The comments here are depressing. Reminds me of the comments on anything related to bicycling on reddit- extrapolations from generalized and uninformed opinions about choices people make about their own lives. Veganism(I am not vegan) is a personal choice and yet the dissenters here choose to let stereotypes color their opinions on entire groups?
I'm an atheist who eats a plant based diet but I didn't start out that way. I noticed that those who choose to eat meat are a lot like Christians in that they become unhinged when an atheist is in their midst. There's this reputation of the preachy hippy vegan, but in my experience it is the other way around.
I am a cyclist who is sympathetic to veganism and eats less meat than your average omnivore. The main reason I still eat meat is that I am not convinced that most plant based diets are not missing something important. Never faced much hostility for choosing to eat plants, but can't say the same for cycling.
Thinking about it, I have never once met a preachy cyclist but have met quite a few preachy vegans. Level of preachiness does not seem to explain the stronger stigma cyclists have.
Partly I think it's a defense mechanism. Say someone offers you meat, you decline and, to prevent their continued insistence or for future reference, admit to being a vegetarian. You will likely spend the next half hour to an hour of your life listening alternately to stupid jokes ("well so was the food!" har har har) and to that person excusing themselves for eating meat. I think this is because they have interpreted your statement as a sort of judgement or attack. If they're incredibly insecure, the mere mentioning of the existence of vegetarians may set off this behavior.
It's probably similar for cyclists. With global climate change and the general lack of physical activity in modern societies, the mere existence of cyclist is treated like some kind of personal attack. "You're not as conscientious or healthy as I am", as it were.
Though, like preachy vegans, there are also some cyclists who agitate everyone by completely ignoring both courtesy and the law when sharing the road.
Your last sentence is one of the most aggravating arguments I hear against cyclists using the road.
Motorists I would argue are much, much worse at obeying traffic laws than cyclists (perhaps simply because there are so many more of them). I think this is made much worse by distracting electronics in a the vehicle.
Regardless, why should a few bad cyclists be the measure for an entire group of people simply making a personal choice on how they're going to get around? Drives me crazy.
I agree that drivers have a larger impact for breaking that law than cyclists simply due to the far larger number of them. The size and speed differences matter too.
As far as I'm an tell about the same fraction of drivers and cyclists break the law. They, however, tend to break different laws: rolling through stop signs is more common for cyclists, whereas speeding is more common for drivers. Often when I point this out a driver decides to defend speeding, which I think is the wrong response. If the problem they claim to have is respect for the rules of the road, then justifying speeding is hypocritical. (For what it's worth I follow the law to the letter.)
Plus, as you've said, the actions of a few bad people in a group should not strongly color perceptions of the entire group.
Fine, but no one is suggesting that motorists not use the infrastructure that they are legally entitled to use which is the case for cyclists(not you, specifically). I'm sorry this has gotten so wildly off topic and if anyone would like to continue this discussion they are welcome to private message me- or do it here, but I won't be responding!
There has to be a word for this kind of... comprehensive incompleteness. Being so particular about a vegan diet (for ethical reasons) strikes me as very odd when animal products are in use every day around us by vegans. Do people know we use every part of the proverbial buffalo? Or do vegans often ponder the "ingredients" in everyday objects?
Is vaccinating your kids vegan? Are all vegans anti-vax?
Are soaps, cosmetics, detergents, plastics, tires, and lubricants made with stearic acid and other beef products vegan?
Vegans for ethical reasons seem to only not want to consume a single part of the animal, but consume the rest, which is a pretty large portion, by weight.
And if you're eating organic food, isn't it more likely that your spinach was grown in a bath of bone meal, blood meal, fish meal? Do vegans know how we produce organic fertilizers?
> Or do vegans often ponder the "ingredients" in everyday objects?
Yes.
> Is vaccinating your kids vegan? Are all vegans anti-vax?
There is certainly a lunatic anti-vax fringe. But no, not all vegans are like that, even though many vaccines contain animal derived products. I find this interesting: http://rvgn.org/2015/05/09/anti-vax-and-veganism/
> Are soaps, cosmetics, detergents, plastics, tires, and lubricants made with stearic acid and other beef products vegan?
No.
> Vegans for ethical reasons seem to only not want to consume a single part of the animal, but consume the rest, which is a pretty large portion, by weight.
No vegan I ever interacted with fit this description.
> And if you're eating organic food, isn't it more likely that your spinach was grown in a bath of bone meal, blood meal, fish meal?
Possible, but if everyone stopped eating those animals, the prices of these products would presumably make their use uneconomical, so promoting veganism would change this.
Though I admit I haven't heard vegans I know ever discuss this particular point. They are probably not aware of how the plants they eat are fertilized.
This is so true. And for your last point there is veganic farming that excludes animal products in the process. It’s awesome and growing.
People love to think of vegans as naive children but most people don’t think anything about their food and the vegans I know do actual research on what happens and how to live better.
I don't think it makes sense to discuss such details as if all vegans thought alike. There are many differences in thought among them, as in any group of humans.
But I would like to point out that this argument by analogy is flawed: Honey is food for the bees themselves. Taking it away harms the bees by making them work harder for their survival. (Unless you can prove that you only take a surplus that they would never touch.) In contrast, excrement from animals like cows or horses is not used by the animal itself.
