I got told today I shouldn't raise kids because I'd purposefully raise them in a vegan household, without animal products of any sort. I was told this would be dangerous and unfair to the kids.
It was a weirdly direct thing for this person to say to me (one of my coworkers). It's stuck in my head. I was told I should let my potential children choose what sort of morals they have, even though this person is raising their kids Catholic. Their advice to me was to allow my potential kids to choose every night between a meat-based meal and a vegan meal (???). And several other coworkers agreed. Where do they come up with this? No carnist raises their kids like this.
So is anyone raising vegan kids or does anyone know about what it's like? Or was anyone here raised in a vegan household?
It's not about owning Hindus though. Let me give you some context. In Karnataka, an important South Indian state that the BJP (the far-right Hindutva party) won some time ago, there was a quite popular free lunch program, provided by the previous government. Their idea was to make poor kids feel like there is some point in going to school, and at the same time fix nutritional deficiencies. One of the items in the lunch would be a boiled egg, which you could refuse if you wished. Eggs being a cheap and great source of protein, made it an easy fix for the carbs heavy Indian diet. BJP comes in, and removes this option, largely due to pressure from their upper caste electorate, who mostly wouldn't even make use of the free lunch, but can't cope with children eating eggs, which are considered "non-veg" in India. In some sense, BJP could be seen as lessening the suffering of chickens, but I would never accept this kind of reasoning.
Beef is effectively banned from being sold and even eaten in like >80% of India. It's not just enough that Hindu upper castes, who have a religious obligation to not eat beef (even this is debatable), but they will not let Muslims and Christians, who have no such obligation, eat beef. People get routinely lynched to death because they are suspected of "trafficking" beef. If you get the cops to bother to look into this, they send the meat to a lab to know if it is indeed beef. This is the level of insanity that Indians have to deal with. And some BJP supporters have now started talking about how this is good for the planet and cuts down on animal suffering, as if keeping cows in factory farms and getting them raped repeatedly so they can be milked efficiently is somehow better.
If animal suffering is the only thing you are considering, then it shouldn't matter if you are being forced into not eating meat or not. Personally, I want to eliminate meat from my diet but I will stand for a person's right to eat meat. I realize this is an odd stand, and it is possibly even inconsistent, but I hope I have explained where it is coming from.
Well, you’re definitely onto something. The Hindus are using this as a tool to enforce hierarchies, and that’s bad. Actually vegetarianism was famously employed by the Nazis too basically to assert purity and wash their hands of other moral issues. I’m unable to get on board with a right to eat meat, considering that animal didn’t and can’t consent to be eaten and we don’t need to eat animals, but I respect your outlook and understand where you’re coming from.