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Thread: Eating local, non-vegan food vs. non-local vegan food

  1. #1
    DavidT's Avatar
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    Default Eating local, non-vegan food vs. non-local vegan food

    What do you posters make of this article?
    "The trouble with quotes on the internet is that you can never tell if they're genuine" - Abraham Lincoln

  2. #2

    Default Re: What do you reckon the meat industry does to save itself (and fight veg*nism

    I find it interesting. Thanks for sharing, DavidT.

    I like the amount of thought that this person has put into what she does and that relationship that she has with death through her choices of what to eat, and how, though the relatives, she shows how different people have different abilities to cope with the sight, which reveals something about the traumatic nature of the kill.

    I don't really mind stuff like this, though I don't give it too much thought because it is on such a small scale. I mean that I find it difficult to call something like this evil or wrong in the face of factory farming, and it may even be right in terms of being a good direction to go in (far better than buying into the idea of organic, free-range chickens), if one were not going to go vegan. It's unclear to me how she gets the rest of the food her family eats, though.

    To be honest, I think a good argument could be made that eating locally, even if that includes meat, is less destructive to land and animals than eating a vegan diet but buying anything from anywhere, because even the money going to buy, say, CocoPops (considered vegan by many), financially supports the giant infrastructure that makes the scale of animal killing that we are against possible. And if one were to try and eat locally as much as possible, it would be maybe impossible to grow everything one needs for a healthy, balanced diet in a backyard or even a small farm or whatever others are growing within your local area, without eating meat. So I could believe that a strictly local diet that includes meat is better for animals than a strictly vegan diet that includes buying from companies that put money back into the production, delivery, and distribution of animal products, especially if that local diet makes very sure that the animals are treated well. Plus they couldn't possibly kill billions for food on a local scale.

    But I'm a hypocrite that way. I would like to grow some of my own food someday (not animals), but I do buy foods that come from who knows where from companies who produce who knows what else with who knows what methods. But within the world of huge global scale food production and distribution, I think eating vegan is better than not and so that's where I am right now with that. I hope after I settle back down from traveling, that I will try to shop more at farmer's markets and buy less mass-produced stuff.
    "cake is a good tool for the revolution!!!" - saycheezly

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    DavidT's Avatar
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    Default Re: What do you reckon the meat industry does to save itself (and fight veg*nism

    Quote matt35mm View Post
    So I could believe that a strictly local diet that includes meat is better for animals than a strictly vegan diet that includes buying from companies that put money back into the production, delivery, and distribution of animal products, especially if that local diet makes very sure that the animals are treated well. Plus they couldn't possibly kill billions for food on a local scale.
    Good post, especially this bit.

    Quote matt35mm View Post
    But I'm a hypocrite that way.
    "The trouble with quotes on the internet is that you can never tell if they're genuine" - Abraham Lincoln

  4. #4

    Default Re: What do you reckon the meat industry does to save itself (and fight veg*nism

    Haha, yep.

    What are your thoughts on it?
    "cake is a good tool for the revolution!!!" - saycheezly

  5. #5
    DavidT's Avatar
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    Default Re: What do you reckon the meat industry does to save itself (and fight veg*nism

    My current thoughts are back up the thread.

    I'm reviewing them in the light of Prawnil's sentiments, which seem to contain some validity.

    I have a ton on my plate at the moment and can't put sufficient thought into it. This type of subject could occupy one for an eternity.
    "The trouble with quotes on the internet is that you can never tell if they're genuine" - Abraham Lincoln

  6. #6
    Prawnil
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    Default Re: What do you reckon the meat industry does to save itself (and fight veg*nism

    I appreciated the reply, thanks a lot, David. I do understand that what I said, the way I put it, is to some degree distant & theoretical sounding. I grew up rurally, too, and do understand that the direct experience of rearing & killing & especially of the people involved is very emotionally complicated. A good proportion of the people at school were farm kids, & of those who weren't, many worked as hands on friends' land at the important points in the farming calendar.