As someone else pointed out in this thread, if necessary, many vegans could probably get behind a world were animals were raised for the use of their excrement but nothing else.
Cow shit fertilises the pasture and feeds other creatures/life in the ecosystem ultimately taking its part in creating an environment for the animal. Moreover the seeds the animal disperses will be lost if you abscond with their excretions.
There's a very real way in which a cow, say, feedsback in to the environment. It's less direct than stealing bee vomit, but still a part of the feeding cycle.
The reason I compared them though was primarily that collecting animal faeces of large mammals would probably be an overall negative (cf. bat guano) unless you artificially confined the beasts?
It seemed to me that the necessary interference in the animals natural cycles would be akin to good beekeeping (where an apiarist can prevent hive death, increase food availability, etc.).
Tires are rather hard to eat in general, so I guess that alone makes them unsuitable for a vegan diet. But I suspect that's not the real reason. What is the actual rationale then?
"Veganism is a way of living that seeks to exclude, as far as possible and practicable, all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing and any other purpose." - The Vegan Society
Veganism for most is more than just food, it's includes seeking to reduce animal exploitation and suffering in any aspect of your life.
People who eat a vegan diet but ignore animal product consumption in leather, wool, cosmetics are not considered vegan by most vegans, it's usually referred to as "plant-based diet".
> People who eat a vegan diet but ignore animal product consumption in leather, wool, cosmetics are not considered vegan by most vegans, it's usually referred to as "plant-based diet".
Variations of vegetarian? Vegetarianism seems to be solely about diet, whereas veganism is abstaining from animal products in general.
There are people who avoid meat/dairy for their own benefit. Because they have allergies to it, or have heard eating meat is unhealthy etc.
There are others who avoid them for the animals' benefit, to avoid animal suffering. Because there is no rationale for treating humans' lives as of infinite value, and animals as mere meat machines, fish as just 'stock' for humans etc—except that we are humans and they're not. That naturally extends to avoiding use of other animal 'products' besides food.
Racism and slavery are other phenomena in which an 'out-group' is treated as not worthy of ethical consideration, as not really mattering, just because they're defined as 'not us'. In these situations, there's a similar difference of opinion in just who the life forms whose lives and suffering matter in the situation are. And if you're brought up in a racist or slave-owning tradition, you (at best) resent the hell out of anyone suggesting you that you are unethical, inconsiderate for being that way. How dare they! Who do they think they are, thinking they're better than me! etc.
It will one day seem very odd that nowadays if you abuse and kill a dog or cat you can go to jail; abuse and kill a million chickens or cows and you can be a millionaire.
To return to the point, I've come across both ethical vegetarians and dietary vegetarians (to perhaps coin phrases); some tried going vegan but it didn't work for them; some think avoiding meat is doing enough, it being quite hard to avoid all dairy when eating out. But there are many variations. A lot of people seem to avoid meat, but not fish, even calling themselves vegetarian. I'm kind of 'lazy vegan', I try to never eat/use/buy animal products, without going nuts about it—always trying to ascertain that what I eat from cafes or friends is totally vegan would be a huge pain, for myself and others.
If you already own a leather coat, and you become vegan, not one animal suffered more from you owning that coat.
A lot of vegans think very black and white, but there are also vegans and groups of vegans who are more nuanced such as the Facebook group "Friendly and Pragmatic Vegans".
In my experience from organizing conferences people who self-identify as vegetarians eat milk products and eggs, though sometimes reluctantly. Vegans don't.
> In my experience from organizing conferences people who self-identify as vegetarians eat milk products and eggs, though sometimes reluctantly.
That's why I used the word "variations". Vegetarians can be "baseline" (no meat), "lacto" (no dairy) and "ovo" (no eggs). A lacto-ovo-vegetarian would eat no meat, dairy or eggs, but it would still only be about diet.
From what I've seen, pets are not ideal, but also a low priority.
Work animals are usually limited to less industrialized situations, so they're not usually a concern for the same people. I've never known anybody who used a work animal, with the exception of riding horses if you count that.
Vegans tend to love animals, and that inspires them to follow a vegetarian and eventually vegan diet. (The non-diet part tends to follow afterwards. See it as an on-going process, like learning things in life is.)
Most vegans I know are totally OK with pets. Some own dogs, cats, or horses. Some aren't, and some hate cats for the damage they cause (apparently a big problem in Australia). It isn't common, but some vegans tried to make their cat vegetarian or vegan as well (cats are natural carnivores).
Reading my post back my post it is rather generalising, and vague ("most", "some", lacking sources, and anecdotal). Sorry for that, but hey at least I both state it and admit it.
> if everyone stopped eating those animals, the prices of these products would presumably make their use uneconomical
If everyone stopped eating animals, the prices of a lot of plant agriculture might become uneconomical. My mistake for bringing in the organic/not distinction, since almost all non-organic fertilizers use some amount of animal products too. It's just that organic ones almost certainly use animal products.
(Very) broadly speaking, you can grow grains and legumes at scale without soil amendments from animals, though IDK about cost. You cannot grow fruits and vegetables at scale without soil amendments from animal products.
