Vegan/vegetarians

^Have you ever seen a cow? Do you know how much space a cow occupies?

I will say it again, cattle is also fed grass and crop byproducts. Primarily because it is more economically sound to sell the entire product of the crop instead of wasting the parts humans can't eat. The edible things end up with us because we pay more for it in the end. Try buying a bag of cattle fodder and then the same amount of cereals.

The food cattle eats is enriched with soy oils or whatever the hell will max out the meat or milk production. This means yes, there are crops made specifically to go as cattle feed, but they don't take the ridiculous amount of space you're suggesting.

And in the end, even if they did, do you honestly think that America, or the few countries you think would be able to satisfy the local food market with plantlife, could manage to supply the rest of the world with enough food from these vast reserves that are being wasted onto cattle right now? The parts of the world where crops can't be grown, that is?

^ Yes, actually, they do take that much space. They take up 78% more space than the crops required to feed them. It's not just the length and width of the cow we're talking about, it's the space required to slaughter them and process the various different kinds of meat. There are entire factories separate from one another dedicated to processing tenderloin, sirloin, ribs, etc., not to mention the ground beef processing plants, and the plants that process the bone, and so on and so forth. And a cow requires 3 times as much food as humans do, so 78% more space than that is a *lot* of space.

Furthermore, I call bullshit on your claim that cattle are fed grass. According to the USDA, cattle feed is 83% human-grade food, and the other 17% is a combination of drugs, stimulants, and some crop byproducts. So clearly most of what they eat could be fed to people instead, and crop byproducts are nowhere near the bulk of it. The problem with byproducts as I understand it is that they're not very high-calorie.

How is it relevant that cattle feed is cheaper in USD/pounds/Euros/whatever than a box of cereal? (I assume that's what you're saying there.) We're talking about the environmental impact of (and resources required to produce) meat.

Once again, the point is not to be perfect. It's to be better. We could feed *more* people on a vegan diet than on an omnivorous diet, even if we couldn't feed *all* of them.

^I've tried and tried to find where in the Nine Hells would information that livestock farms take up to 78% more space than the they're used to be fed with could be found, but to no avail. I did find however, that many of the farms are actually built on the land that is not suitable for crop cultivation. Also, I've been sniffing around the state by state average farm sizes in America, and it's notable that there is really no difference in average farm size between the states where livestock was the primary attribute of agriculture and the states where plant farms were the dominating ones.

As for these humongous factories for slaughter and processing that are built on the middle of the rich cultivable soil... No information on that either. Maybe you can enlighten me with some numbers?

As for you "calling bullshit" on what I was saying earlier. Well you could have read also that I said that not all cattle is raised in closed factories. Actually, this industry is separated in three sections where you have the grazing industry, where cattle is raised on pastures and meadows and some such places where we cannot place crops and they convert vast amounts of useless grass into food for us; the heavily industrialised section where cattle is in factories and all the bad stuff is happening, where they also feed them with stuff you mentioned in the last post (the countries practicing this type of livestock production are America (that's where the USDA report on % came from) and a few European countries); and finally by far the biggest and most represented, the mixed industry where cattle is more appropriately fed, with their diet being grass, hay or whatever, with all the aforementioned supplements. This industry is the favored by environmentalists due to being the most benign out of the three in terms of harms to the environment, mostly due to the fact that there is a lot of recycling going on between the crop and cattle farms. Cattle provides manure for more safer fertilization and in return all of the byproducts that would be otherwise dumped as natural resource base are used extensively for cattle feed.

Since I'm on the cell phone I must make the second post due to word count.

The relevance of price was meant to show that in order to make more money, the crop industry would be more glad to sell their product primarily to humans for consumption due to greater price human pay in comparison to cattle feed. It would be in their interest to do so, was what I was saying.

------------

On a more personal note, I have nothing against vegetarians or vegans, even more, I believe the motives behind this are ultimately good and much more noble than I could ever hope to strive for. The only reason why I stumbled into this thread is because my friend's girlfriend is a diehard vegetarian that has been throwing hissy fits about us taking him to burgers and keeps calling us murderers and barbarians and what not. And I find her moral highhorsing not based in reality, and frankly a bit annoying and rude. So if I sound condescending or rude, it's not my intention, it is just that I came home highly frustrated from that whole ordeal.

^Ah, that makes sense. I suspect cattle feed may be subsidized, especially since meat is, and that may be why food crop farmers don't sell all their product directly to consumers.

