those damn vegans!

Ansel@thelemmy.club to Lemmy Shitpost@lemmy.world – 853 points –
74

I'm not vegan because I give a fuck about animals. I'm vegan because I hate plants.

Green dudes have had it too good for too long.

They are out there lording their massive advantage in cumulative biomass over us. Fucking plants. I can’t wait to eat some tomorrow.

As pointed out above, if you hate plants, you should eat as much meat as possible. Every kilo of meat represents at least ten kilos of plants eaten by the animal.

I don't want another animal taking my Freudian pleasure. The erotic joy of voring a verdant, fleshy succulent. Feeling the crunching snap of brutality as an innocent plant is ground between my glistering molars. The swallow; the mulched, peppery bolus peristalted down a wet, hungry, pulsing oesophegus. The conversion of what was once a marvel of evolution, a being that could harness the power of a living star, into fodder for my next bowel movement. From stoma to stoma.

This is not some cool, by-the-numbers optimisation. This is raw, visceral, hungry cruelty.

The old adage can be given greater, poetic specificity. Revenge is a dish best served cold. And it is a salad.

Fuck plants, all my homies hate plants!

Cool Fact: Vegans consume a total of less plants than omnivores. Animals eat plants, so if you eat them, you're eating an animal plus everything it ate to grow up.

Animals on average convert about 10% of the mass they eat into their own body mass.

So when a lion dies and turns to grass, the antilopes only get back 10% of the grass they ate to make meat for the lion.

Circle of life, my ass. More like a trickle down pyramid scheme.

It's even less. The Antilope converts 10% of grass to meat, the lion converts 10% of Antilope meat to lion meat. So it's 10% of 10% bringing us back to the root problem of everything... The 1%!!!!

I mean, obviously you won't get 100% of the energy back because most of it is spent on heating you up and moving and also heating you up, but yeah, I feel like God could've really done with some optimization techniques.

Only a matter of time before plant-based alternatives fully take over from meat. Meat farming is not sustainable, as you mention all the land used to farm food for animals could be used to just farm more food for us directly.

We just have to get rid of the stigma around plant-based "meat".

At this point it isn't so much the stigma as it is the price for a lot of us. If it was the same or cheaper than regular meat prices in my area I would buy it instead.

Prices are coming down, but they won't come down a lot until more people buy it, but more people wont buy it unless it's cheaper...

Here's hoping there's some more restrictions imposed on meat.

Huh. Now that you mention it, even where I live i actually didn't hear any comments after soy shit fell. I didn't notice. Still ain't buyin substitute cu I love meat but it's no longer due to hearing how bad it tastes - in fact I did hear some good comments lately.

This seems like a dubious line of reasoning. It's like making the claim that if you eat moss your net water consumption is lower than if you eat the leaves off an oak tree because of all the water it takes to grow. I mean I guess it's sort of true but it's also sorta weird. The argument is basically eat closer to the bottom of the food chain and the younger the better, but I don't think you're going to be happy if people eat more puppies and veal...

So it's about efficiency. A given organism is going to have a particular conversion ratio in terms of how much mass/calories/nutrients whatever you're measuring it has to take in to increase it's own content an equivalent amount.

Since the vast quantity of food consumed by animals goes into energy rather than body mass they're very inefficient. Particularly larger creatures like cows which "waste" (obviously not from the cow's perspective) that energy breathing, moving, pumping blood, digesting, feeling and so on.

Infants are probably less efficient, as pregnancy is very stressful biologically.

25 more...

Plants make oxygen, animals make poop
If the vegans win then we'll no oxygen to breathe, only poop

This is the future vegans want

I'd agree with you, that also means more farts. And farts are funny. Do you hate comedy?

I've been acclimatizing to a fart-only lifestyle by micro dosing on e-girl farts I buy online.

80% of my oxygen and 30% of my calories I get from farts now.

I'm going to crawl into a burlap sack and throw myself off a bridge like an unwanted litter of kittens.

Comedy means laugh and laugh means consuming more air . Do you wanna help vegans win ?

That's it, now I'm gonna go eat twice as many legumes as I usually eat just because of this post!

It's funny, but obligatory cattle rearing requires more crop fields to sustain than simply eating the crops ourselves.

Honestly we can't stop vegans. What we need to do is imprison in a giant chamber that artificially grows grass

Yes, sounds awesome! And let's embed that chamber in a massive near-vacuum, so if you try to leave it, you suffocate. Also, it's a giant, spinning blob in the middle of nowhere, with a gravity center at its core so you physically can't even get away from it without a massive propulsion system and then what - go to the next random blob that offers nothing? Haha, I like your idea!

Reminder to keep eating lamb and cows because they want to eat all the grass on the planet leaving only desert behind.

