I got blocked by a vegan on Twitter

[Anakin McFly]

It's the first time anyone has blocked me on Twitter.

I was pointing out that vegan options aren't as affordable and accessible in many parts of the world as it is in the US. He started listing a bunch of cheap vegan ingredients, but I'm forced to eat out at least one meal a day, where the cheapest cooked meals are typically unhealthy and not at all vegan (though they may be vegetarian. I personally don't eat much meat, and I love vegetables and salads; but they usually have eggs or mayo or honey.) The vegan options here are mostly targeted towards rich white tourists and would require some travelling during my lunch hour, plus double or triple my food budget. He said he was homeless for 3 years and still managed to be vegan and that I'm just making excuses, and posted a lot of pictures of sad animals.

I get angry about food a lot because I have limited options for what I can eat in terms of cost and access, and get mad when people who have those options suggest I'm heartless for not caring about the animals. I hate animal cruelty, and if we found a way to eradicate that and make the industry humane I'd be extremely happy. Heck, if the whole world were to turn vegan, I'd also be fine. But until then it's not a realistic option for me, and when I looked up local vegans, one thing they agreed on was that it was an extremely difficult lifestyle to maintain here.

My primary objection right now is also how it would require inconveniencing a lot of people I care about and standing out in a bad way. Meals in Asia are often communal with people sharing common dishes. I've spent a lot of effort trying to fit in, and don't want to be that one weird person eating a special meal alone, or have to excuse myself from future social meal gatherings with family or friends (which one local vegan said was the hardest part). My family also eats dinner together, and often it's my mother and/or brother doing the cooking because they're home first. I don't want to have to either force the whole family to turn vegan or request that they cook a whole different meal for me, or cook my own meal and eat later/separately from everyone else. A family friend once talked about how her friend's daughter was vegan and kept demanding she cook her a separate meal every day because she refused to eat what everyone else was eating, and that made me angry at how inconsiderate it was. I thought she should have at least cooked her own food, and if that wasn't an option because of time constraints, to just be grateful and eat whatever was there. But then that's been countered with how it's selfish and self-centred to consider our social standing and not annoying/inconveniencing other people to be more important than the lives and suffering of animals.

The second objection is how mentally exhausting it will be to have to look up the ingredients or make a best guess of what goes into every dish I order, or ask the stallholders and be that annoying person holding up the queue. It's often not possible to tell on sight if something was cooked with butter, honey, animal fat, broth, eggs, milk, etc. Many foods I would have thought are vegan turn out not to be. I also have extremely strong feelings against food wastage, and can't bear hearing about vegans who throw out perfectly good food because they heard that it contained some animal product. How does that do anything for the animals, who now died for nothing? Tons of meat go to waste each year, and that bothers me much more. It also means that even after I do all that, it will likely have little to zero impact on the number of animals actually killed; it would just mean more wastage, and maybe a cleaner conscience that helps no one.

and that's just the food; when it comes to other products I don't know how anyone has the mental energy to go full vegan, such as those who refuse to buy books because they're bound with gelatin, or watch films likewise because of the gelatin, or use or buy products with glue.

I do recognise that these are all excuses, and that - as he said - if I really cared about the animals, I'd do whatever it takes. My issue is only with his assumption that being vegan is cheap and easy and the only reason people don't do it is because they're selfish and like bacon. Also the cultural ignorance, like that time someone told me I could just grow my own vegetables. I live in an apartment, as does 90% of the population. We do not have gardens.

I honestly don't see how this approach of convincing individual people to avoid anything involving animal products would help those animals in any substantial way, vs going straight to the top and working to implement food industry reforms to either improve animal welfare at farms or make vegan options affordable and accessible for everyone. That's how substantial change happens, not by demanding someone throw away their fresh cup of coffee because it had milk in it, as one vegan did. It would make so much more difference and be a lot more achievable if people managed just to halve or quarter their meat intake, or go vegetarian, vs the current focus on all-or-nothing veganism that's concerned more with individual purity than the actual effect on animals.

but I still feel guilty and don't know what to do.

[Raxivace]

Tbh it sounds like this Twitter Guy was using a discussion with you as a pretense to vent about what they don't like more than anything, instead of just having an honest discussion. I usually just avoid those types myself, or drop the discussion altogether if it seems like they're someone like that. It's almost never worth pursuing further.

I'm not someone that has any interest in vegetarianism or veganism myself. If reducing the amount of meat and/or animal products you consume matters to you though, just do what you can within reason. You don't need to feel guilty because some random Twitter person is more willing to jump through unreasonable hoops like knocking coffee cups out of people's hands or whatever than you are.