Like Diogenes living on handouts in Athens and decrying the materialist way of life, you can enjoy an economical vegan diet only if the world around you is not.
There are plenty of plant-based fertilizers, as well. If humans primarily farmed animals for manure-based fertilizer, many vegans would be pretty thrilled, whether it meets the textbook definition of vegan, or not.
I'll speak for myself. It's not about purity. It's about reducing harm. I know I can't be a "pure" vegan without either living in a bubble, or some remote area with really good farming.
Do people know we use every part of the proverbial buffalo?
Yes.
Or do vegans often ponder the "ingredients" in everyday objects?
And yes. I'm aware the paint on the walls might not be vegan. I just have to live with that.
Is vaccinating your kids vegan?
I don't know, and I don't care. I'm okay with using animal products for medicine. Maybe that makes me not vegan.
Are all vegans anti-vax?
No.
Are soaps, cosmetics, detergents, plastics, tires, and lubricants made with stearic acid and other beef products vegan?
Strictly, no.
And if you're eating organic food, isn't it more likely that your spinach was grown in a bath of bone meal, blood meal, fish meal?
Maybe. But I'm sure this is better than actually eating the animals, in a calculated sense. I make no effort to eat organic, anyway.
Do vegans know how we produce organic fertilizers?
Note: I am not vegan, nor I necessarily endorse the thinking behind this answer, but I'm trying to do a service to the discussion by reporting what I heard from a conversation with a vegan friend.
I think the argument here is that most of most animals' worth come from eating them or their products. If everybody were to stop eating animals then it would not be economically feasible any more to use the "waste" parts of the animal for all the other products. We would find other more economically feasible ways to produce the same products (via plant matter or synthetics). Thus, by refusing to eat meat and animal products, all the other uses of animal suffering would cease to exist.
So is part of being vegan trying to make everyone else stop eating animals? Or is it enough to just control what you eat yourself? Because if your point is to make all the other uses of animal suffering cease to exist, then it sounds like a hopeless cause unless you try to convert everyone else in the world into vegans.
If your goal is to climb Everest, each step gets you closer to your target; it is not a hopeless endeavour just because you cannot reach the summit in a single leap.
Many people have successfully climbed Everest in the past. Are you saying that people have already converted everyone else in the world into vegans in the past, or that you're hopeful that it's as possible to eventually do that, as it is possible for yet another person to climb Everest?
Neither, but the latter is closer. I’m saying that ending animal suffering takes many steps, and that not even trying because perfection doesn’t seem possible to you is akin to not even trying to go to the gym because you personally (I am making an assumption here) have not climbed Everest.
I have plenty of vegan friends and a small set of them beat the drum constantly.
I’m not going to be vegan and if there was a meat prohibition, I’d be an outlaw.
The thing that particularly drives me nuts about this kind of vegan is that they will bring cookies to a party and after everyone’s has eaten them point out that they were vegan and that everyone enjoyed them.
A. Carrots are vegan. I can eat stuff without meat, too.
B. No shit, Carl. You made them we assumed that.
C. the cookies sucked and people weren’t going to be rude at a dinner party where someone already went out of their way to make you a vegan dish.
D. They dipped them in milk because they were dry AF
E. If I went to a vegan party and made vegan cookies and fed them to everyone and told them in the end there were pig eyeballs in them everyone would get pissed.
I don’t do that because I’m not a self righteous asshole.
Vegan activism is not trying to make everyone else in the world go vegan, it is trying to make a bigger difference than just by your own abstinence. It can be by introducing someone to veganism, or anything "bigger" than that.
> Or do vegans often ponder the "ingredients" in everyday objects?
I have met many vegans that adhere to various levels of "strictness", (2nd-hand leather goods, isinglass filtered beers, etc. etc.), but even for the very most relaxed, non-adherent vegans, at a very minimum being acutely aware of the non-vegan nature of many/most non-edible products is definitely a consistent theme. This seems like basic 101 of pondering becoming a vegan. Of course they consider the ingredients of soaps, plastics, etc.
> Vegans for ethical reasons seem to only not want to consume a single part of the animal, but consume the rest, which is a pretty large portion, by weight.
Everything is anecdotal, so perhaps vegans you've met do think like this, but in my experience the opposite has been true. Some have been lovely people, some have been a little closer to the negative stereotype of vegans that's propagated on the internet, but they have been at least universally well-versed in the ingredients of their own consumption.
> Do vegans know how we produce organic fertilizers?
The definition reads: "Veganism is a way of living which seeks to exclude, as far as is possible and practicable, all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose."
Veganism is a commitment beyond diet. Every vegan I know does not intentionally make use of anything that contains animal products in any form. There is a huge industry for cruelty free cosmetics, for example. You’re mischaracterising veganism. A person who follows a diet of no animal products but uses animal products elsewhere in their life would usually say they follow a “plant based diet” and not claim to be vegan.
Ethical vegans are interested in doing the least harm, and so they'll investigate ingredients to ensure they're at least minimizing the suffering of animals.
A vegan would not wear leather shoes. If we're going to go off anecdotes, most vegetarians I know wouldn't either.
However many people I know transitioning to vegan/vegetarian lifestyles will continue to use leather products from before the switch, at least until they wear out, to avoid being wasteful.
