[Misc] Veganism

[FatSuperman]

There's not a chance in hell I could turn vegan. I like diary too much ...... and eggs. We've cut back on meat and now have it twice a week, fish twice and three days of veggie. It feels a decent balance.

I don't have an issue with people deciding to be vegan just as long as they don't try and push it my way ( it does almost seem like a religion for some ). What gives vegans a really bad name are the knobs like DXE going around Brighton at the moment intimidating people and thus actually turning people against their cause. They need a punch in the face.

Yeah I actually can't stand people that do that - but I genuinely think most vegans are nothing like the people who go around trying to force their opinion on others and shock them with horror stories. I know quite a few vegans and not a single one is like that. They are just normal people who, for whatever reason, choose to eat a plant-based diet.

 

[Guinness Boy]

There's not a chance in hell I could turn vegan. I like diary too much ...... and eggs. We've cut back on meat and now have it twice a week, fish twice and three days of veggie. It feels a decent balance.

I don't have an issue with people deciding to be vegan just as long as they don't try and push it my way ( it does almost seem like a religion for some ). What gives vegans a really bad name are the knobs like DXE going around Brighton at the moment intimidating people and thus actually turning people against their cause. They need a punch in the face.

This, word for word


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[knocky1]

which side is spreading this misinformation:

You're right. I'm wrong. Many are kept in outdoor grassless pens farting out methane whilst rainforests are being cut down for cultivating soya beans for feed.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2451943X16300278

 

[Notters]

Very few cows eat much grass.

Not in the UK, they are mostly grass fed here.

whilst farting methane.

It's not their farts that are the problem, they breath it out.

 

[Gwylan]

Spreading misinformation like this is incredibly dangerous. People talk about the ‘vegan agenda’ but they aren’t the side with multi million dollar advertising budgets designed to convince people of this absolute nonsense.

Exactly. The Vegan Society estimates that just under 1% of the UK population is vegan (probably an over-estimate) and I'd hazard a guess that at least 75% of vegans are in their teens and twenties. I have no idea how many vegans there are as CEOs of the top companies, in the cabinet or as editors of national newspapers but I'd surprised if you couldn't count them on the fingers of one hand. These the sorts of people who drive an 'agenda', not a load of hipsters in Shoreditch.

 

[FatSuperman]

ironically you have overlooked that ruminants are much more efficient at converting basic cellulose material to protein, carbs and fats. eating meat is more efficent way to obtain protein and other nutrients. theres an argument about how much meat we eat, 8-10oz steaks for ~£3 arent necessary, but difficult to tell people not to eat cheap meat. it would be better we didnt demand cheap food and instead stuck to meant reared on marginal lands, valley grass lands and hills, without feeds from across the world.

It's not ironic because the discussion wasn't about 'what is the most protein efficient food'. In general there is more protein per gram in meat than in vegetables. But then again there is more protein in cuttlefish than there is in steak steak, so I suppose if you are desperate for protein then go eat that, or octopus. Or seitan, which is plant-based and more protein rich than all of that. Jesus, peanut butter has as much protein as steak, and is more calorie dense, so from an efficiency perspective you could go nuts on that. Arctic explorers eat lots of butter to keep themselves going, due to it being the most calorie dense food, so you'd be in good company.

I suspect most people eat steak because it's delicious, rather than some inherent need to cram protein!

However, if your point is that it is a more efficient use of land, to feed / rear cattle in order to get protein into humans, then again, that is total nonsense. It would be FAR more efficient to grow protein rich plants for human consumption, than to grow feed and rear livestock on that land.

15% of the world's calories come from meat, and that equates to 25% of the world's protein. So by and large, it is providing more protein by gram, but funnily enough, 75% of the world's protein intake is not coming from meat.

 

[FatSuperman]

and 2 of every type of animal, who can escape on a boat, and just start again. There will be no dinosaurs this time so the vessel doesn’t have to be as big…….which is obviously a bonus given construction costs nowadays.
On the plus side, kangaroos wont have to walk to the ark anymore then walk back to Australia after the flood, modern transport techniques have improved considerably.

Another plus is that we've made a few animals extinct since the Original Flood, so the big boat can be even more modest. Also, I've been thinking, do we really need to take every animal? There are over 1,000 breeds of cattle worldwide, but 90% of beef comes from just 6 cattle breeds. Let's just let the other 994-odd drown? They are useless anyway, and if we get rid of them there is more room for other, more worthwhile cows. I'm not sure what the long-term implications are for this, but I'm excited to find out.

