?

[pErvinalia]

You look like someone wasting his time.

[laklak]

Do I look bothered?

Am you bovvered?

[JimC]

He's a bovver boy!

[Brian Peacock]

You look like someone wasting his time.

Well that rather depends. If I was trying to convince someone to go veg*n then you might have a point, but mostly I'm just challenging assertions that lay down the law as a precursor to policing the food choices of others.

[JimC]

Brian, is there a reason why you use the word "veg*n"?