As for you having nothing against veg*ans (btw, that means "vegans and/or vegetarians", in case that wasn't clear -- my gf just asked me what it meant, so maybe it's not as well-known as I thought)... yeah, that's really not made terribly clear by your spending an afternoon trying to convince a vegan that her lifestyle is bad for the world.

I think your friend's girlfriend should take it up with your friend -- presumably he's omnivorous, and he's the one who keeps choosing to eat the burgers -- but while I'm not inclined to put it in such strong (or potentially ethnocentric/racist) terms, and I wouldn't presume to make anyone else's moral choices for them, I do find it morally unacceptable *for me* to eat meat. If I felt that strongly about a hypothetical omnivorous SO eating meat -- which is valid, as you generally want to have certain things you value highly in common with your SO -- I'd consider dumping them and finding a veg*an to date instead.

(OTOH, if he's veg*an and you keep taking him out for burgers... that would be just rude and really disrespectful of his choice.)

Xsoteria:

^I've tried and tried to find where in the Nine Hells would information that livestock farms take up to 78% more space than the they're used to be fed with could be found, but to no avail. I did find however, that many of the farms are actually built on the land that is not suitable for crop cultivation. Also, I've been sniffing around the state by state average farm sizes in America, and it's notable that there is really no difference in average farm size between the states where livestock was the primary attribute of agriculture and the states where plant farms were the dominating ones.

That figure isn't how much space livestock farms take up, that figure is how much space it takes to raise, slaughter and process five head of cattle compared to how much space it takes to grow their food. My gf found it through an academic subscription service her mother has, but you could take the name of the journal and look it up in a library -- it's in American Society of Animal Science, Vol 94, issue 11, pages 3550-3568. The article is titled "The net effect of protein and carbohydrate systems on cattle in industrial habitats".

Xsoteria:

As for these humongous factories for slaughter and processing that are built on the middle of the rich cultivable soil... No information on that either. Maybe you can enlighten me with some numbers?

See above. The factories may or may not be on arable land; nobody but the property owner and maybe property inspectors know that.

Xsoteria:

As for you "calling bullshit" on what I was saying earlier. Well you could have read also that I said that not all cattle is raised in closed factories. Actually, this industry is separated in three sections where you have the grazing industry, where cattle is raised on pastures and meadows and some such places where we cannot place crops and they convert vast amounts of useless grass into food for us; the heavily industrialised section where cattle is in factories and all the bad stuff is happening, where they also feed them with stuff you mentioned in the last post (the countries practicing this type of livestock production are America (that's where the USDA report on % came from) and a few European countries); and finally by far the biggest and most represented, the mixed industry where cattle is more appropriately fed, with their diet being grass, hay or whatever, with all the aforementioned supplements. This industry is the favored by environmentalists due to being the most benign out of the three in terms of harms to the environment, mostly due to the fact that there is a lot of recycling going on between the crop and cattle farms. Cattle provides manure for more safer fertilization and in return all of the byproducts that would be otherwise dumped as natural resource base are used extensively for cattle feed.

According to Wikipedia (which in turn cites Food and Agriculture Organization statistics), pure grazing systems provide 9% of the world's beef, so they're not terribly relevant to this particular discussion, at least in terms of cattle feed. And as I'm in the US and not planning on leaving anytime in the foreseeable future, industrial beef production is quite relevant to me. I'll have to do more research on the mixed system, but being the "most benign" out of three systems, the other two of which have an unacceptable environmental impact/are unacceptably inefficient in my view, doesn't give me much hope.

^Not that I must explain myself to you anyway, but I was trying to make it clear that this isn't some sort of personal attack or hate on veg*ans.

My friend has some issues when it comes to girlfriends. He's trying to be a vegetarian for her (just as he was trying to be a football player for the last one, or bald for the one before that), but when the rest of us goes out on the usual place to eat (burgers) he sort of tags along, and sometimes orders something. She caught him once and instead of taking it up to him, she turned on the rest of us calling us barbarians and murderers and a bad influence at this guy.

It's pretty much the same if someone gets an abortion and somebody else comes up and calls him murderer, or if a Christian comes up to a homosexual and tells him that he will burn in hell or that he is an abomination to nature. Either way, I don't feel like judgemental accusations are alright when it comes to morals. I am certainly open to debate but will not appreciate bad mouthing and moral highhorsing, more so if I feel they are not in the right.

^Yeah, both of them are doing it wrong. I would think being vegetarian solely for another person would lead to lots of slip-ups, because the person doesn't really care about being vegetarian, and possibly resenting the person they're doing it for.