Exactly, I'm vegan but I have a leather jacket I bought before transitioning. I will use it until it wears out. Some vegans would sell/throw out all their non-vegans clothes afraid of what others might think, but a lot of vegans do not care much.
I’m a vegetarian and I have all kinds of leather items. Shoes, motorcycle jacket, probably a belt or two. Because leather, when taken care of, lasts a long time, and I haven’t always been a vegetarian. But it would be incredibly stupid to get rid of them just for the sake of appearance.
And not every vegetarian is such based on morality. I wouldn’t be surprised if the “...but i eat fish/chicken” vegetarians wear leather.
I've had someone who insisted they wanted to get out of my car because I have leather seats(and I was giving him a lift as a favour). To me, that's 1000% insane, but hey, his choice.
It's not "1000% insane", and I am sure you could easily see their point of view if you wanted to, even if you disagree.
Imagine something you don't want to be part of. Imagine yourself making a kind of a stand in that situation.
Today I ate at that nasty sausage place - they had a collection box, asking for donations for animals in need, right next to the grill. Insanity's all over the place...
"To me it's X" "It's not X" - do you not see that here, you seem (ironically) the one deficient in seeing the other guy's point of view? At least, I read him as saying "It seems X to me", which is not something you can disagree/argue with—I think he began "To me.." to avoid that kind of criticism, by stating an indisputable fact.
That said, I mostly agree with both of you. But my casting vote says - yup, 1000% insane hehe. That would seem pretty crazy to me if I witnessed that. (Disclosure: vegan for decades, would never buy anything leather)
Veganism to is "making a serious effort to not harm animals by not consuming product for which animals were harmed to produce them".
There are always edge-cases. I've not met vegans actively addressing that, for instance (1) any vehicle seems to kill some bug at some point and (2) most plant farming needs some kind of animal-pest control.
Edge-cases aside, it is a fact that a vegan lifestyle vastly reduces animal suffering and death, and is is in most cases less taxing on our environment.
> Do vegans know how we produce organic fertilizers?
Yes there are plenty discussions on that topic and related topic in the vegan movement.
I think people like to argue the details, like honey and shellfish, but most vegans I know are pretty aware of what vegan is, anything with an animal product or byproduct.
There are definitely clueless people who eat chicken and call themselves vegan and such, but anyone whose done the research, or at least knows what an animal actually is, agrees on the base set and may have personal exclusions like honey.
Is veganism "eliminating the consumption of any animal products" or "reducing consumption of products that are produced due to animal exploitation and suffering". In the former case, honey is clearly not allowed, but in the latter it could be. Beekeepers and their bees can definitely be more of a symbiotic relationship than an exploitative one.
I see both sides of the debate; at the very least it's not as black-and-white as most other animal products.
> Beekeepers and their bees can definitely be more of a symbiotic relationship than an exploitative one.
Seriously? Beekeeping can be quite stressful for the bees, in some cases colonies are pruned. And the keeper gets to make money selling the honey that the bees did happily give up (the try to sting anyone taking their honey).
This is exploitation by definition. Calling it a symbiosis is euphemistic.
There are links elsewhere in this thread that defend honey as vegan. I'm neither a vegan nor an expert in beekeeping, so it's not an argument I'm interested in having.
> Considering honey to be vegan sounds a bit fringe, to be honest.
Maybe on a "percentage of vegans" level, but on a logical level, why? Humans provide housing, (supplemental) food, protection, medical attention to bees in exchange for some of their honey production.
The bees don't really get to consciously choose, sure, but you could make an argument that the Whole Foods employees selling you tofu don't get much choice in whether or not to work, either.
You could make the same arguments about milk though, right? We provide housing, food, protection, etc. to cows in exchange for their milk production.
I guess with cows, it's a little beyond what they'd normally do (constantly lactating is not the natural state of the cow), so there's that distinction.
I'm not a vegan, so I haven't spent any serious time considering this, but I bet there's an argument to be made that bees would "rather" not have their food store pilfered :)
> You could make the same arguments about milk though, right?
Sort of, but with an important distinction - we have to keep the dairy cows having babies so they're making milk. The female calves have to be separated and fed formula (so we can get the milk; likely traumatic for the babies). The male calves are either killed or raised for veal, which is going to present... issues for vegans.
I can't find anything in a quick Google search indicating that's any sort of common practice. Most appear to recommend feeding supplemental sugar to prep for overwintering.
Presumably apiculture occasionally involves accidentally squashing and killing some bees as you slide comb frames in and out? And I think bee keepers amputate wings from queen bees.
I'm not vegan or vegetarian, but if you prioritise not harming animals in order to get food or other products from them then this doesn't seem compatible.
> Humans provide housing, (supplemental) food, protection, medical attention to bees in exchange for some of their honey production.
That's also true of animals raised for meat: most of them are raised on farms and would not have lived, at least in those numbers, in the wild. Many species / breeds exist specifically because of farming, and benefit from the shelter, resources, and medical attention that humans give.
(I would be curious to see if there are people who only eat farm-raised animals and refuse to eat wild animals; there is some logical consistency there, but I've seen a lot of people with the opposite preference.)