 

[Bakero]

Exactly. The Vegan Society estimates that just under 1% of the UK population is vegan (probably an over-estimate) and I'd hazard a guess that at least 75% of vegans are in their teens and twenties. I have no idea how many vegans there are as CEOs of the top companies, in the cabinet or as editors of national newspapers but I'd surprised if you couldn't count them on the fingers of one hand. These the sorts of people who drive an 'agenda', not a load of hipsters in Shoreditch.

Everyone knows the vegans control the media.

 

[rippleman]

Christ why can’t people just be honest and say ‘I like to eat what I want’? It’s nobody else’s business why each of us eat what we want anyway.

Try telling that to the vegan activists that want to stop people exercising their right to eat whatever they want!

 

[beorhthelm]

However, if your point is that it is a more efficient use of land, to feed / rear cattle in order to get protein into humans, then again, that is total nonsense. It would be FAR more efficient to grow protein rich plants for human consumption, than to grow feed and rear livestock on that land.

15% of the world's calories come from meat, and that equates to 25% of the world's protein. So by and large, it is providing more protein by gram, but funnily enough, 75% of the world's protein intake is not coming from meat.

my point was only to highlight the overlooked efficiency of animals. i like your idea of more peanut if we can convince everyone to eat 100g a day. and grow it, ship it etc. we could continue to utilise all that grassland across europe for cattle and sheep, or turn it over to poor yielding crops, or let it return to woodland. some say that would be a good idea in itself.

 

[FatSuperman]

Try telling that to the vegan activists that want to stop people exercising their right to eat whatever they want!

Absolute bell ends those people. Same as with any activist or religious zealot etc. You aren't going to convince people to change their diet based on your opinion or horrible pictures etc. Change simply doesn't work like that in the vast majority of people. It's a total waste of time. It's no different to trying to convince people to use less energy, or drive more economical cars. People will do that when the barriers to change have totally disappeared, and the change is in fact the easiest thing to do. There will never be a mass conversion to veganism, but perhaps over generations it will start to happen. And frankly there isn't anything wrong with that. In my opinion.

 

[BLOCK F]

View attachment 104149

Good old Pink Floyd!

 

[FatSuperman]

my point was only to highlight the overlooked efficiency of animals. i like your idea of more peanut if we can convince everyone to eat 100g a day. and grow it, ship it etc. we could continue to utilise all that grassland across europe for cattle and sheep, or turn it over to poor yielding crops, or let it return to woodland. some say that would be a good idea in itself.

Well, we need to eat 200g of peanut butter a day to get our RDA of protein. But unfortunately that takes us 50% over our fat allowance. A few months of this and we'll have scurvy. Plus I suspect some other issues.

Look, the reality is that it's nothing to do with efficiency. Raising and eating animals is not more efficient than growing plants. If you were out having to hunt for your own food, then being able to catch a wild animal is definitely a good shout - calorie dense and a good reward, assuming it doesn't take you forever to hunt it etc. But if you were having to grow your own food to survive, then growing feed for animals, rearing and eating those is not the sensible option.

 

[Thunder Bolt]

Not in the UK, they are mostly grass fed here.



It's not their farts that are the problem, they breath it out.

Don't let facts spoil a binfest.


I'd love to see how our resident vegans think that everyone could become a vegan when you have Inuits, Laps and Bedouins living in environments where crops cannot be grown.

 

[Bakero]

Don't let facts spoil a binfest.


I'd love to see how our resident vegans think that everyone could become a vegan when you have Inuits, Laps and Bedouins living in environments where crops cannot be grown.

Have any of the resident vegans suggested everyone could become vegan?

 

[abc]

There's tough competition out there (we have Palace fans posting on here for goodness sake) but that has to be the most deluded post of all time.

What happened? Did a vegan run off with your mother?

Not deluded at all and def not a palace fan! .

Grassland is indeed an essential carbon sink, though perhaps I should have been more accurate is saying the soil is the carbon sink whilst the grass is the sequester. Of course this doesn't mean we shouldn't protect our forests or any other ecosystem (sea grass could be the biggest carbon sink of all). However, every time land is ploughed or cultivated (several times a year when in crops) there is a carbon release event which does not occur in grassland. Furthermore cropping deletes the soil where livestock grazing maintains a nutrient balance. One should no more take this argument as a reason to stop growing crops or vegetables than the reverse is an argument to stop farming animals (or for that matter go and shoot all the ruminants such as wilderbeast in the wild). However we do no need to achieve balance with an aim to reduce mega intensive food production full stop, use less fossil fuel based fertilisers and pesticides and above all maintain the health of the soil. Mixed farming systems are fundamental to achieving this.