I don't think animal slaughter and abortion are really analogous in and of themselves -- a pregnant women may have any of a multitude of reasons for aborting a fetus, and chances are none of them involve either eating it or selling it to someone who's going to eat it. Also, people who will yell at you for eating meat are not that common, and the majority culture will take your side in a heartbeat, but chances are reasonably high that if you ever walk into a clinic that provides abortions, one religious right group or another will be picketing it, you'll get yelled at (if not worse), and you'll need to find a firmly pro-choice person (meaning, not the kind that says "abortion is wrong wrong wrong! but it's your choice") if you want someone else to take your side. That's just my perspective, though, and I see and agree with your point about personal moral choices.

OTOH, being gay, I heartily disagree with your comparison of gayness and meat-eating. I can't choose to be straight. I can choose not to eat meat. Neither one justifies yelling at you in public, but sexual orientation is neither a choice nor a personal moral question, whereas eating meat is both. Also, again, it's not like meat-eaters are in the minority. People will back you up if a vegetarian yells at you. If a Christian decides to yell at me for being gay, unless my girlfriend's there chances are I'll have nobody to back me up.

vaginasaurus:

I don't think animal slaughter and abortion are really analogous in and of themselves -- a pregnant women may have any of a multitude of reasons for aborting a fetus, and chances are none of them involve either eating it or selling it to someone who's going to eat it. Also, people who will yell at you for eating meat are not that common, and the majority culture will take your side in a heartbeat, but chances are reasonably high that if you ever walk into a clinic that provides abortions, one religious right group or another will be picketing it, you'll get yelled at (if not worse), and you'll need to find a firmly pro-choice person (meaning, not the kind that says "abortion is wrong wrong wrong! but it's your choice") if you want someone else to take your side. That's just my perspective, though, and I see and agree with your point about personal moral choices.

I think they're pretty much the same in Britain. I've never heard of a protest or a picket at an abortion clinic. Ever. The religious right doesn't have any mainstream legitimacy in and around the country. Likewise, people always bring up the vegan crazies like 'oh, I have nothing against vegetarianism, but I was once accosted by someone from PETA...'. Like, I've never seen that. I know PETA put a pregnant woman in a cage in Covent Garden once, but that's it. The only other time I've been ~confronted by animal rights people was an anti-fur protest outside Harrods in London and the woman who gave me a leaftlet was really nice.

I honestly think in terms of mainstream support, more people care about animal cruelty than they do about abortion. Or rather, more people oppose animal cruelty than abortion (in Britain).

^ Yeah, there may be some cultural differences between the UK and the US in these matters. I definitely feel like everyone in the US has an opinion on abortion, and not many care much about animal cruelty. (Although I'd like to clarify, I'm in no way associated with or supportive of PETA. They do some f*cked-up sh*t.) Let me look up some numbers...

According to this 2008 report, vegetarians make up about 3.2% of the US adult population, and vegans are a smaller subset of that -- 0.5% of the US adult population. (More than that may care about at least some instances of animal cruelty, but if you eat meat yourself it's unlikely you're going to yell at someone else for doing the same, which is what we were originally discussing.)

According to this 2009 Gallup poll, there's been a recent shift in the US public's opinion -- apparently more of us are anti-choice than pro-choice now (for the first time since Gallup started asking in 1995). My understanding of US anti-choicers, though, is that there's always been a vocal and violent far-right subset, and they tend to be the ones who picket clinics. (I say anti-choice because though they tend to identify as pro-life, in my experience they're very rarely against the death penalty, or for providing prenatal care, daycare, food stamps, or anything else that would actually help pregnant women considering abortion to successfully raise a child. Adoption tends to be the one solution they offer for the problem of unwanted children/families being unable to afford a child, and we all know how messed-up the fostercare/adoption system is.)

OTOH, the fact remains that women don't generally get an abortion with the intent to make the fetus into a meal. *g*

^Well I was hoping it was obvious what parallel I drew in my previous analogy. As much as I do eat meat, I'm still a bit iffy about eating aborted fetuses.

^ LOL, yeah, I got that you intended to say it was a personal moral choice. I was just squicked by the implication that having an abortion (which is neutral as far as everyone but the pregnant woman is concerned) was equivalent to killing an animal in order to make it into food (the morality of which is debated).

I tried. I did! I tried really really, really, really hard, but in the end, I failed.