[Anakin McFly]

Thanks. I found this article and I like the part where it says:

"This preoccupation with increasing the number of vegans rather than focusing on decreasing the total amount of meat consumed by our society may be the biggest failure of the animal liberation movement to date."

https://qz.com/493090/we-need-more-meat ... advocates/

It notes how efforts to tell people to eat less meat have a greater effect in reducing overall meat intake than efforts trying to convert people to veganism. Which is something I'm totally on board with, because I am very disturbed with the state of the global meat industry and wish that people could do something about it.

But it's about which actions have the most direct impact on reducing animal suffering, and I'm just very sceptical that the all-or-nothing approach of veganism is the best way to do that - it sets such a high bar that most people can't reach, and is more likely to turn them off altogether. I can easily go a week without meat, but not without milk/eggs/honey/butter/sugar (which I just learnt is non-vegan) - especially when they're such a big part of most dishes, especially those with no meat.

[Raxivace]

The milk would be a big problem with my family- my younger brother can't chew most foods and has difficulties drinking liquids so he has most of his meals via formula through a g-tube. Even getting regular milk based formula that covers his nutritional needs is often a huge pain in the ass, and the idea of having to do that while also making sure its not made from animal products sounds like a nightmare.

That alone is enough to personally keep me from veganism. Ironically though my brother eats so little meat that he's almost a vegetarian by default.

[Anakin McFly]

I'm mildly lactose intolerant so I don't take much milk, and I think more people would pick up vegan options if it wasn't presented as a religiously strict lifestyle. Like, I love potatoes. I eat them lots. But mashed with butter, or baked in a gratin with lots of cheese. I've gone through periods of life subsisting primarily on oatmeal, but either with added honey for breakfast or cooked with chicken broth and carrots and onions and stuff for a proper meal. Or mushroom pasta, but with cream sauce or egg. And cheese. Pretty much every non-meat dish I eat isn't vegan, and trying to make it such by taking out all the fun stuff would make it much more likely I'd give up and go grab a cheeseburger and ironically end up eating more meat than I otherwise would.

ideally I'd like to live near a farm that raises happy animals who'll be able to live happy lives until a painless and instantaneous death which turns them into food, but I'm stuck in a tiny city state where we have to import everything.

[phe_de]

My two cents.

While I don't eat meat every day, I am not a vegetarian either.
I live in a part of Germany where people in general like to eat meat; and where I have the suspicion that restaurants deliberately offer unattractive vegetarian dishes, so that their guests eat meat. This is actually my beef, pun intended, with many vegetarian dishes: They often are less tasty than the available meat dishes.
But this is a first world problem. A bonus of living in the first world is to have ecological products available. When I buy eggs or milk products, they are usually organic.

I am usually tolerant of other people's diet, and expect them to be tolerant towards mine.
If there was a way to produce plenty of food in an ecologically sustainable way, without making animals suffer, and at an affordable price, then everybody would be in favour of it. But as long as a steak produced in a petri dish or from a 3D printer costs more than a small car, it's not an option.

[Anakin McFly]

If there was a way to produce plenty of food in an ecologically sustainable way, without making animals suffer, and at an affordable price, then everybody would be in favour of it.

This. The easiest way to change any mass diet is to make alternatives cheap and tasty and accessible. People ultimately just want affordable food that tastes good. I had vegetarian fried chicken a while back at a buffet and it was amazing and addictive, and I wouldn't really mind if it started secretly replacing actual chicken.

I like that artificially-produced meat is actually possible now, though! Costs usually go down over time, plus standards and safety get improved, so in future it could very well become the primary form of meat production, and that would be great all around.

It meanwhile looks like European farm conditions are much better than the ones in the US.

We have quite a few vegetarian choices here due to a sizeable number of Buddhist/Hindu vegetarians, but they're usually not vegan. Organic products are extremely expensive meanwhile, since we have barely any farmland and mass-import almost all our food. (My mother recently got mad at me for accidentally buying an organic vegetable because it cost five times as much.) Buying local ironically means non-organic and food from factory farms, which are the only ones we have the space for.

What also bugs me is how that guy kept saying I should just learn to cook my own food, but I don't have access to a kitchen for most of my meals because the work hours here are crazy and I'm out most of the day; I also don't like the idea of having to subsist on leftovers cooked hours before.

This is a hawker centre, and the sort of place most of us eat at every day because the food is cheap and tasty. None of its stalls are vegan, though most dishes have very little meat:



The places serving vegan food tend to be actual air-conditioned restaurants, and apart from being much more expensive and having to eat the same thing every day would also make me seem like a giant snob if I abandoned my colleagues each day to go eat there. Which some vegans argue puts my feelings and social life above animals' actual lives, but it would be nice not to have the people I work with hate me while I slowly go broke.