    I honestly believe that people are under- (or, rather, over-) estimating the general population when they say things along the lines of, "If people had to kill for their own meat, the vegan population would boom!". I think this would not largely be true. People in many many cases, I'd say especially younger people, when put under guidance of a person who represents the authentic, hard life of farming, will take to it quite easily, and then the practical experience & coming-to-terms will swamp the relatively abstract moral agruments against. I've seen this in young people taught to kill rabbits ferreting or shoot pests: so long as a person who is representative of the authority of tradition & self-sufficiency was present, reservations more often than not just vanished. (though, funnily enough, looking back as a vegan many years later, I was one of the very few who couldn't. I did want to, certainly, at the time.)
    I see it as the authenticity of surviving by skill of the hands from the land becoming something, often anything from admired to outright fetishised, in a world progressively dissolving, or at least obscuring, peoples' roots. - And with very little emphasis on reassessing the practices it usually includes (as if by not slitting animals' throats or busting their necks you aren't living the rural life to its fullest potential of authenticity).

    I think that article very neatly packs up the received view of personally killing animals to eat - that it is virtuous & that it involves some kind of honour and care and re-connection. I think it is deep, deep nonsense. I believe it is a case of cramming traditional lifestyles & values into one single valued unit - but, from a certain angle at least, in among the romanticised farmer's life, the act of killing is a total non-necessity. It is not the farmer or the chicken. The 'package' of authentic hard farm living as a tradition is caked in the myth of meat as a necessity.

    As far as I see it, all claims that it is quicker, less stressful, more honest or even compassionate to do the killing small scale with your very own hands, are down-stream of the brilliantly straightforward question: "Did you, physiologically, have any need to do it?" And the answer is almost always, of course, No! That, to me, makes all that follows it a confused distraction.

    To repeat a pointlessly long-winded point, in short (easily arguably over-simplified) form: the assassin, without anyone to call a hit, retains the psychological capacity to kill, & to persuade/train/simpy encourage others to do the same. The hit-caller, without the assassin, is cruel & disturbed, but is in the final analysis harmless, & is forced to 'resolve' things by other means.

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    Ex-admin Korn's Avatar
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    Default Eating local, non-vegan food vs. non-local vegan food

    Quote matt35mm View Post
    I think a good argument could be made that eating locally, even if that includes meat, is less destructive to land and animals than eating a vegan diet but buying anything from anywhere
    Less destructive to the land maybe, but a irrelevant comparison, isn't it - and not only for vegans? If one should compare the two, it would make most sense to compare either locally grown vegan food with a diet including local animal products, or vegan vs. non vegan food "from anywhere"


    So I could believe that a strictly local diet that includes meat is better for animals than a strictly vegan diet that includes buying from companies that put money back into the production, delivery, and distribution of animal products, especially if that local diet makes very sure that the animals are treated well.
    If you kill and eat someone, you haven't treated them well.


    Plus they couldn't possibly kill billions for food on a local scale.
    Please elaborate... one couldn't kill billions of chicken in a small, local chicken farm, but unless humans eat less chicken, the same number of chicken would need to be killed, only that not so many chicken are killed per farm.


    But within the world of huge global scale food production and distribution, I think eating vegan is better than not and so that's where I am right now with that.
    [my emphasis. Korn]

    Please send me a note if your viewpoints will change regarding this, so I can change your account status for you...
    I will not eat anything that walks, swims, flies, runs, skips, hops or crawls.

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    DavidT's Avatar
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    Default Re: Eating local, non-vegan food vs. non-local vegan food

    I'm confused.

    Surely these messages should be in the "What do you reckon the meat industry does to save itself (and fight veg*nism)" thread?

    Instead, it's in a thread called "Eating local, non-vegan food vs. non-local vegan food" which I don't remember starting, even though I'm the first post in the thread.

    Which makes my post (number 5 here) not make sense, because it's referring to an earlier post which I thought was in the same thread.

    I was drinking some rather nice vegan organic wine last night. Maybe that's it!
    "The trouble with quotes on the internet is that you can never tell if they're genuine" - Abraham Lincoln

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    Default Re: Eating local, non-vegan food vs. non-local vegan food

    Quote Korn View Post
    If you kill and eat someone, you haven't treated them well.
    This says it all


  10. #10
    Prawnil
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    Default Re: Eating local, non-vegan food vs. non-local vegan food

    Yeah, it got split at the point the link was posted. So for future reference (as if that's necessary), most of what I posted is in reference to "What do you reckon the meat industry does to save itself (and fight veg*nism)", too.

  11. #11

    Default Re: Eating local, non-vegan food vs. non-local vegan food

    Korn, I feel like I should clarify some of my points for you. I'm not sure if you've misunderstood me or if I'm misunderstanding you.

    First of all, when I say "that's where I am now with that," I didn't mean to suggest that I was considering eating local meat. I meant that I am currently comfortable with a non-local vegan diet, but I may grow to be less comfortable with the non-local part of it, and try to eat (vegan) more locally. I don't see why that would have anything to do with my account status, so I think I was misunderstood here. Perhaps I was unclear in my writing.