Given the challenge of its definition, subjective or collective interpretation is a major component of veganism. Similar approaches can be taken to various degrees of rabbinic kosher law, as well as Islamic halal lawfulness.
generally most vegans (including myself) are adopting the diet for health as well as compassion, although many use it just as well as a cudgel to denigrate people over social media.
If I am cooking the food, it is vegan. If I am eating out with friends, I will make every effort to find a vegan option, however I will acquiesce to a vegetarian option if none are available as I understand the nature of the diet ive chosen. Most vegans refer to this as 'the paris exception' coined by peter singer.
The bigger picture here is that plant-rich diets are one the top most effective solutions to climate change (#4 on the Drawdown.org list): http://www.drawdown.org/solutions-summary-by-rank Rather than worrying about what is or is not vegan, just focus on eating more plants.
I believe the saying goes "eat food, not too much, mostly plants".
Having been in a relationship with a wonderful German woman for a while now, I've found out that Germany has a very solid history of vegetarian cooking. Not necessarily for ethical reasons, but because of the periods in history where meat was too expensive or simply unavailable for most people. So they had to come up with a bunch of great (primarily) vegetarian dishes.
You'll probably never get me to give up my lemon chicken or shawarma completely, but you would have just as much trouble getting me to give up my portobellos or brussel sprouts.
Plant-based is another word for "not vegan enough", and when one suggests someone should use the word plant-based they're telling that person they're "too far from the ideal vegan definition to call themselves vegan". It is very defeatist approach, and IMO harmful.
We should embrace the fact that in our societies, perfect veganism is a very extreme idealistic endpoint. Its the travel towards it which is already good. Heck, everyone who's not even vegetarian but reducetarian is doing a lot of good for both our environment as well as animal welfare.
This points to a larger societal problem of lackluster labeling requirements - people should at least have the knowledge so they can make informed decisions.
Why not? As a citizen paying taxes I'd like the ability to quickly know who the paving company was (or if city workers, then definitely who specifically was involved), and who the supplier of the asphalt (etc) is, etc; a platform like the stock market but for cities, requiring to release an annual report (maybe some already do have this requirement?), and the ecosystem that could develop around it would be very useful. Is a city run well - why and who seems to be leading the success?
This is kind of cool. The really good thing is the idea of a blacklist though, but perhaps having a system to tag ingredients would be better - it could potentially help food allergics and stuff as well if we could tag "gluten" or "lacto-ovo" or whatever. Vegans are a small group compared to vegans and people who restrict their diet due to illness.
> The really good thing is the idea of a blacklist though
It's not though, because untagged items are assumed to be suitable. This becomes an issue for people with health-related diets e.g. if you have serious food allergies you want to be very very sure your foodstuff does not contain the allergen. So a tag/categories system should have "suitability tags" (whitelist) in much the same way restaurants will have marks for vegan or jain/ahimsa or halal items, not for the opposite.
I'm replying to a comment which specifically mentions gluten. Gluten is an allergen, and hype aside there are people for whom gluten is an actual health risk.
That depends on whether there are more vegan or non-vegan foods. It also depends on which kind of failure is better: accidentally eating something non-vegan, or unnecessarily restricting an already-restricted diet.
But in either case you're not going to cover every possibility.
Eg, a complete whitelist would include tomatillos, cactus fruit, dandelion greens... and also stuff like "monocalcium phosphate".
Whereas a complete blacklist would include bear jerky, locusts, pickled pig's feet, monkey brains, haggis...
Also, checking strings is failure prone. "chicken" doesn't match "chicken breast", "chicken thighs", "mechanically separated chicken", etc. That last one is mistakenly considered vegan in the README example. If you try to match "chicken" as a substring, you might exclude "mock chicken" (if that's a real ingredient).
To be thorough, this is going to have to be a VERY big list, white or black.
I think haggis might be covered by the existing blacklist, as it's usually made with lamb offal, and would usually appear as a sub-list on an ingredients list.
Bland? Only if you define your meals primarily by the meat they contain, which is still very ingrained in the western approach to food.
So a lot of people think of vegetarian food as "leaving something out" or "taking something away", and imagine a steak dinner where you've simply removed the steak. That is obviously a bad approach.
Focus on what you can make instead.
Disclaimer: I like cooking and eating all kinds of tasty food, and I don't mind at all if it's vegetarian or vegan.
As a vegan myself, I find it laughable that someone could somehow elude the notion that the vegan "lifestyle" is "restrictive and bland" until they fortuitously discover this GitHub repo, or a tool that uses it. People are aware. They seldom miss a chance to let me know.
It’s funny because all spices are plants. So if you, for some reason, wanted to cut out all plant matter you’d be the one with a bland tasteless world.
This is the "dinosaurs" argument, and it's mostly just annoying. Did humans inflict death, farming or other suffering on animals in order to make those plants? Not as far as I know.
Like, go look into more interesting things, like the fertiliser and non-food products that are difficult to avoid if you want something interesting, but even then you'll find that veganism can be quite pragmatic. But don't throw non-problems like the above at people.
What are you so hostile against a simple shower thought?
My personal opinion would be that if anything is vegan (the "plants nourish on dead animals" position is an argument for another day), then a carnivorous plant itself is unquestionably vegan.
