> HOT SINGLES in YOUR AREA want you to STOP EATING CHICKEN, EGGS, AND FARMED FISH.
This but unironically though. I always tell people that, as a woman in STEM, my best dating advice is to develop interests that are deeply skewed towards the gender you're attracted to, and those people will be so excited to meet someone of their desired gender who actually is into $THING. Becoming a committed vegetarian as a straight man would certainly qualify.
I'm the target audience to be convinced. Although I don't think I could convince the rest of my family to go vegan, and therefore couldn't go wholly vegan myself, I do want to reduce animal products I eat, especially for breakfast and lunch since I make those just for myself.
The problem is, it's hard and I don't know how. Any amount of making menu plans + posting delicious looking recipes + giving helpful tips is probably very helpful, because that's the main thing standing between me and eating less meat and I'm sure I'm not the only one. I like lots of things, but coming up with protein foods that are easy to make and satisfying for lunch leaves me drawing a blank.
This comment is half giving readers ideas for how to promote veganism, but half a plea for lunch suggestions. 😅
I have gone to vegan meetups in my area despite not being vegan. (I'm a reducetarian who eats mostly vegan these days, so I have an interest in vegan recipes and restaurant options.)
The vegans at the meetups were very nice and accepting to me even though I'm not a vegan. They were eager to share advice and recipes. I think making friends with accepting vegans like this could really help with learning how to eat that way. Especially if they're the kind of people who like to cook and share recipes, and if they invite you over to eat their food so you get a sense of what it's like before you try to follow the recipe yourself. Seeing what's in their fridge/pantry could also be useful.
Depending on where you live, there might be vegan meetups you can go to. If you show up a few times, I wouldn't be surprised if you meet some people who would be happy to help you.
I'm not going to say that "refried beans and cheese with vegetables and a carbohydrate" is the best strategy, but it's certainly tasty and easy. (Hint: If you want lard-free refried beans, get no-added-fat refried beans. You'll be adding in some fat with the cheese, and the fat that gets included with vegetarian refried beans is miscellaneous oil that sometimes tastes weird.)
I think it is also important to look into *why* certain things are more convincing than others. For instance, shcoking images seem appropriate if they make people better understand the nature of the issue, but inappropriate if they make people misunderstand the nature of the issue.
Optimizing for persuading people rather than optimizing for making people understand seems like a form of propaganda production. (Sorry, I have read too much Ben Hoffman.)
“ Messages which compare farmed animals to companion animals or to humans tend to be persuasive. Messages which compare humans to farmed animals tend not to be persuasive. ”
Huh? This seems contradictory. Is this a typo, or is there supposed to be some difference between “comparing farmed animals to humans” and “comparing humans to farmed animals” that I’m not getting?
I'm surprised this post doesn't seem to touch upon the main point of contention I have with veg.anism, which is the question of impact.
Like, say I'm a consequentialist. Telling me "the farming industry causes untold death and suffering" will easily persuade me to commit to pressing a magic button to end it all overnight if I find myself in a convenient thought experiment, but so long as I'm one guy in a world that doesn't seem likely to stop inhumane farming conditions (let alone meat consumption altogether) in the foreseeable decades, I don't see how that translates to my having a duty to abstain from all those products.
Veganism/vegeterianism really aren't big enough to amount to an effective boycott, and we're lightyears away from a place where my individual choice to buy eggs or not has any material impact on any actual chickens. In the meantime, if I have a heart then I'll spare the cow a thought when I'm eating beef, but it wasn't me that killed it, and I just don't see that there's any meaningful level on which I'd be saving any of its yet-unslaughtered brethren if I abstained from eating that steak.
So, to round back to the paper — I dunno, I'm really surprised that this whole area isn't a bigger deal. They may not formalize it to the same degree, but I'm convinced a large number of non-vegans think along similar lines when they consider the prospect of vegetarianism. "Maybe it's bad that slaughterhouses exist but I, Joe Average, won't be closing any down by denying myself a hamburger, and the boat has sailed for that particular cow, so I may as well." (This is, IMO, why vegans are stereotyped as neurotic self-flagellators — given the lack of an individual real-world impact, it's perceived as simply an act of self-punishment for a perceived shared human guilt, rather than a way to actually make the world better.) And I therefore wouldn't expect arguments that don't account for that side of the issue to have much impact in the grand scheme of things, because caring about the animals (and even feeling *capable* of going vegan) isn't the bottleneck.
