Vegans and vegetarians can move along and enjoy their day. You're cool already, and off the hook.
Cows are ruminants. That's a group of animals that are specially adapted to eat nutritionally-useless grasses. That's their whole deal. If you're living in a pastoral or premodern farming society then that's great because you can't eat grass and you can eat cows, so it's free food. But instead you live in a society (insert meme) where we grow food specifically for cows then ship it to cows. Again, the animal that's specialized in eating things that have no nutritional value, so we're going out of our way to grow plants with no nutritional value, and then ship enough of it around to feed an animal anyway.
What does that mean? It means by whatever metric you choose, cow meat is worse than half as efficient as other common sources of animal protein.
Feed conversion ratios. Enough feed to make a pound of beef is enough to make 2.5 pounds of pork or 5 pounds of chicken.
CO2 per calorie. 1000 calories of beef costs 13.8 kg of CO2. 1000 calories of pork costs 4.45kg CO2. 1000 calories of chicken costs 3.37kg CO2. Also note lamb topping the charts, which will be a running theme. (Also an extra reason not to use broccoli as your primary calorie source, if eating 13 pounds of broccoli a day wasn't a good enough reason on its own.)
Land use per year per calorie. How much land did that 1000 calories take? You'll need 119 square meters for beef, 7.26 square meters for pork, or 6.61 square meters for chicken. Note lamb topping the chart again. (Also apparently prawns can be farmed super dense, that's something interesting that I didn't know.)
Why do sheep show up so high on some of these charts? Because they're also ruminants. Don't eat sheep either.
How many restaurants serve just rice and beans? How many of your friends serve vegan meals when they have parties? Do you really think people want to eat the same meal over and over?
You are oversimplifying it.
I mean, either it’s incompatible with your morals, in which case missing a slice of cake at a bday party or just eating some fries and salad when you’re out with friends isn’t that big a sacrifice, or you’re fine with eating murdered animals. If you’re fine with it then whatever, but people shouldn’t make excuses.
Also the more vegans there are the more vegan options will appear in restaurants. Capitalism baby. I’ve even noticed a massive uptick in my area in the last five years or so.
People are completely fine making excuses if that excuse is they couldn't find anything to eat all day or eating most vegan options makes them miserable. But most people are ok with eating murdered animals. Generally speaking that isn't considered immoral.
Yeh, but “I couldn’t find anything all day” and “all vegan food sucks” is just objectively false, especially in 2020. Even Burger King is making vegan stuff now. There’s also such a thing as making your own food?
Like I said, people who care for animals and make it a moral priority to not eat their corpses will make the “sacrifice”, the rest are mostly in the grips of carnist realism
Well it's not so much as all vegan food sucks as people have their own palates and if they have limited options they get tired of it. You're right though, it is getting far easier to find options.