My uncle has a forest that he really loves.

I have to laugh whenever vegans claim they don't eat living things. Since when are plants and vegetables not living things? They aren't conscious in the same way people are but they do "live," digest, respirate, and reproduce, and some of them have elaborate networks of roots that they use to send chemical signals to each other.

Anyway, not to knock vegans, some of my friends and family are and they seem to be doing great. Just, whenever I'm eating good chicken wings, or ribs, or any meat with a bone in it, I certainly feel glad to have that "carnivorous" side.

I've literally never heard a vegan claim to not eat any living thing. We know plants are alive lol.

Since when have plants been alive? This is news to me. Next thing you are going to tell me is that plants also crave Brawndo.

Plants crave Brawndo. That's a great slogan if you ask me. Now I crave it also.

And I'm not trying to say vegans are dumb or ignorant about that. Just that I've had the experience of some of them seeming surprised and disagreeing that plants are living things.

Funny - that is an about face from what vegans used to claim.

You're saying "vegans" as if we're a monolith. I'm sure there are vegans who aren't aware that plants are considered living, but I'm sure there's about the same percentage of meat eaters who aren't either. If every vegan you've ever talked to (or some, since you've made both claims) has this misconception, I'm willing to bet your sample size is extremely small, or you're being intentionally dishonest to support your initial claim.

Which vegan said that?

Every vegan I've talked to says they don't eat living things. Literally - every one of them.

I really can't tell if you're being serious or not. Poe's law I guess. But just in case - every fucking cause or belief or whatever will have idiots doing it for illogical, pseudoscientific, ignorant, etc. reasons. I assure you majority of vegans aren't downright stupid and ignorant. Though some confuse animals with sentience.

I am serious, in every discussion I've had about it some one always says, "but plants aren't living things." ?? Since when!

I don't mean to imply that vegans are stupid or ignorant, they have their valid reasons for being vegans. And I'm on the same wavelength with them about sentience in animals - I think they very much are sentient beings, and the way they are harvested for meat is cruel and extreme.

I also think plants have a degree of sentience - in that they can breathe and communicate (via chemicals) to other plants, the way trees "warn" each other of pests through their root systems.

But we're omnivores, and there's no way I can excuse any of it, it's just what we are. We all eat living things. It's human nature. Even mushrooms contain living larva - most canned mushrooms, for example, have some maggots since they are where flies like to lay their eggs. It's just something we learn to live with even it it's gross and/or unpleasant.

Okay now you're the one getting into pseudoscience. What is sentience in your book? People disagree on what sentience is exactly but I think at a basic level it's the ability to experience feelings or sensations. The process of touch is associated with our sensory organs and nervous system. First our peripheral nervous system or sensory nerves activate to stimuli and send signals to our cns or brain where we process those signals. Of course that's a basic explanation but "consciousness" or "sentience" requires a complex nervous system to process that information and generate awareness.

As far as we know plants lack that ability to process information. Of course plants react to stimuli as they're living as you said. For photosynthesis, it does not require any decision making or sentience. This communication you see are non-sentient responses relying on things such as gene expression. So anyways, I don't understand the purpose of your generalizations on vegans. I'll say it again, they are ignorant people in every community and in no way does that reflect the whole community.

For your last argument, veganism isn't about whether or not we're omnivores and we don't rely on your opinion on whether or not veganism is unnatural.

I have a more "dictionary" definition of sentience, as meaning the capacity to feel, and have a degree of consciousness. Even Michael Crichton (in his book, Jurassic Park) argued that the lowest kind of plant, say a potato, has a mean degree of sentience.

And there have been many documentaries about the organization of plant communication around their root systems - many of them. So it's not really considered pseudo-science, it may just be an idea that is beginning to be understood.

And according to those very same documentaries, plants do possess the ability to process information. In human brains, which are much like a tangled root system, chemical processes are what create what we call "thoughts." It's the same in plant systems, chemical processes exist that enable plants to let nearby plants know if pests are chewing on them, if fire is near, and/or when they are ready to reproduce.

So I'm not really proposing anything that is unscientific here. And when did I EVER state that "veganism is unnatural?" You said that, I didn't. I said we're "omnivores," which means were are physiologically designed to eat and grind up meat AND plant materials, both.

Based on our understanding of biology, a prerequisite for sentience is a central nervous system. Plants have really amazing abilities to pass chemical signals, but they lack any mechanics that would allow them to internalize the signals they receive. For example, I wouldn't say that my doorbell is sentient just because it can warn me when someone is at my door. Importantly, animals are different from plants in their ability to internalize pain, fear, sadness, etc. This is why animal ethics and welfare are considered important discussions, and why it's damaging to invoke plant sentience to distract from that discussion.