Meanwhile, our meat consumption is about half that of the US, which is second only to Australia - which has apparently been trying to make the shift away from factory farming to traditional farming.

[Anakin McFly]

sorry to bump, but I'm going through a bad OCD/anxiety flare up over this and it's severely affecting my appetite and I don't know what to do. I'm scared I'm on the brink of an eating disorder. I barely ate all day because I felt extremely guilty about eating, and only managed to because I would have felt worse about wasting food, and now I just want to throw up and cry and never eat anything again. Again, vegan options are not accessible here and would require me being difficult and ungrateful and inconveniencing a lot of people I care about, which is the very last thing I want to do, and I don't even want to become a vegan because it would require more money and time than I can afford and sounds like an OCD and social anxiety nightmare. I've spent most of my life fighting to escape that. The thought of having to ask people to accommodate unreasonable demands for something I don't even want kicks up my social anxiety to stratospheric levels (I've always coped by being very agreeable), but then I feel extremely guilty about how I'm being selfish and indirectly benefiting from animal cruelty, and I don't know the way out of this

[phe_de]

Sorry to hear about that Anakin.

I'm not an expert in psychology, but it sound to me that you should seek professional help.
Do you have health insurance that covers therapy?
Unfortunately I don't have advice about the food, except: Eat what you like. It's not really helpful I guess.

@Gendo: If other people start giving advice, then maybe it might be a good idea to move this thread to the VIP board.

[Raxivace]

You are not a bad person for needing to eat the food you can actually afford and access. Anyone that tells you otherwise is being ludicrous at best, performing outright predatory guilt tripping bullshit at worst.

I agree with phe_de that you should talk to a professional of some kind if possible.

[Anakin McFly]

I have access to a pro bono counsellor, but she's currently in grieving because of our mutual friend that passed away - she was much closer to him. So it's probably not the best time, and I don't have other options I know of at the moment because most places are terrible with LGBT clients. But I've messaged a friend group she's part of, and got to chat with another friend so it helped a bit - he's extremely into ethics and also not a vegan. It was late last night, but we'd probably get to continue the conversation later.

It's not so much an ethical issue with me right now. Even if I were to give up animal products, I know that any actual impact will be minimal to zero. e.g. most of my meals are group meals, as is tradition here, so if I don't eat any of the meat it would just mean more for others and make absolutely no difference to demand/supply. Most dishes here use meat as a garnish, not as the main item. My position has always been that the best way to reduce animal exploitation of any sort is to go to the top, with the people who have the power to make substantial changes on a large scale, because at the individual level our efforts would more likely make us miserable for nothing.

So my main hangup has more to do with being increasingly disturbed at the idea of eating corpses, as several vegans like to term it, and food made with dead bodies. Because yeah, that's gross, and enough to kill my appetite. Likewise them pointing out that we only get milk because farmers rape cows with artificial insemination and then kill their babies so we get to drink the milk instead. But my breakfast today was a solitary banana, and this can't go on. I usually eat a lot of oatmeal, but that goes with milk or honey, likewise cereal; no eggs; no toast because that goes with butter; no yoghurt because that has milk; etc. I'm also keenly aware that this is primarily an OCD episode and driven by massive anxiety rather than any actual desire to change my diet, while also knowing that one of the worst things to do with OCD is to give in to the fears.

One compromise a lot of people suggest (regarding eggs and dairy at least) is to buy local from sustainable farms where animals lead happy lives, but that's a very Western solution and not applicable here, because it's a tiny city with no farmland and we import almost everything.

EDIT: it's basically this: https://ocdla.com/orthorexia-eating-disorders-ocd-1977
I learnt that a majority of vegans and vegetarians suffer from anxiety disorders. One of them said that she couldn't even bear to kiss her boyfriend after he'd eaten non-vegan food, because she was terrified that some of it might get into her mouth. I really don't want to go down that hole.

EDIT 2: got to talk with another friend, and he said not to feel bad because "Being vegan is really really expensive and difficult here"; he knows of only one vegan and she's a very rich lawyer. Instead he just eats less meat. So that helped, especially since a huge argument from Western vegans is that it's cheap and easy and everyone can do it.

[Anakin McFly]

I'm ok; I got to chat with another friend who shared a lot of similar ethical concerns and went vegan for a month, but found it incredibly difficult and at times impossible. She's off it now. She's a biologist and works on an animal ethics committee, so animal welfare is something she cares about a lot (plus she deals a lot with animal cruelty as part of her job), and it helped to be able to hear from her and to have her say it's okay.