This seems to ignore the way supply and demand function? Like, the alternatives aren't "all the factory farming" vs "zero factory farming", or even "n slaughterhouses" vs "n-1 slaughterhouses". More like "1 kg of battery-cage eggs" vs "100 equivalent days of suffering". Sure, supply and demand aren't perfectly elastic or continuous in the real world, but *in expectation* foregoing 1 kg of eggs should reduce (somewhat less than) 100 equivalent days of suffering.
That's actually much *better* than voting, which mostly *is* all-or-nothing (one extra vote has ~0 marginal effect unless it flips the result).
I'm going to start with an earnest congratulation that these are in fact the sort of counter-arguments that I'm "looking for", the kind I was saying vegans should make more often.
But that being said — the thing is, I really don't see, with industries of that scale, how it could possibly work on this granular a level. That "in expectation" is doing all the work! I do not care about hypothetical trend effects, I care about whether, materially, I would be saving any chickens by passing on a particular egg carton. Perhaps I'm missing something, but I just don't see how that could possibly be true.
(If I'm in a sufficiently influential position to do so, perhaps convincing my entire community to stop buying eggs might start to have an effect. But even then I am tragedyofthecommonsically incentivised to personally keep buying the eggs as long as possible, so long as I can prevent the knowledge that I'm doing so from undercutting the activism.)
Of course, this is all very different if I'm, say, living in a small rural community and am buying, or not buying, from one specific farmer with a hundred customers or so. But industrial operations? For good or ill (well, for ill) these are the guys who famously end up incentivised to keep producing surplus and then dump it to rot, rather than reduce production. How does that egg carton make a difference in a world like that? *How*?
(As a side-note, I don't subscribe to the ultra-crunched "adding up 'days of suffering'" way of thinking about this. My moral intuition is very much that the important metric is the number of individual chickens harmed and/or killed, not the span of time. If only because, though I certainly care about suffering as well, I find death significantly worse, such that "two guys are tortured for twenty years each, then killed" is trivially a *lot* worse than "one guy is tortured for forty years, then killed". I don't think this has any direct bearing on the supply-and-demand thing, just thought I'd clarify it.)
I think the only answer is that social movements are slow. If we ever got to an America where half of all people were vegetarians, it could only have happened by one person, then another, making the shift.
(I don't believe that will actually happen before lab-grown-meat indistinguishable from the real thing, though. Sometimes I wonder whether just donating money could do way more than diet.)
Also, you wouldn't, in the real world, try to convince as many people as possible not to eat eggs while secretly buying them yourself, because you would know that when you were found out it would undo almost all of the work you did. That example sounds like an only-in-economicsland thing.
> (I don't believe that will actually happen before lab-grown-meat indistinguishable from the real thing, though. Sometimes I wonder whether just donating money could do way more than diet.)
My thoughts exactly!
> That example sounds like an only-in-economicsland thing.
- hope this is helpful. Of course, it's about 10 years old at this point, but I expect it still essentially holds up; if you disagree, I can look for something more recent.
---
[Excerpts:]
Anecdote by someone who worked at a grocery store: "Anyone who has worked in a grocery store—however small—will tell you that they have a pretty good system in place to avoid throwing away excess meat. They sometimes mess up and end up throwing away fruits and veggies but very rarely throw away meat or dairy products. In one year of working at a grocery store, it happened once."
And then here's the estimate by the authors of "Compassion by the Pound" of the expected impacts of various products:
If someone gives up -> total consumption of the product falls by
But every time you eat chicken, you're eating like 1/4 of a chicken (approximately). So it only takes four people, or your own choices four times, per chicken, to save a chicken. If 100 people who shop at your store eat chicken one fewer time per week, that's 25 chickens the store can't sell. They will order fewer chickens. That trickles up to the people who farm chickens.
It's a fair answer, but I think there are some important differences, such that the comparison is instructive. Assuming voting is an inconvenience, it's at least one which only comes up a couple of times a year, instead of every single day, so it's an easier threshold of principled-things-to-do-even-though-they-don't-really-matter to build the willpower for.