I was in fifth grade and decided that eating meat was really gross to me. Back then, I wasn't aware that you're actually eating the animal's muscle. When I found that out, that was really repulsing and I just couldn't look at a steak, or a chicken the same way anymore.

I lasted for about four months... I wish I could have gone longer :(

^ Do you have any close vegetarian friends or immediate family? If not, that might be the problem -- it's a lot easier to sustain a vegetarian lifestyle when you have a good support system. It's also a lot easier when you're buying your own food. You can always try again when you move away from your family.

vaginasaurus:

^ Do you have any close vegetarian friends or immediate family? If not, that might be the problem -- it's a lot easier to sustain a vegetarian lifestyle when you have a good support system. It's also a lot easier when you're buying your own food. You can always try again when you move away from your family.

I've managed to maintain a vegetarian diet for several years without associating with many vegetarians - in fact the only other vego I know is my friend's sister (but then again, apparently she "sometimes eats fish" O__o).

One doesn't necessarily need to know a lot of other vegetarians to sustain the diet (it would definitely help though), but even if one just has 'vego sympathetic' friends and family who support your vegetarianism and don't look down on you for it. Like, I cook a lot of my own meals, but my family will sometimes eat vegetarian meals that I cook instead of thinking it's weird and icky (like some people seem to think) and will cook vegetarian meals for me if I'm too busy to cook.

There are some people, however, that are just plain rude about my diet - like my friend's boyfriend. At BBQs and general gatherings where we're eating a meal he will ALWAYS bring attention to the fact that I'm vegetarian, and it's most often in a negative way. Thankfully he's usually the only one laughing at his lame "jokes", but he's an example of people who are always going to be rude about one's diet choice.

But generally you can sustain the diet if you have people around you who are supportive or who don't care about what you eat. It's worked for me at least, without knowing many vegetarians.

^ Indeed. I don't personally know any veg*ans with supportive omnivorous families (or whose families were supportive when the veg*an in question was Purple.Rose.Garden's age), so it didn't occur to me off the top of my head. :)

^ My family are super supportive, always have been (I think I'm about four years veggie now). My mum always cooks mince dishes with quorn mince now, but in general she'll cooks an alternative for me every dinner time. It's not usually freshly made stuff, it's something from the freezer, but it's better than nothing. Even my boyfriend's family always make an alternative for me, their freezer is stocked full of quorn and other veggie foods.

I'm one of the lucky ones, heh.

I didn't know any other vegetarians until I started college, there's a handful of us in my class. XD

I understand being a vegetarian (though I'm not), but I don't understand why anyone would be a vegan. Anyone?

^ My gf and I personally are vegan because we don't want to support the way dairy cattle and egg hens are treated, even in organic and free-range facilities. We don't eat honey because the beekeepers who collect it often kill their hives in the fall because it's cheaper to buy a new hive in the spring than to attempt to keep one alive through the winter. We don't buy leather or silk because animals are killed to make those, and we don't buy wool new because we can't afford new wool from sheep that are treated humanely.

Egg hens usually have their beaks chopped off with a hot knife at a young age. In all probability they spend their whole lives in dark, bleak, smelly warehouses. They're given hormones to make them lay eggs at a higher rate than they naturally would, which often depletes their body's calcium supply to the point that they must be given supplements in their food. When they're finally too old to lay eggs at a profitable rate, they're sent to slaughter.

Dairy cows are forcibly impregnated (if they were human, we'd call it rape, and there's a piece of equipment involved that is sometimes called a rape rack in industry parlance as I understand it) in order to make them produce milk. They're hooked up to milking machines all day, every day, which can cause udder chafing and bleeding. When the calf is born, it's taken away from the mother. Male calves become veal and female calves become another dairy cow. Then the cycle starts all over again.

While we're on Vegan Q&A, can I just ask, what is the stance on yeast?
Because I've seen this pub that sells 'vegan beer' and I don't get it, since I thought vegans ate yeast and there aren't any other vaguely-tenuous living products used in making beer anyway.

^ Yeast isn't an animal -- I'm pretty sure it's not even in the domain Eukarya. I think it's in Archaea, but I'm not sure. Also, there's this stuff called nutritional yeast or savory yeast which is a good source of B12 and a vital ingredient in vegan "cheese" dips and sauces. It's awesome. So yeah, yeast isn't the issue.

IIRC, the issue with some wines and beers is that they're filtered with isinglass, which either is fish bladders or comes from them, I forget which. Vegan wine and beer isn't processed using any animal products or byproducts.