Like in the 90s, there were zero veg restaurants (in my town, anyways). The best you could do was Indian, and damn I ate a lot of Indian. I was lucky if a store had one kind of tofu. Soymilk wasn't really sold in the store. Fake meats and specialty veg foods didn't exist. No vegan ice creams and desserts and shit. Also no Uber Eats.

I listen to people complaining today and I really have no patience for it. I went vegetarian (not vegan*) at 19. I bought and cooked my own meals. I made a fuck ton of rice and beans. And I had to do this in a suburban hell with no car. Adults in a city whinge that it's hard and I'm like badeline-scream

Granted, people living in rural Kansas or whatever food desert might have it harder. For the rest, fucking just do it.

*I've been vegan for ten years now

  • Angel [any]M
    ·
    4 months ago

    I'm gonna assume good faith here, but please note that this community is not for carnists or apologists.

    To start, you're conflating two very strange things here: "not everybody can" and/or "not everybody wants"

    To address the first concern of "can," yes, it's true that not literally every single individual on the planet has the capacity, practically speaking, to live a vegan lifestyle. However, please note that this is usually a way of people who are not in these situations at all (as they are extremely rare situations) formulating themselves a "pass" for why they can't go vegan.

    Carnists have a very prominent tendency to make bad excuses for rejecting veganism, things that are easy to work around, but they'll believe that these excuses are anything but because the truth of the matter is that they do not take animal liberation seriously. If you don't think that it's a bad thing for a pig to be slammed into a gas chamber and slaughtered for a ham sandwich, it's so easy to be like "pork is just so damn tasty" and take that as a solid justification due to how carnism has been casually enabled in society to such a strong degree.

    Carnists overwhelmingly outnumber vegans by a ton, and it's a far more socially acceptable position to be in than being vegan, so it's really fascinating that when vegans do have the time and space to speak up for beings that are being oppressed en masse while they're quite literally voiceless, carnists have to be like "but pwease think about what I feel when you say mean words about the grossly unethical industries I fund on a daily basis." powercry-1"

    To address the second concern of "want," merely what a person wants to do is an absolutely unacceptable way of handling ethics. This could be used to justify a lot of horrendous behaviors that I'm pretty sure you and many other people would condemn outright, no matter how much a sick and depraved individual simply "wants" to do it.

    Most important thing is to limit meat consumption to the minimum.

    Last of all is this. This is the "reductionist" or "utilitarian" approach to veganism, but it's a very odd stance to hold. Hell, it's even more odd than just straight-up believing that you should give absolutely zero moral consideration to animals.

    On the subject of giving animals moral consideration, why do you simultaneously believe that animals deserve moral consideration but also simply wanting to needlessly kill them for food justifies it? That sounds rather contradictory. It'd be like saying "We should reduce our racism to a minimum, but also, if you have a desire to call a racial minority a slur, feel free to do it!"

    Furthermore, it's very arbitrary to have a notion of "reducing" animal exploitation to a minimum. If you don't have a guideline denoting that animal exploitation is inherently bad and to be rejected, what sets your metrics for aiming to be reduce it? In other words, if you're not rejecting animal exploitation entirely, how do you know that you're rejecting it enough?

    The reducetarian mentality does not have an ethical backbone, so it can be shifted at any given moment. Even if you wanted to consider a somewhat practical example: imagine someone reducing their animal product consumption to being only 5 days a week, and on weekends, they eat an entirely plant-based diet. If they had a Saturday night where they're craving a steak really bad, is there really any sensible factor in their perceived code of animal ethics to get them to reject saying "Fuck it, I'll have a steak tonight anyway even though it's Saturday." Trying to draw arbitrary lines on when you're "allowed" to eat non-vegan doesn't work just because of that—it's highly arbitrary!

    If somebody said "We need to simply reduce our racism," I'd find that abhorrent, especially since it's so damn inconsiderate of the victims of racism. Such a mentality strives to grant convenience to the oppressor, the racist, and it doesn't consider the victim in the regard that they deserve to be considered. This is how the abolitionist vegan mentality perceives reductetarianism, in that if you transition from 7 days of week in which you consume animal flesh and secretions to only 5 days in which you do so, the animals you eat on those 5 days will not care about the ones you supposedly save on those 2 days that you hold as abstinence days.