In the right circumstances it can also rise to a positive experience (as a sort of civic holiday you participate in with your whole community and get "irrational" good feelings about) in a way that not-eating-meat, being inherently a *denial* of something, will find it hard to match. (Come to think of it, a possible takeaway for animal rights activists might be that it could be a good idea to focus on building a strong "hurray for you! everyone else clap for the person who's committed to veganism!" 'reward-system' to replicate this effect, although 1] it might wind up looking culty and 2] I still expect it to be a harder sale because, again, denying yourself lots of tasty foods is a much taller order than queuing up to do a bit of ritualise paperwork a couple of days a year.)
Finally, and not at all trivially, I have a reasonable expectation that a majority of people are voting alongside myself and make the collective expenditure of time and effort worth it; it's more comparable to a counterfactual world where there *is* a reasonable expectation that veganism could get big enough to constitute an effective boycott of the meat industry.
I'm not sure how to say this without sounding snotty, so forgive me, please. I am definitely as morally flawed as the next person. But I do consider the ability to do things that only help if a lot of people do them, and to refrain from doing things that would only be a bad idea if a lot of people did them, foundational to morality. Like, I understand the temptation to believe that our actions can't make a difference at the margins, but I can't support that kind of thinking.
What are the estimates for non-industrially produced eggs? I live in a rural area where people sell eggs from "few chickens per backyard coop" type operations and while I have NOT made effort to buy exclusively those, I'm willing to do this (especially as they're not significantly more expensive) if it reduces the suffering from 60 days to under 10.
2) I did not realise the suffering cost of farmed fish. On learning this, I will attempt to switch most of my salmon consumption to wild caught white fish + mackerel and herring for oily fish. This is also proof of simply informing people of those numbers.
People tend to prefer familiar food (pasta, roast potatoes, salads) to less familiar food (bean soups, tofu, certain vegan meat alternatives). Unfortunately, pasta and roast potatoes is not a balanced diet, ********so it’s also important to introduce less familiar food.*********
That's what many vegans seem to think, but I don't believe it's true at all (the part within asterisks, that is).
I think vegans sabotage their own cause by insisting unnecessarily on foods off-putting to westerners, such as soy in various forms, whole grains, and stuff with weird Asian names.
It is not hard to put together a good diet using just plant foods westerners grew up with (which does include beans - are people not familiar with beans???), and without having to shun white rice and white flour. I've been eating more or less that way for almost 15 years.
I'm not exactly a vegan evangelist, because I know that people hate that kind of vegan. But the few times I tried to convince someone to go vegan, the selling point was that "plant food is just as tasty as animal food"! (which is a lie; meat is disgusting). The times I've tried it, I was able to get people to agree (with the statement, not with becoming vegan). "Plant food is just as tasty as animal food" implies that a vegan diet can be centered around the plant foods you grew up with and already love, and does not have to include weird foods like soy.
I am confused about the claim that "beef tends to be the worst for health and the environment, so health and environment messages might encourage people to eat more beef."
Are you saying that because people might react negatively to advocacy, they would say "screw you, if it's worst I'll just eat MORE"? Because otherwise I would think that if beef is worst for health & environment, then messaging around those things would encourage people to eat LESS.
I also don't understand why cows, pigs, etc are held to suffer less than chickens. You say that but don't explain it. Can you clarify? The way you put it made it sound like it wasn't simply because there were more chickens than the others. So why else would it be?
I mean, Days of Suffering per Kilogram is pretty evocative and practical scale to inform decisions. For my own use I might even convert it to Hours of Suffering per 100 kcal, referring to approximate calorie need per hour, effectively converting it to Hours of Suffering per Hour of Existence.
> HOT SINGLES in YOUR AREA want you to STOP EATING CHICKEN, EGGS, AND FARMED FISH.
This but unironically though. I always tell people that, as a woman in STEM, my best dating advice is to develop interests that are deeply skewed towards the gender you're attracted to, and those people will be so excited to meet someone of their desired gender who actually is into $THING. Becoming a committed vegetarian as a straight man would certainly qualify.
I'm the target audience to be convinced. Although I don't think I could convince the rest of my family to go vegan, and therefore couldn't go wholly vegan myself, I do want to reduce animal products I eat, especially for breakfast and lunch since I make those just for myself.
