like why would you eat bugs when you've got a perfectly good, protein-filled non-bug bean option right there. Fucking weird tbh
Yeah but you gotta have the dilemma to own vegans online.
What if you were trapped on a desert island with a large, Kafkaesque cockroach, a Caesar salad (with anchovies), and a cow with object permanence? Would you be ok with eating the sentient bug man?
what if your name was gregor and this dude showed up on your island one day and then kept debating to themselves if they should dismember and consume your friend betsy, or shuck and devour you, and absolutely wailing about the moral ramifications of just sharing the ceasar salad you were eating for lunch because "it has anchovies!" only for them to look you dead in the eye and ask permission to hack off a few of your limbs?
I know it is unsocialist but I called dibs on this struggle session
Oh how's she doing? I've been meaning to catch up with her for ages. Go back years me and Debs do. Used to play tennis with her afterschool on wednesdays.
Honey, no. Bugs? Certainly a better protein option than meat in terms of environmental impact. Like others have said, I would if necessary, and the ethics aren’t as clear cut as eating larger mammals and sea creatures, But more than anything else I can’t imagine a situation other than some lovecraftian nightmare world where eating bugs makes more sense than eating beans. Also faux meats have gotten so good it just seems pointless Rn. Who knows though? Could be a crucial agricultural crop in LGSC!
I’m loving the vegan unity in this thread, who ever said veganism isn’t a coherent ethical philosophy!? Speciesism is the fertile soil in which all bigotry grows! Go vegan comrades!
As a vegan, I still don't get the speciesism shit. Like, most vegans will still always prioritize people over animals. That doesn't mean we can't have animal rights or killing and eating them, but yeah, animals are necessary for a lot of medical research and termite infestations are still gonna be met with extermination.
The idea of speciesism is really simple. The idea is that Other animals are just as deserving of life as we are and the core assumption of animal agriculture; that by raising and maintaining the lives of animals We can decide when and how they die, is fallacious and inherently cruel. The arguments for this tend to center around how when the Nazis we’re designing concentration camps they looked to slaughterhouses for inspiration on how to do a mass extermination. That might sound like bougie Zionist veganism that doesn’t properly account for the value of human life. But I personally think it’s a profound idea because every genocide begins with the dehumanization of the enemy and the fact that dehumanization usually translates directly to “its ok to murder and brutalize them” is evidence that there’s something to the idea IMO. I think it’s debatable how Necessary or even valuable animals are for medical research and honestly pests like termites can be directly harmful to ones health and the health of their family so that kinda falls into a similar category of like what you do when attacked by an animal; you gotta kill the Animal or atleast get it very far away from you because otherwise it will physically harm you. We’re allowed to prioritize human lives over other animals just as any other species would with their own. We just can’t ethically capture or keep livestock with intent to slaughter because that’s just as bad as fattening up Some other person so you can eat them later.
In even simpler terms the argument boils down to pointing out the dangerous fallacy of the logic that we can rape and murder cows and other animals and it’s not ethically wrong because they aren’t human.
Honey is worse than eating endemic bugs if you're comparing them.
Honey production has a lot of terrible suffering involved on top of being bad for the environment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clMNw_VO1xo
Just logically the concept of introducing an invasive species that steals nectar and pollen from endemic bees and other pollinators is doing harm to the environment and local biodiversity.
That’s what I said lol but that said small scale beekeeping is fine and kinda good
I think most probably would be. Some vegans don't even eat honey.
All vegans do not eat honey.
If someone eats honey, they are not vegan. They are stricter vegetarians who avoid (presumably) dairy and eggs.
If you eat vegetables, there will be bugs in there, there's just no way around it. So already, it's established that being vegan is doing the least amount of harm to animals practically possible. Whats considered "practical" is what's in contention. It also depends heavily on your reason for being vegan, for instance a lot of people our age do it for the environment.
Personally I don't eat bugs because, gross, but I occasionally have bread that has honey in it because I'm not gonna bother to buy a different loaf if someone in my home grabs some with it in there. If that invalidates being being a vegan, that's a pretty unstable classification.
Yes, that is not what veganism is by the definition.
I'm with you, if someone accidentally buys something I'll eat/drink it, that happened to me yesterday. But that's why veganism is an ideal to strive for, not something you either are or aren't doing.
Also, what you're doing isn't "eating honey" how I meant it. You don't buy honey and you avoid buying items made with it. You're just not denying eating it if someone buys it accidentally, which is different. Honey's in a lot of stuff, it's hard to avoid.
You eat vegetables, yet farmers use pesticides to grow them. Curious!
I avoid carmine because of this; it's red food dye made from crushed cochineal insects found in a lot of things
bugs do have brains, and some are surprisingly smart, best to not kill unnecessarily
want a real vegan struggle session? Which lifestyle is more ethical; being a hunter who who only eats what you kill and doesn’t eat dairy or eggs, or being a lacto/ovo vegetarian?
Vegetarians are just omnis who are lying to themselves. Going to consume milk and eggs? Might as well just kill and way the cow and chicken too, it makes no difference.
Very true, “pescatarians” are even worse. I have way more respect for unapologetic omnis than vegetarians who are “concerned” with the ethics of their Food.
That said, it’s important to be patient with people on their food journeys. Quitting cheese especially is like quitting a drug. That’s why vegetarianism even exists and not the opposite path of quitting eggs/milk/cheese THEN meat. If you think about it that’s the path that makes more sense by any ethical/environmental/health standard (not that meat is good for you in any way) but no one does that because it’s way fucking harder to give up cheese. Why people cling to eggs though I don’t get. Eggs are overrated AF.
I had more trouble with eggs than cheese tbh, but each to their own. I'm also all for some patience, but gotta have the reality of milk and egg production shown to vegetarians.