What is vegan and what is not vegan is going to differ depending on what each vegan believes. Diet is like being religion, you going to have different people drawing the line at different points.
If you avoid meat because you do not want the nutrients or is allergic, it is a diet. If you avoid meat because you find it wrong, it is a philosophy or religion.
If the question is about belief, I would not consider "vegan" a diet in any possible meaning of the word.
(The above does not state that I find veganism to be wrong—rather, it merely classifies the ideology.)
I talked to a vegan while ago about whether he would eat figs. Wasps dig into certain types of figs to lay their eggs, and then die and get digested by the fig.
He told me that he'd just avoid eating them to avoid the question of morality.
So to answer your question from what a vegan told me: possibly.
But why? It's no more "non-vegan" than a fruit tree having partially fed from a carcass or dead insects having decayed and enriched the soil? It's not like you're preventing animal suffering by not eating fig, the entire thing is part of the female fig wasp's lifecycle, that's the entirety of its life.
And if the issue is taking advantage of the pollinator's hard work, the vast majority of fruits are off limits.
> I talked to a vegan while ago about whether he would eat figs. Wasps dig into certain types of figs to lay their eggs
I believe all figs work that way, with co-evolved fig wasps pollinating it. The pollinating female is actually the smallest part of the animal protein digested by the fig: only the female wasps and a subset of the parasites (which managed to infect female wasps before their exit) make it out, male wasps and the rest of the parasites die inside and get digested as well.
When an industry appears that raises carnivorous plants to package them up for grocery stores for human consumption then maybe that question will stop being a needless "gotcha", but until then it can probably remain a rhetorical exercise.
Aha, you are correct. I got caught by the use of the term "vegan" as a label for food suitable for vegans (to which I normally react as if the label had read "contains concentrated plutonium").
To dig into your question, one first has to answer what the definition of vegan is in the context. Is it just a diet, or is it a belief? While a pet wolf fed only vegan food would probably die from malnutrition, it is fair to assume that a cow left to its own devices would eat food that, while indigestible to human vegans, would be vegan in nature.
But, does that make the cow "vegan", as the cause of this choice is merely a biological one? I do not think it would hesitate to enjoy honey if presented, nor worry if meat was its primary food source.
Yeah I guess it comes down to whether something like "a vegan" is defined by action (not eating animal-derived foods) or by intent (attempting to not eat animal-derived foods because of religion, worldview, etc.).
And if it's intent, are all vegans equally vegan? If I "eat vegan" for my own health, and you "eat vegan" because you want sustainable agriculture long-term, and Suzie "eats vegan" because her religion tells her to, are we all really "vegans?"
And if we are, then why isn't a giraffe? We have no insight into its motivation, and "it evolved to do so" is a slippery slope.
I don't think I've ever met a vegan who takes such a fundamentalist view. Generally the question is more: "does this product contribute to animal suffering or environmental degradation via unnecessary resorce use of animal husbandry?"
If figs aren't acceptable because wasps get digested by the plant, then surely no food is vegan, as insects are certainly involved in pollination and probably form some small percentage of almost any food product available.
I have, but it is rare. I know less of the strong fundamentalists like this--E.g., even their sugar must be special to lower the amount of field mice killed while harvesting--than I do freegans that only eat free food.
The issue with sugar is bone char—animal bones are often used to bleach white sugar. That’s similar to the problems with some beers. Guinness, for instance, uses isinglass (fish gelatin) for purification.
While I believe that some vegans might have some concern about harvesting. I’ve never met anyone who wouldn’t eat conventionally-harvested vegetables.
NB: not a vegan but a kosher vegetarian and so have some similar restrictions.
This presents an interesting question about what renders food non-vegan.
The system between wasps and figs is mutual. The fig doesn't trap wasps against their will—the wasp enters voluntarily because they have evolved to lay eggs in figs, as the fig provides a brilliant environment for the eggs to safely grow. I do not know of any mechanism where the fig benefits from the death of the wasp—that the opening is so narrow that the wasps wings detach is, from what I can gather, in order to protect the wasp's offspring, which is to the benefit of the wasp, not the fig. It is therefore not really a killer plant. The wasp is the one that keeps squeezing as its wings are torn off.
If fig is not vegan because an insect voluntarily died in the process of its pollination, then I simply no longer understand the concept of veganism. Not eating fig is not about avoiding animals or animal products, nor about not contributing to their production (If you consider the fig an animal product due to this process, note that most plants absorb nutrients from dead animals through the soil).
I hate figs personally, though, so I'm not trying to contribute to their consumption. And wasps.
Except the dead wasp (and male wasps and parasites which die in the fig) are digested by the fig to mature it. Then what? If that makes food non-vegan, I don't think you're going to find much vegan food, pretty much every plant will at one point have absorbed nutrients from dead animals.
There is no hard-and-fast rule to determine if something is vegan or not. You could just as easily argue that figs are vegan because the figs do not suffer.
My wife can't eat dairy so we often have to find an item on the menu marked as Vegan to guarantee it doesn't contain any dairy.
Otherwise, it's nearly impossible to get a server to answer the question, "Does this item contain dairy or is it cooked in dairy? Butter, cream, milk, etc."
A common answer we get is, "I don't know if its dairy-free but it's gluten-free."