The problem is, it's hard and I don't know how. Any amount of making menu plans + posting delicious looking recipes + giving helpful tips is probably very helpful, because that's the main thing standing between me and eating less meat and I'm sure I'm not the only one. I like lots of things, but coming up with protein foods that are easy to make and satisfying for lunch leaves me drawing a blank.
This comment is half giving readers ideas for how to promote veganism, but half a plea for lunch suggestions. 😅
I have gone to vegan meetups in my area despite not being vegan. (I'm a reducetarian who eats mostly vegan these days, so I have an interest in vegan recipes and restaurant options.)
The vegans at the meetups were very nice and accepting to me even though I'm not a vegan. They were eager to share advice and recipes. I think making friends with accepting vegans like this could really help with learning how to eat that way. Especially if they're the kind of people who like to cook and share recipes, and if they invite you over to eat their food so you get a sense of what it's like before you try to follow the recipe yourself. Seeing what's in their fridge/pantry could also be useful.
Depending on where you live, there might be vegan meetups you can go to. If you show up a few times, I wouldn't be surprised if you meet some people who would be happy to help you.
I'm not going to say that "refried beans and cheese with vegetables and a carbohydrate" is the best strategy, but it's certainly tasty and easy. (Hint: If you want lard-free refried beans, get no-added-fat refried beans. You'll be adding in some fat with the cheese, and the fat that gets included with vegetarian refried beans is miscellaneous oil that sometimes tastes weird.)
Are we talking about veganism or vegetarianism?
I think it is also important to look into *why* certain things are more convincing than others. For instance, shcoking images seem appropriate if they make people better understand the nature of the issue, but inappropriate if they make people misunderstand the nature of the issue.
Optimizing for persuading people rather than optimizing for making people understand seems like a form of propaganda production. (Sorry, I have read too much Ben Hoffman.)
“ Messages which compare farmed animals to companion animals or to humans tend to be persuasive. Messages which compare humans to farmed animals tend not to be persuasive. ”
Huh? This seems contradictory. Is this a typo, or is there supposed to be some difference between “comparing farmed animals to humans” and “comparing humans to farmed animals” that I’m not getting?
I'm surprised this post doesn't seem to touch upon the main point of contention I have with veg.anism, which is the question of impact.
Like, say I'm a consequentialist. Telling me "the farming industry causes untold death and suffering" will easily persuade me to commit to pressing a magic button to end it all overnight if I find myself in a convenient thought experiment, but so long as I'm one guy in a world that doesn't seem likely to stop inhumane farming conditions (let alone meat consumption altogether) in the foreseeable decades, I don't see how that translates to my having a duty to abstain from all those products.
Veganism/vegeterianism really aren't big enough to amount to an effective boycott, and we're lightyears away from a place where my individual choice to buy eggs or not has any material impact on any actual chickens. In the meantime, if I have a heart then I'll spare the cow a thought when I'm eating beef, but it wasn't me that killed it, and I just don't see that there's any meaningful level on which I'd be saving any of its yet-unslaughtered brethren if I abstained from eating that steak.
So, to round back to the paper — I dunno, I'm really surprised that this whole area isn't a bigger deal. They may not formalize it to the same degree, but I'm convinced a large number of non-vegans think along similar lines when they consider the prospect of vegetarianism. "Maybe it's bad that slaughterhouses exist but I, Joe Average, won't be closing any down by denying myself a hamburger, and the boat has sailed for that particular cow, so I may as well." (This is, IMO, why vegans are stereotyped as neurotic self-flagellators — given the lack of an individual real-world impact, it's perceived as simply an act of self-punishment for a perceived shared human guilt, rather than a way to actually make the world better.) And I therefore wouldn't expect arguments that don't account for that side of the issue to have much impact in the grand scheme of things, because caring about the animals (and even feeling *capable* of going vegan) isn't the bottleneck.
This seems to ignore the way supply and demand function? Like, the alternatives aren't "all the factory farming" vs "zero factory farming", or even "n slaughterhouses" vs "n-1 slaughterhouses". More like "1 kg of battery-cage eggs" vs "100 equivalent days of suffering". Sure, supply and demand aren't perfectly elastic or continuous in the real world, but *in expectation* foregoing 1 kg of eggs should reduce (somewhat less than) 100 equivalent days of suffering.