[OpiateOfTheMasses]

My sister in law is a full vegan and I find the concept slightly stupid. My wife has banned me from discussing it with her sister. Surely the logical conclusion of full veganism would be to shun oil and all its derivatives? As oil is ultimately an animal product....

And if you give up oil, not only are you giving up many current forms of transport, but you're also giving up plastics. And electricity (as it stands) becomes a little tricky too with our reliance on fossil fuels (there's a clue in the name).

Or is there a time limit on it? If the animal died more than X years ago then it's all good.

[phe_de]

Another thing I find amusing (or hypocritical) about vegans is that they are never seen talking to lions, tigers, wolves or other carnivores, trying to convince them to lay off the meat.

I have heard about vegans who have natural carnivorous pets and give them a vegan diet. That's nothing short of animal abuse. If these vegans were to become animal food I wouldn't feel sorry for them.

But maybe it's an urban legend.

[Derived Absurdity]

... and this thread just took a radical jarring turn into Stupidville. 180 degrees, full steam ahead.

[CashRules]

The first sentence of phe de's post is 100% gold. You can mint that stuff. Anyway, the best use for vegans is hog feed. You don't want to raise your own vegans to feed to your hogs because second law of thermodynamics, but if you find some vegans growing naturally then feeding them to the hogs is a definite consideration.

As for the second part of phe de's post, almost all canids can adapt to a herbivorous diet of it's the right herbivorous diet. Felids, however, are almost all obligate carnivores so if you avoid feeding them meat they are going to suffer and likely die. Excuse me while I take a hike up in the hills to talk to a few bears and a cougar I spotted a couple of weeks ago.

[phe_de]

Fact is: Not everybody can process all food equally well.
Humans are omnivores, so they can eat anything in principle. But there are exceptions.

Anakin mentioned lactose intolerance.
I get sick when I eat peanuts, which is why I usually avoid Indian food.
And I have heard of people who don't support gluten.

Since peanuts, gluten and milk are protein sources, those who don't support it need to find other protein sources. And one source is meat.

[Cassius Clay]

'Sup, Anakin. Self-care is important so try not to beat yourself up, and remember that everyone's a hypocrite in some way. Good luck.

[Anakin McFly]

Thanks. I did a mental inventory of most of my meals and realised the average dish has just a spoonful of meat or a couple pathetic shrimps. I eat steak maybe once or twice a year, with the occasional cheeseburger, plus I don't use much dairy due to mild lactose intolerance; trying to find vegan alternatives will take a lot of effort and money and social difficulties for negligible difference. In 7 years when I finally get to move out (unmarried people aren't allowed to buy housing until 35, in order to encourage marriage and procreation) I'd at least have more say over what I eat, so I've decided that if I'm going to make any major dietary changes it can wait until then when I'd actually be able to carry them out. Most likely I'd go some degree of pescatarian. And hopefully by then there'd have been food industry reforms to improve current farm conditions, and better food waste management so that more people get fed with a lower rate of production.

[BruceSmith78]

Beans are the best protein source. And meat. Meat and beans. And milk. Meat, beans, and milk are the best protein sources.

[CashRules]

Thanks. I did a mental inventory of most of my meals and realised the average dish has just a spoonful of meat or a couple pathetic shrimps. I eat steak maybe once or twice a year, with the occasional cheeseburger, plus I don't use much dairy due to mild lactose intolerance; trying to find vegan alternatives will take a lot of effort and money and social difficulties for negligible difference. In 7 years when I finally get to move out (unmarried people aren't allowed to buy housing until 35, in order to encourage marriage and procreation) I'd at least have more say over what I eat, so I've decided that if I'm going to make any major dietary changes it can wait until then when I'd actually be able to carry them out. Most likely I'd go some degree of pescatarian. And hopefully by then there'd have been food industry reforms to improve current farm conditions, and better food waste management so that more people get fed with a lower rate of production.

I've found part of your problem. You need more steak. You should eat steak at least three times a week. Burgers should be a daily thing.

[CashRules]

Beans are the best protein source. And meat. Meat and beans. And milk. Meat, beans, and milk are the best protein sources.

Yes, feeding beans to the livestock is the correct approach. Well done! Really, I mean WELL DONE.

[Cassius Clay]

http://i.imgur.com/nLSLnYf.png

[Anakin McFly]

Beans are the best protein source.

I read that as bears and then I was disappointed it was beans.

[CashRules]

He meant bears.

[Gendo]

[OpiateOfTheMasses]

I read it as beer. But that may say more about me. [shame]