    With my comment that they couldn't possibly kill billions, I meant that if more people only ate the meat that they or their neighbors could kill for themselves or their own community, the number couldn't reach billions. The billions thing is only possible via factory farming in centralized locations and very efficient distribution throughout the world. If people who would never be vegan would instead eat locally as much as possible, this would be harmful to places like KFC or McDonalds or even supermarkets, which rely on selling cheap, non-local meat.

    I understand and appreciate that if you kill and eat someone then you aren't treating them well. But to me there is a real difference in the quality of life between the way this farmer raised her chickens and the way chickens are raised in factory farms. I think factory farming is enemy number one. PERSONALLY, I have already chosen to be a vegan, so I am not saying that I would ever buy anything from a local animal farm. But I don't foresee a world in which every person will be vegan, and for the majority of time that people have been eating meat, they've not done so with the uniquely cruel methods and mass scale of the past century because of the unavailability of centralized factory farming. Billions of animals killed for food wasn't possible a century ago. So, to me, whatever might reduce the support of factory farming is a step in a better direction, not because it's closer to vegan ideology, but because it might result in less animal deaths for human consumption. I'd consider that a concrete victory, but that has no bearing on my personal decision to not eat animal products, and if someone asked me if they should be a vegan or if they should just eat local animals, I'd say vegan. But I think it's a worthy and realistic question to ask: What can I do or support that results in better treatment for animals (as in not suffering in daily life; obviously the death part is a suffering) and less animal deaths in a world where the majority of people are not and will never be vegan? Getting more people to go vegan is great, but trying to get the whole world to go vegan when most people don't want to will only create animosity and a backlash.

    What worries me about eating vegan but non-locally is that the money still often goes to build the infrastructure of centrally produced goods that are efficiently distributed and cheaply available. Say I buy a packet of salty crisps that are vegan, but that company has loads of other flavors that aren't vegan. What does Pringles or Walkers care what flavor I choose? They're not gonna stop making Sour Cream and Onion because I bought Original; it doesn't read any different than being a preference for the original flavor. All they know is that they got some more money to put back into the production of all of the flavors, including the non-vegan ones.

    Similarly, the trucks that deliver soya milk to my nearest supermarket could be from the same company that delivers the regular milk or the meat or anything from who knows where to supermarkets everywhere. I am helping to finance that which makes centralized production of goods possible, which includes animal "goods." I am financially supporting the system of convenient-to-buy, widely available, mass-produced, cheap goods, which is the very same system that decides to grow super huge chickens and de-beak them and cram them into cages. I still seem to be supporting the mentality, without happening to support the particular ingredients that come from animals.

    So what I meant to say is that I am not ready now to give up the convenience of buying stuff from my local supermarket. And as for the new thread title, I don't think it's particularly representative of what I or anyone has said, as it seems to suggest that perhaps we, as vegans, should instead consider eating local non-vegan food. That's not what I'm suggesting that we do. Veganism is good, and that's not what I'm questioning. I just wanted to make that clear. I just wanted to express that I think that it's worth thinking about where we get our vegan food, and how even a vegan diet can be harmful to animals when we buy it from companies that do bad things by either selling other products that aren't vegan or even just by legitimizing and actively augmenting centralized production of goods and wide distribution. I think it could be argued convincingly that I do more to support companies that do harm to animals than people who eat anything locally and don't financially support these large companies as much as I do. And this is all still in the realm of pondering and I'm not making any definitive statement one way or the other about any of this yet. It's just stuff that I'm thinking about.

    I don't know, is any of that clearer?

    Anyway, Prawnil, I thought your post was very interesting and I am going to think more about that. I see what you mean about the attraction of what seems authentic about killing your own food and the authority or admiration that might be projected onto a person who does such things. I'd never thought about it that way before, so thanks for the new thought!
    "cake is a good tool for the revolution!!!" - saycheezly

  12. #12
    Ex-admin Korn's Avatar
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    Default Re: Eating local, non-vegan food vs. non-local vegan food

    Quote DavidT View Post
    I'm confused.

    Surely these messages should be in the "What do you reckon the meat industry does to save itself (and fight veg*nism)" thread?
    I moved these posts over from that other thread both because the title of the article you posted a link to was "Ever Wonder if You Could Kill What You Eat?" (the meat industry definitely wouldn't want people only to eat animals killed by those who ate them, because that would make the meat industry less profitable), and because Matt's follow-up post about eating locally etc.