That's actually much *better* than voting, which mostly *is* all-or-nothing (one extra vote has ~0 marginal effect unless it flips the result).
I'm going to start with an earnest congratulation that these are in fact the sort of counter-arguments that I'm "looking for", the kind I was saying vegans should make more often.
But that being said — the thing is, I really don't see, with industries of that scale, how it could possibly work on this granular a level. That "in expectation" is doing all the work! I do not care about hypothetical trend effects, I care about whether, materially, I would be saving any chickens by passing on a particular egg carton. Perhaps I'm missing something, but I just don't see how that could possibly be true.
(If I'm in a sufficiently influential position to do so, perhaps convincing my entire community to stop buying eggs might start to have an effect. But even then I am tragedyofthecommonsically incentivised to personally keep buying the eggs as long as possible, so long as I can prevent the knowledge that I'm doing so from undercutting the activism.)
Of course, this is all very different if I'm, say, living in a small rural community and am buying, or not buying, from one specific farmer with a hundred customers or so. But industrial operations? For good or ill (well, for ill) these are the guys who famously end up incentivised to keep producing surplus and then dump it to rot, rather than reduce production. How does that egg carton make a difference in a world like that? *How*?
(As a side-note, I don't subscribe to the ultra-crunched "adding up 'days of suffering'" way of thinking about this. My moral intuition is very much that the important metric is the number of individual chickens harmed and/or killed, not the span of time. If only because, though I certainly care about suffering as well, I find death significantly worse, such that "two guys are tortured for twenty years each, then killed" is trivially a *lot* worse than "one guy is tortured for forty years, then killed". I don't think this has any direct bearing on the supply-and-demand thing, just thought I'd clarify it.)
I think the only answer is that social movements are slow. If we ever got to an America where half of all people were vegetarians, it could only have happened by one person, then another, making the shift.
(I don't believe that will actually happen before lab-grown-meat indistinguishable from the real thing, though. Sometimes I wonder whether just donating money could do way more than diet.)
Also, you wouldn't, in the real world, try to convince as many people as possible not to eat eggs while secretly buying them yourself, because you would know that when you were found out it would undo almost all of the work you did. That example sounds like an only-in-economicsland thing.
> (I don't believe that will actually happen before lab-grown-meat indistinguishable from the real thing, though. Sometimes I wonder whether just donating money could do way more than diet.)
My thoughts exactly!
> That example sounds like an only-in-economicsland thing.
By Talos, this can't be happening! But fair cop.
This is the info I used when I originally went vegetarian:
https://reducing-suffering.org/comments-on-compassion-by-the-pound/#Elasticities
https://reducing-suffering.org/does-vegetarianism-make-a-difference/#My_consumption_doesnt_make_a_difference
- hope this is helpful. Of course, it's about 10 years old at this point, but I expect it still essentially holds up; if you disagree, I can look for something more recent.
---
[Excerpts:]
Anecdote by someone who worked at a grocery store: "Anyone who has worked in a grocery store—however small—will tell you that they have a pretty good system in place to avoid throwing away excess meat. They sometimes mess up and end up throwing away fruits and veggies but very rarely throw away meat or dairy products. In one year of working at a grocery store, it happened once."
And then here's the estimate by the authors of "Compassion by the Pound" of the expected impacts of various products:
If someone gives up -> total consumption of the product falls by
One Pound of Milk -> 0.56 lbs
One Pound of Beef -> 0.68 lbs
One Pound of Veal -> 0.69 lbs
One Pound of Pork -> 0.74 lbs
One Pound of Chicken -> 0.76 lbs
One Egg -> 0.91 egg
But every time you eat chicken, you're eating like 1/4 of a chicken (approximately). So it only takes four people, or your own choices four times, per chicken, to save a chicken. If 100 people who shop at your store eat chicken one fewer time per week, that's 25 chickens the store can't sell. They will order fewer chickens. That trickles up to the people who farm chickens.
Do you vote?
It's a fair answer, but I think there are some important differences, such that the comparison is instructive. Assuming voting is an inconvenience, it's at least one which only comes up a couple of times a year, instead of every single day, so it's an easier threshold of principled-things-to-do-even-though-they-don't-really-matter to build the willpower for.
