I see a lot of people asking on this sub about how to transition to a vegan diet. There is this great group of Doctors, Nutritionists and Scientists called ZOE. They arent advocating vegan completely, more Mediterranean diet - but certainly to reduce meat, eggs and dairy.

They just published this nice guide on how to reduce meat.

Last week there was a good podcast/youtube on the studies from the Stanford Medical School on his research on Beyond Burgers vs Meat that is worth watching given the hysteria around "fake" meat.

There are often posts where people say they consumed animal products intentionally and now feel bad about it, some even do it several times

Non vegan people in the subs say they just made a mistake and that making mistakes are normal for our species, they shouldnt feel bad about it and should be forgiven, they are not holding them accountable, if intentionally contributing to animal abuse is just a simple mistake then that means they can do it again and again and not feel bad about it

I come in and ask if they would apply that same view to racism, rape, child abuse etc;, and i get heavily voted against by non vegans, non vegan sympathizers and animal abuse apologists

I am also called gatekeeper and that i am responsible for people not being vegan, yet again the people in this sub refuse to hold the perpetrator accountable, its not them, its me thats responsible for their evil acts

Non vegans say those people who made the MISTAKE are forgiven, we cant forgive people for something they did to others, only their victim can forgive them

I spent sometime googling mistakes and decisions and i think the info i came across makes sense, people arent making mistakes, they are making conscious decisions to do bad things

Knowingly purchasing and or consuming animal products is not a mistake, it was an intentional choice

Purchasing a plant based meal to realize later that it had milk powder in it is a mistake as it was unintentional to buy animal products

Making a mistake doesnt mean you are doomed, you can accept responsibility and change, you can do better, you can dedicate your life to never intentionally contributing to animal abuse again and thus becoming a more ethical individual in the process

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Mistakes free you from self-imposed guilt; poor choices require ownership and responsibility

Mistakes do not carry with them selfish motivations; poor choices do

https://medium.com/publishous/poor-choices-are-not-mistakes-ed1d9d8e5345

A mistake is something we do without intention. A bad decision was made intentionally. If you’re classifying your bad decisions as mistakes, you’re not accepting responsibility.

Why is this important?

Because most of us are likely to continue making mistakes*; and more than a few of us (and let me be the first to put my hand in the air) are likely to make some bad decisions*

https://www.francescolejones.com/2021/11/i-made-a-mistake-vs-i-made-a-bad-decision/

I think i triggered the mods in this sub because they prob make those MISTAKES and that is why they removed the post https://reddit.com/r/vegan/comments/1dhgybz/mistake_is_overused_and_abused_in_this_sub_bad/

I see it quite a lot and it has happened to me many times. I was wondering if anyone else notices the same? It's sad that so many people still look vegans/veganism in a negative way

Hello all,

For clarity, I am not a vegan (yet) but have great respect for folks who are. I started dating a wonderful vegan lady a few months ago and have made a few things for her, but they'd been admittedly pretty basic despite being well-received.

I'd like to up my vegan cooking game and figured I would reach out to the source. Is there a gold-standard recipe that you love? I know some cuisines have dishes that are superstars and assumed vegan dishes would be similar. Admittedly, it's a broad topic but if y'all could narrow down a few 'wow' recipes for me, I'd really be appreciative.

Thanks!

https://www.change.org/p/keep-the-chatuchak-animal-market-closed-after-the-fire/dashboard

I tried using this idea as a launch pad for discussion in various vegan debate sub-reddits. But, I'd also just be curious if most vegans agree, and if there's anything people would like to add, like other interesting reading that comes to mind.

Many meat eaters grapple with reaching for weak justifications for their meat eating such as appeals to nature and struggle with even putting these weak justifications into words.

I think Ted was a famous example of a person on the extreme end of this spectrum of stubbornly simply getting his views on what is right and wrong from a descriptive reality of how less intelligent animals kill each other to survive, so his attempts at logic are interesting to compare and contrast to many meat eaters arguments, similarly his emotional existential grappling with not being able to come up with a coherent argument whilst intuitively feeling sad about the actions he was taking is also interesting to compare and contrast.

Quoting from one of Ted Kaczynski's (the Unabomber's) journals:

Lately, to tell the truth, I’ve been getting a little sick of killing things. Neither the death struggles of the animal nor the blood bother me in the least; in fact, I rather enjoy the sight of blood; blood is appetizing because it makes rich soups. I enjoy the instant of the kill because it represents a success. But a moment afterward I often feel saddened that a thing so beautiful and full of life has suddenly been converted into just a piece of meat. Still, this is outweighed by the satisfaction of getting my food from the forest and mountain. Rabbits and grouse have beautiful eye; in both cases the whites don’t show and the iris’s are a lovely brown. And this grouse today I noticed that the pupil, black at first glance, is actually a deep blue, like clear, translucent blue glass.

Also, in a letter to his brother, Ted wrestled with the question of; 'is it a good thing that some people feel sad about the animals killed painfully by hunter-gatherers?'

For me, I think yes it is a good thing, I feel sad partly because I relate to hunter-gatherers as people who could be offered lessons in how to grow enough diversity of vegan food at their own desired level of technology such that they would not need to hunt. I also hope one day some people might be motivated to do that for them in a responsible way that only improves their quality of life.

I understand a meat eater might feel sad for many reasons also, even if for example it's just because we have higher level technology today such that we can potentially kill some animals faster today with less pain and less stress. But even though we have the means to blow up an animals head with exploding bullets without the animal ever seeing it coming doesn't mean we always use such methods, nor do I think it would justify cutting short the animal's interest to live.