They don't get a big special boy tick in my eyes, maybe because I skipped that step and don't know why the need it.
Nah, no idea. Just googled it and it's some sort of rock salt?
I think it as easy for me to skip it because I already loved cooking and cooked most of my own food. A little easier in Aus than other places in the world maybe - I hear getting fresh food is kinda fucked in a lot of the US
kinda fucked is an understatement. impossible for a sizeable percentage of the population, difficult for many more, and generally inconvenient otherwise.
pretty sure the u.s. just decided at some point that everything was fine coming out of a can
Without a car my only reasonable option for food would be 7-Eleven.
theres a walmart like two and half miles away from me, so uh... ive got that going for me i guess.
o7 Will do, we have an Indian grocer a couple of blocks down that we love.
Lacto/ovo vegetarians are so obviously worse that it's not even a contest.
This is the correct take, it’s vegan ideological unity all the way down! o7
being a hunter who who only eats what you kill
Especially when it's overpopulated white tailed deer.
"If the deer ever do overpopulate an area, their numbers will reduce naturally through starvation, disease and lower fertility."
Thats literally the same argument hunters make. That its more ethical to shoot a door, than to let it slowly starve to death over winter because they're overpopulated. We have inexoribly changed the ecosystem with fencing and aggriculture. Deer can no longer freely disperse like they could 200 years ago.... so overpopulation DOES mean suffering.
And the link you provided has no actual scientific studies. There are lots of those out there.
But nah... just post blog spam and call us a made up name, lol
Literally one of the ONLY positive things about the US is we have amazing wildlife management. Its better than nearly every other country on Earth.
https://www.thoughtco.com/hunting-myths-and-facts-127898
Overabundant might not be a scientific word but it is a real problem in a co-existant human–fauna society.
We killed all their predators and now there are too many deer. We hit them with cars, extremely often. They eat too much resources, eroding the land.
It is a problem we created and barring killing all people and ending society, directing hunters towards managing a population of deer that is growing with no limiters is a good option.
The root cause is humanity, eco fascist.
If you're proposing killing everyone so nature heals, go have fun jerking yourself off in the anprim corner.
We live in a real world where that's not happening and neither is reintroducing wolves into urban environments.
If hunters hunting overpopulated species of deer that are being hit by cars anyway reduces them eating farmed meat and helps us shift focus to tearing down the factory farming industry, good.
they apparently have a way to make insect burgers, which i wouldnt be against trying personally. gets rid of the crunchiness and makes it into ground beef basically
Why do this? We have impossible burgers and beyond meat and both kick ass already.
i had some sort of african dish with some sort of locust kinda thing in it and it kinda tasted like shrimp
i was pretty sure chapo posters agreed the only ethical meat is your neighbor's outdoor cat
Wow, looking at all the responses this doesn't seem to be a struggle session at all. There's some straight up vegan unity in here.
Also cause it's a dumbass question for a struggle session. Leave the struggle session prodding to @BASED_BALL
I try not to eat/kill anything that may have a mind/capacity to suffer. So technically from a utility standpoint i have a problem eating bugs, but not animal byproducts (dairy, honey). In practice i try to limit the byproducts because of their creation being inherently destructive and predatory. Its a bit incoherent but its a roundabout way of saying i try not to eat bugs nor partake in animal exploitation.
(Just waiting on panpsychism to be proven right so that i can go insane and starve to death via quasi-jainist diet impossibility)
I figure it a suffering thing that maps roughly onto the number of nerves/braincells. more braincells = more suffering = more bad. But then I thought if you kill a human instantly, then there's no suffering. boom, i'm eating humans and saving the planet
Ethically? Yes. I try my hardest not to hurt any animals when there is no need.
If I had to though, for sure I guess? I dunno. No more fucked than eating a cow, pig or human child.
"If you had to" is a survivalist argument omnis try to use to 'trap' vegans.
But we don't live in a survivalist situation, which is one of the points as to why we don't eat meat, because we don't need to.
Yeah, absolutely. The if you had to argument is one I often get hit with. It's dumb as fuck, but I'm so use to answering it off the bat right now.
Like, I had a kid who was failing to thrive. They couldn't breast feed, and refused all vegan options we offered in formula. They'd dropped weight significantly, and it was scary as heck. At that point, if gave that kid non vegan formula.
This is the closest I've ever come to an "if you had to" argument.
their lifespans are so short you could just keep 'em in a big fishtank and just collect the dead ones off the bottom
You could also eat human corpses for the same reason, but we don't.
Not if insects don't decay quickly or if the microorganisms breaking them down aren't a problem for humans, plus you're not gonna get prion diseases from insects
Fair cop. I guess I was, in a smartass way, trying to say there's no need at all to eat the bugs.
If it's only disease were worried about, then there a whole bunch of mammals we wouldn't be eating. Cows, for instance, give us prion disease. Pigs are a massive vector for disease. The current pandemic was borne from people eating, trading and selling flesh.
Just don't eat what you don't need to I should have wrote.
The "need" bit is an interesting question if we're talking about world populations in particular — to my knowledge as it stands we can't sufficiently feed everyone on a 100% vegan diet (even if distribution and inequality problems were magicked away) but adding insect protein would be viable to ease the transition while reducing the emissions/disease/suffering/etc that comes from meat farming
Yeah, look. I'd love to see some solid research on this. It's something I hear quite often in defence of meat / against vegan diets, but I'm never shown the why or how of it.
I guess it then comes down to the age old 'minimize harm' element of veganism; i.e. I wouldn't watch the bugs because I get plenty of protein in my diet already. If for some reason other people didn't have access to beans, but did to bugs, then sure, I guess.
There are usually other issues with eating animals that die of natural causes. I'd assume that includes insects.