    If you want to post links to articles that defends use of animal products: please either don't - or post a link with a quote, and comment the article. We simply don't need articles here defending eating animals unless people post them to share how/why they disagree in such articles!
    I will not eat anything that walks, swims, flies, runs, skips, hops or crawls.

  13. #13
    Ex-admin Korn's Avatar
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    Default Re: Eating local, non-vegan food vs. non-local vegan food

    Quote matt35mm View Post
    With my comment that they couldn't possibly kill billions, I meant that if more people only ate the meat that they or their neighbors could kill for themselves or their own community, the number couldn't reach billions.
    If one should eat only local food, and people should eat as much animal products as they do now, a lot of new, small farms would be needed - which of course isn't something vegans support.

    Maybe we misunderstood each other, but there are always red lights blinking here when I see talk about animals treated well in the same sentence as eating them...

    But to me there is a real difference in the quality of life between the way this farmer raised her chickens and the way chickens are raised in factory farms. I think factory farming is enemy number one.
    People were avoiding meat and other animal products long before factory farms existed, and the country in the world that has the most vegetarians, is probably also the country in the world with the lowest amount of factory farms per citizen: India. A lot of local food is eaten in India...


    All they know is that they got some more money to put back into the production of all of the flavors, including the non-vegan ones.
    The main purpose of all these companies is to make money. It isn't to kill or harm animals. If they can make money on selling vegan products, they'll do it.

    Almost everything you do in life - in a non-vegan society - may move some money from your pocket into the pocket of someone who will use this money to buy animal products. We simply can't control what everyone does and buys, but we can contribute to making non-animals based food production more profitable. That's why I buy vegan meals from non-vegan places: it keeps motivating cafes, restaurants and junk food bars to offer animal free meals. If a popular, standard eatery offers a veg*n meal, and nobody buys it, it will soon be off the menu. It's as simple as that. If it's off the menu, fewer people will have a chance to try out an animal free they may enjoy so much that they'll consider using less animal products.

    Similarly, the trucks that deliver soya milk to my nearest supermarket could be from the same company that delivers the regular milk or the meat or anything from who knows where to supermarkets everywhere.
    Sure - and the people who transport these products, design the packaging, take care of the finances for these companies may not be vegan. Still: with the small amount of people that are vegans and vegetarians in the Western world, we have to realize that at the moment, the best thing we can do is to avoid animal products and let others know why we do this. When the percentage of people who avoid meat and other animal products in our part of the world increase, it's more relevant to look at all the side effects associated with buying what we buy. If new vegans get the feeling that even if they do the their best, but don't check every company involved in every vegan product they eat before they buy something, they'll soon go back to eating standard food. We simply have to be realistic. What you describe about that soy milk could be said about the rice, carrots and lettuce you buy as well. Some people may have a lot of time/energy to check every company that's involved in every product they buy, but most of us (myself included) don't do that. Let's not give others the feeling that checking all these details is something that's expected from everyone who goes vegan!



    I am helping to finance that which makes centralized production of goods possible, which includes animal "goods."
    Yes, and you're also helping a lot of other people and companies: those who made and sold the computer you use, those who provide your home with electricity, those who made the chair you sit on and so forth. You could of course move into some remote village and only eat food you grow or locally grown, veganic/organic food, - and talking about the meat industry: they would be happy if you did. Our impact on this world is much greater if we live in this world than if we escape it. If we live in it, we'll indirectly support a lot of people and companies with different viewpoints than ourselves.

    as for the new thread title, I don't think it's particularly representative of what I or anyone has said
    Please suggest a new one!
    I will not eat anything that walks, swims, flies, runs, skips, hops or crawls.

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    DavidT's Avatar
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    Default Re: Eating local, non-vegan food vs. non-local vegan food

    Quote Korn View Post
    I moved these posts over from that other thread both because the title of the article you posted a link to was "Ever Wonder if You Could Kill What You Eat?" (the meat industry definitely wouldn't want people only to eat animals killed by those who ate them, because that would make the meat industry less profitable), and because Matt's follow-up post about eating locally etc.

    If you want to post links to articles that defends use of animal products: please either don't - or post a link with a quote, and comment the article. We simply don't need articles here defending eating animals unless people post them to share how/why they disagree in such articles!
    Thanks.
    "The trouble with quotes on the internet is that you can never tell if they're genuine" - Abraham Lincoln

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