You might find this article of interest: https://www.earth.com/news/trees-grass-carbon-sink/

And by the way, I have nothing against vegans - not eating meat is their choice and I respect that. I am far more concerned about the wider environment and the damage that one sided politicised myths could potentially do if not challenged.

As one or two posters have said, the real answer to climate change lies in eating less of everything and controlling world population growth.

 

[BrickTamland]

Don't let facts spoil a binfest.


I'd love to see how our resident vegans think that everyone could become a vegan when you have Inuits, Laps and Bedouins living in environments where crops cannot be grown.

Well they don’t rely on mass produced food, of any kind, which is the real issue. Can you eat meat and be environmentally friendly? Yes of course, if you rely on traditional, small scale rearing methods (which the groups you mentioned do). Do the majority of people who eat meat, and the majority of meat those people eat, adhere to those methods? No. It would be far too expensive, hence the demand for battery farming etc.

I don’t eat meat but don’t think what you eat is necessarily the main problem, it’s how that food is produced which is the issue, and economically speaking it is much easier for people to eat the problem foods, rather than say, organic free range ‘we give it a cuddle when we slaughter it’ cows and pigs, which, if locally sourced, is no real threat to the environment.

 

[Mannakin]

Thread went off piste about as quickly as you’d expect.

Boggles The mind how bloody stubborn people get over this subject. It is rather basic science that teaches us that you lose energy each time you convert it. Nothing is 100% efficient. The most efficient internal combustion engine in the world is 40% efficient. So when you burn the gasoline to create energy, 60% of it is lost. And that’s before you consider everything else sapping the energy (resistance from road, aerodynamics / wind, etc).

So people that think you are using land MORE effectively by producing food and water to give to one animal, in order to kill it and feed other animals must be pretty ****ing stupid. Ignoring all of the ethical / animal welfare arguments, meat is way more environmentally unfriendly than plants.

Christ why can’t people just be honest and say ‘I like to eat what I want’? It’s nobody else’s business why each of us eat what we want anyway.

Energy is never "lost", ever, it's just converted to something e.g. noise/heat that's not useful.

 

[FatSuperman]

Some of the comments are ridiculous. We aren't talking about Inuits being an issue here. You always hear these same tired old arguments "vegans never mention the inuits". "What about all that land wasted by growing plants, which aren't calorie/protein/iron/etc dense??".

It's all bollocks. It is simply INEFFICIENT to convert plant energy to animal energy to food energy. All other arguments about land use are just fluff. I'm not trying to preach to people to eat less meat, that's a waste of time. But I can't stand these nonsense arguments against a plant-based diet.

If you consider all of the arable land on the planet, then if we all had a typical US-omnivore diet, the planet could sustain around 2.5 billion people. If we used it all for plants, it would feed somewhere closer to 10 billion.

View attachment Land-use.png

 

[Horses Arse]

Not deluded at all and def not a palace fan! .

Grassland is indeed an essential carbon sink, though perhaps I should have been more accurate is saying the soil is the carbon sink whilst the grass is the sequester. Of course this doesn't mean we shouldn't protect our forests or any other ecosystem (sea grass could be the biggest carbon sink of all). However, every time land is ploughed or cultivated (several times a year when in crops) there is a carbon release event which does not occur in grassland. Furthermore cropping deletes the soil where livestock grazing maintains a nutrient balance. One should no more take this argument as a reason to stop growing crops or vegetables than the reverse is an argument to stop farming animals (or for that matter go and shoot all the ruminants such as wilderbeast in the wild). However we do no need to achieve balance with an aim to reduce mega intensive food production full stop, use less fossil fuel based fertilisers and pesticides and above all maintain the health of the soil. Mixed farming systems are fundamental to achieving this.

You might find this article of interest: https://www.earth.com/news/trees-grass-carbon-sink/

And by the way, I have nothing against vegans - not eating meat is their choice and I respect that. I am far more concerned about the wider environment and the damage that one sided politicised myths could potentially do if not challenged.

As one or two posters have said, the real answer to climate change lies in eating less of everything and controlling world population growth.

Interesting article relating to Californian forests, droughts and alternative land uses. All interesting stuff. Not sure how that is an argument for veganism not being good for the planet though; it is better for the planet than a high meat diet. Eating in moderation, not eating meat 3 times a day, thinking about what you do and how you travel in addition to how you eat are all key issues in terms of protecting the environment.

Interestingly, one way we could make a massive difference to the energy used and hence carbon emissions is to turn off the internet. Too late for that now I guess