It looks like someone is paying attention to this thread, since all these terms are on the blacklist now.
However, I had wondered if the author's original intention mainly was to help cooks make a determination about non-obvious ingredients. Anyone with a basic grasp of the concept of veganism probably already knows that steak, bacon, ham, pheasant, venison, cheddar, mozzarella, ghee, lactic acid, sour cream aren't vegan. Not so "isopropyl myristate" or "laneth-10" (to pick a couple of random ones from the list), and that seems like the tool's area of greatest potential utility.
According to the website they're linking to, ham can also be an ingredient.
Although technically I couldn't find a reference to 'HAM', but rather 'HAM (CURED WITH HONEY, SALT, SUGAR, WATER, DEXTROSE, LACTIC ACID STARTER CULTURE, SODIUM ASCORBATE, SODIUM NITRITE)' [0]
I know what a blacklist is. Nothing wrong with a blacklist. The problem is that the function is called "isVeganIngredient", and it returns true for "ham".
> I know what a blacklist is. Nothing wrong with a blacklist. The problem is that the function is called "isVeganIngredient", and it returns true for "ham".
If you "know what a blacklist is", how can you fail to understand that it returns true for ham because it's a blacklist and thus assumes any missing item is OK?
Even if they add "ham" to the list, you'll always be able to find stuff that's not on the blacklist, because that's how blacklists work. Hákarl? Not on the blacklist, will be marked as vegan. Whale? Not on the blacklist, will be marked as vegan. Pizzle? Not on the blacklist, will be marked as vegan.
A blacklist means you'll have false negatives (items will pass which should not), and a whitelist means you'll have false positives (items will be flagged which should not). If you can't actually test properties, the only question you're left with is which failure mode is preferrable, but it's one or the other.
And in my opinion, things which have to do with health or safety are the latter (you'd rather avoid something which turns out to be safe than allow something which is not).
I am saying the function should not be called isVeganIngredient if it returns true for ham. It’s misleading. It’s bad design.
Two possible solutions:
1. Invert the return value, and change the function name to isKnownNonVeganIngredient (and take similar steps for the other functions).
2. Even better, scrap the functions entirely, and just release the data (e.g. publish a dumb JSON package on npm called non-vegan-ingredients), so people can use everyday array methods to consume it however they want.
Yes, and that is because of the blacklist. A blacklist can only answer if something is on the list. One could either claim that the function should never return true or that returning true is correct, but the accuracy is unknown.
Are you an organization promoting veganism? Maybe direct your limited awareness raising funds at less ambiguous examples.
Are you looking to score points against a self-professed vegan acquaintance? Maybe don't offer guidance on what other people eat unless they ask for input.
Are you a conflicted vegan? If you're feeling inner turmoil about consumption of scallops/oysters then maybe abstain to be safe.
Are you (as I suspect) merely concerned about definitions? Define "vegan" sufficiently and the answer should follow from that. Different self-professed vegans will use different definitions, some seek to avoid "animal products", others "animal suffering". In the latter case, an organism without a nervous system cannot "suffer" as the term is commonly defined, in the former "animal" is typically used synonymously with the kingdom Animalia.
This is indeed an interesting question, and debated by vegans. The exact definition of what makes something permissible for vegans is just not there. With "no central nervous system" a creature should not be able to feel suffering, but are we sure. There are some videos that show these shells escaping a preditor, that would show they are aware to some extend.
It's... an argument. One me and most vegans I know avoid by not being particularly interested in neither scallops nor oysters.
I'm very "sentience" oriented, and have a (relatively, for a veg person) high bar for one, so personally I consider them fair, um, game. But one probably shouldn't put "vegan" on the label.
Wondering how hard it would be to build something that takes a picture of ingredients on a food label for text recognition, which feeds into this... or something like this
You don't do that, just use barcode https://world.openfoodfacts.org/ they also have app in play store with scanner function. It is no brainer to build with existing barcode libraries.
There are quite a few scales out here that can measure this exact thing. I know a big point is the AI recognizing it, but as people tend to cook with similar ingredients anyway, it shouldn't be too hard to adapt it as part of a process
Here's just a few examples that I've done no research on and am receiving no compensation from:
They promoted their proprietary $0.99 app in a discussion about a free open source library, and I gave them some useful feedback about how to design a similar app that could make even more money with in-app purchases. I thought hn encouraged entrepreneurialism!
If you get a gnu-hoof onto your head, while hunting, you can actually fall down the veggie ladder- so from third order vegetable, you can return to beeing a vegetable alltogether.
Would it be acceptable for vegans to eat animals that died accidentally or without human intervention? There’s some valuable proteins in that squashed skunk ma’am
Speaking personally (vegan here), that's a good question. Well, vegans tend to be people who think for themselves; there's not one thing vegans think on that or any subject.
I was once in the position of having a couple of sausages on my plate at a wedding, that I knew would be thrown out if I didn't eat them, and I was hungry, so I ate them. The person I was with couldn't believe it, as it seemed to go against my professed veganism. But as eating them didn't add to animal suffering, and they'd otherwise be wasted, it wasn't a conflict for me. I don't think I'd eat them now, as I haven't eaten meat for uh 25+ years. (And never once missed it, surprisingly)
So, sure, I think for vegans generally, animal suffering is the issue, and if somehow that wasn't a factor, the issue is then something like yours would be if you were hungry and came across a person that died accidentally. (See the movie Alive 1993 or read the book)
disclosure: Both my gf and I have shirts saying EATING PEOPLE IS WRONG, featuring the Goya painting of Cronus eating one of his sons.