I find some nihilists & primitivists like Ted's response to this question the most fascinating, they wish they could have been born into a world in which no one experienced sadness about killing animals, but this just feels like desiring a black and white world because it would help them make sense of their place in the universe.

Maybe they fear that if they said yes its good some people feel sad, that the only other track society would be left to go down is exterminating all carnivores and building robot carnivore imitations for entertainment.

However, I think there is a middle ground in simply relating to ourselves as an omnivore species who are intelligent enough to one day desire to build a global vegan social contract. Where among each other we decide that we generally wouldn't like to encourage in any of our fellow humans the act of breeding and killing other sentient animals. For reasons of; 'it has the strongly likely outcome of damaging to an unacceptable degree many people's ability to be compassionate with one another'. So, not an indictment on the subsistence hunter-gatherers and non-human animals who hunt to survive, but an aspirational future goal for humans.

Finally, here is the long meandering letter by Ted I mentioned for anyone curious:

I doubt that the pigmies have any guilt, conscious or otherwise, about killing animals. Guilt is a conflict between what we’re trained not to do and impulses that lead us to do it anyway. Apparently there is nothing in pygmy culture that leads them not to kill or inflict pain on animals. What the pygmies love and celebrate is their way of life, and they see no conflict between that and killing for meat; in fact, the hunting is an essential part of their way of life — they gotta eat. We tend to see a conflict there because we come from a world where there is a gross excess of people who even apart from hunting destroy the material world through their very presence in such numbers. But to the pygmies — until very recently anyway — there’s been no need for “conservation”. The forest is full of animals; with the pygmies primitive weapons and sparse population the question of exterminating the game never arises. The pygmies problem is to fill his belly. The civilized man can afford to feel sorry for wild animals because he can take his food for granted. Some psychologists claim that man is attracted to “death” as they call it. Certainly young men are attracted to action, violence, aggression, and that sort of thing. Note the amount of make-believe violence in the entertainment media — in spite of the fact that in our culture that sort of thing is considered bad and unwholesome and so forth. Since man has been a hunter for the last million years, it is possible that, like other predatory animals, he has some kind of a “killer instinct”. It would thus seem that the pygmies are just acting like perfectly good predatory animals. Why should they feel sorry for their prey any more than a hawk, a fox, or a leopard does? On the other hand, when a modern “sport” goes out with a high-powered rifle, you have a different situation. Some obvious differences are: much less skill is required with a rifle than with primitive weapons; the “sport” does it fun, not because he needs the meat; he is in a world where there are too many people and not enough wildlife, and a rifle makes it too easy to kill too many animals. Of course, the fish and game dept. will see to it that the animals don’t get exterminated, but this entails “wildlife management” — manipulation of nature which to me is even worse than extermination. Beyond that, while the pygmy lives in the wilderness and belongs to it, the “sport” is an alien intruder whose presence is a kind of desecration. In a sense, the sport hunter is a masturbator: His hunting is not the “real thing” — it’s not what hunting is for a primitive man — he is trying to satisfy an instinct in a debased and sordid way, just like when you rub your prick to crudely simulate what you really want, which is a love affair with a woman. Of course there’s nothing wrong with jagging off to relieve yourself when you get horny — it’s harmless. But — even apart from the question of depletion of wildlife — the presence of “sports” in the wilderness tends to spoil it for those who know better how to appreciate nature.

Hello, I [29] got pregnant by a vegan man [26], and now I can not eat meat. I feel disgusted by the smell or taste of meat, dairy and eggs. Is it that my baby is vegan? I live in a South American country, there are no vegan doctors nor dieticians here. My doctor insist me on eating meat and dairy for a healthy pregnancy but I can not. This also caused me troubles with my mother who is a doctor herself.

I am willing to give a chance to this vegan diet because the father of my child is healthy and athletics, you would not tell he is vegan. He goes to the gym and does cycling. He is now helping me and taking care of me.

Do you have any advice for me? How to carry on a vegan pregnancy? Do you know why I can not take animal products now? Is it that my baby is vegan?

I’ve been seeing this argument amongst vegans whom are also disabled right advocates.

It’s such a hard topic to discuss, as someone who is also disabled.

I’ve been seeing people say that they need to consume animal products in order survive. Meaning, they need to take non-human animal’s lives in order to survive.

Isn’t this in itself speciesist? Actively assessing that your life is more valuable than a non human animal’s, therefore it is okay to take their lives for your own survival? You’re actively deciding that your own life is more important than theirs.

This might even be too vegan/radical for most vegans I’ve ever encountered. Since they also pander to arguments of animal murder being okay if you’re part of a minority and it’s part of your culture.

I’m looking for genuine discussion.

Also kind of terrified because i think i may have thought this myself:

I’m disabled, in chronic pain, can’t cook, don’t do groceries, live with parents that are both fascist carnists and abusive. I eat meat and animal products when I have no other choice, when the other choice is more health complications and suffering, but I wonder if this decision is inherently speciesist. I figured I don’t even make the groceries, I’m not the one paying, might as well eat it, I have no fault in it. But if I stopped eating any animal products, they would stop buying my servings. Less demand. I live highly dissociated from life, trauma has taken a toll on me, so sometimes i go through days without even realizing I’m alive. I’m as disconnected from life as I can be, meaning I was also disconnected from the harm I might been causing, indirectly. But now I’ve realized that and I’m going to do everything in my power to stop the suffering and murder of non human animals.

I don’t want anyone to tell me that I shouldn’t feel guilty. I should, I’ve caused harm. Also, if it comes to it, I don’t want to live a life that depends on the murder and slaughter of another beings. I won’t make the decision that my life is more important than theirs.