Hehehe well.. I guess that's the point of Alive. It's sometimes the thing to do. Depends how hungry you are. If the alternative's dying, most people would.
For some societies, e.g. Eskimo, being vegetarian would be impossible, while in ours, eating meat or animal products is totally unnecessary for almost everyone. And does a lot of harm to the environment.
> Depends how hungry you are. If the alternative's dying, most people would.
Yeah, survival movies like Cast Away, Into The Wild, and 127 Hours (I just saw the latter) underline that people do weird things to survive including diet-wise. But I also saw the voluntary coin of the story in the beautiful documentary Happy People: A Year in the Taiga. An animal lives in freedom and relative peace, until it gets hunted and killed. That's different from ~45 days of prison life a chicken here gets. Can't compare that 1:1 and judge the former as non-vegan. Its as close to vegan as it gets due to being natural.
Sure. <Intrepidly goes off-topic> .. Into The Wild was just the guy being a spoiled ignorant delusional dick, I thought, really not impressive. Jungle was far better. You almost persuaded me the guy in 127 Hours ate his arm off the first time I read that haha. (Um he didn't, did he?!) Am writing this in case you didn't see Dersu Uzala (the Kurosawa version), one of my very favourite movies. The world before cities was a different world, like you say. <Totally off topic> Incidentally, it's my theory that Yoda is taken from Dersu. (As Star Wars is a remake of Hidden Fortress)
Depends on how strict the vegan is to the letter (you can almost compare it to a religious -ism). A vegan doesn't eat any product containing ingredients from a dead or alive animal. For some, it goes as far as "using" instead of "eating" (IMO that gets ridiculous cause would you accept money from a meat eater?). As you can see, there is not one agreed upon definition.
As for the specific subject you brought up see roadkill cuisine [1]. Fur is made from roadkill as well. I'd expect that is more common than eating roadkill, but I am unsure.
There's a vocal part of the vegan community ("vocal vegans") who dislikes all of the above. Its like the mob. How big the group exactly is, I don't know, and they give vegans at a whole a bad name. Make no mistake though: they do not represent the vegan community at a whole.
I'm vegan for ethical reasons.
I would eat an accidentally killed animal. Not doing so would be a waste. At least, give some usefulness to the accident, as sad as the accident can be :-)
But as said in this thread everywhere, all vegans are different. I know a vegan who became disgusted by meat, so I guess this vegan would not eat an animal killed accidentally.
I personally don't dislike meat (fortunately, I don't crave for it neither, and as time passes, this is truer and truer).
I'm always interested to see that almonds are acceptable to vegans. Perhaps people should look into commercial beekeeping and how most farmed almonds are pollinated. I'd say that a colony of bees is much more intelligent than a typical cow or chicken.
I'm not vegan btw, so perhaps I'm not entitled to an opinion on this - that said, I do keep bees.
While I'd argue that stopping to consume meat/dairy/eggs has more impact on animal lives and the planet than stopping almonds because bee are used in pollination, I'm still interested in how these bees a exploited/harmed.
You seem to know more than me on this topic, could you please elaborate?
The EU at least banned blood and bone meal from use as agricultural fertiliser (due to major restrictions on animal byproducts in the wake of BSE), though I think this _may_ have now been lifted. In any case, most fertiliser is artificial. The biggest use of bone meal in this country still seems to be as fuel.
Please read the thread. Bee harm in producing almond, we're talking about. Yes, it's a bit of a fringe discussion. :) But that's quite common in veganism.
Your argument could seem ridiculous to someone who isn't familiar with the concept of "swarm intelligence". Below is some super basic info on how the hive mind works, and how it could be applied to help humans build A.I.
Even if you accept that your food comes from animal byproducts, being vegan will drastically reduce your "animal footprint". Turning blood/bone/manure into wheat is much more efficient than turning blood/bone/manure into wheat into a cow.
(I'm not a vegan, I just don't find this "you can't really be a vegan" loophole compelling)
> being vegan will drastically reduce your "animal footprint"
The biggest difference to animal death one can make is going vegetarian. But even someone who goes reducetarian is already decreasing their personal and the global footprint. The difference between vegetarian and vegan is much smaller however.
Most people are carnists/omni. For them, vegan is a long shot. If we lower the barrier and stop with this defeatist all or nothing approach we can slowly but surely reduce animal suffering.
Do you tell your kid who's running first time that they're not quite yet a marathon runner? No, you don't do that either.
Set lower standards instead. For yourself, and society. The lower barrier of entry will feel welcoming and allows carnists/omnis to try delicious vegetarian and vegan dishes. Because, yes, those do exist.
I never made the argument that one can’t be vegan the argument was that if you can eat almonds you shouldn’t eat most mass produced produce since it’s not free of animal products.
I really couldn’t care what people eat, and those that don’t eat meat just leave more ribeyes for me.