In the right circumstances it can also rise to a positive experience (as a sort of civic holiday you participate in with your whole community and get "irrational" good feelings about) in a way that not-eating-meat, being inherently a *denial* of something, will find it hard to match. (Come to think of it, a possible takeaway for animal rights activists might be that it could be a good idea to focus on building a strong "hurray for you! everyone else clap for the person who's committed to veganism!" 'reward-system' to replicate this effect, although 1] it might wind up looking culty and 2] I still expect it to be a harder sale because, again, denying yourself lots of tasty foods is a much taller order than queuing up to do a bit of ritualise paperwork a couple of days a year.)
Finally, and not at all trivially, I have a reasonable expectation that a majority of people are voting alongside myself and make the collective expenditure of time and effort worth it; it's more comparable to a counterfactual world where there *is* a reasonable expectation that veganism could get big enough to constitute an effective boycott of the meat industry.
I'm not sure how to say this without sounding snotty, so forgive me, please. I am definitely as morally flawed as the next person. But I do consider the ability to do things that only help if a lot of people do them, and to refrain from doing things that would only be a bad idea if a lot of people did them, foundational to morality. Like, I understand the temptation to believe that our actions can't make a difference at the margins, but I can't support that kind of thinking.
Do you have analyses of pasture-raised certified-humane eggs?
1) Are "cage free" eggs the same as "free range"?
What are the estimates for non-industrially produced eggs? I live in a rural area where people sell eggs from "few chickens per backyard coop" type operations and while I have NOT made effort to buy exclusively those, I'm willing to do this (especially as they're not significantly more expensive) if it reduces the suffering from 60 days to under 10.
2) I did not realise the suffering cost of farmed fish. On learning this, I will attempt to switch most of my salmon consumption to wild caught white fish + mackerel and herring for oily fish. This is also proof of simply informing people of those numbers.
A lot of canned salmon is wild caught, I believe.
Yes, so called "pink salmon". I don't eat tinned fish tho.
Ozy wrote:
People tend to prefer familiar food (pasta, roast potatoes, salads) to less familiar food (bean soups, tofu, certain vegan meat alternatives). Unfortunately, pasta and roast potatoes is not a balanced diet, ********so it’s also important to introduce less familiar food.*********
That's what many vegans seem to think, but I don't believe it's true at all (the part within asterisks, that is).
I think vegans sabotage their own cause by insisting unnecessarily on foods off-putting to westerners, such as soy in various forms, whole grains, and stuff with weird Asian names.
It is not hard to put together a good diet using just plant foods westerners grew up with (which does include beans - are people not familiar with beans???), and without having to shun white rice and white flour. I've been eating more or less that way for almost 15 years.
I'm not exactly a vegan evangelist, because I know that people hate that kind of vegan. But the few times I tried to convince someone to go vegan, the selling point was that "plant food is just as tasty as animal food"! (which is a lie; meat is disgusting). The times I've tried it, I was able to get people to agree (with the statement, not with becoming vegan). "Plant food is just as tasty as animal food" implies that a vegan diet can be centered around the plant foods you grew up with and already love, and does not have to include weird foods like soy.
What are these “robust estimates”? They go against my intuitions so I’m interested in reading them. How do they “adjust for sentence”?
"When you include both land animals and sea animals, 69% of farmed land animals are shellfish, 16% are chickens, and 14% are fish."
I think something went wrong with this sentence, and it's not obvious to me exactly what.
I am confused about the claim that "beef tends to be the worst for health and the environment, so health and environment messages might encourage people to eat more beef."
Are you saying that because people might react negatively to advocacy, they would say "screw you, if it's worst I'll just eat MORE"? Because otherwise I would think that if beef is worst for health & environment, then messaging around those things would encourage people to eat LESS.
I also don't understand why cows, pigs, etc are held to suffer less than chickens. You say that but don't explain it. Can you clarify? The way you put it made it sound like it wasn't simply because there were more chickens than the others. So why else would it be?
It’s been corrected to “health and environment messages might encourage people to eat more chicken.”
This is per kilogram of product, not per animal. Larger animals produce more product per animal.
Well, many wannabe-vegans will be delighted that that most difficult of all things to give up, cheese, is not on your list of priorities.
I mean, Days of Suffering per Kilogram is pretty evocative and practical scale to inform decisions. For my own use I might even convert it to Hours of Suffering per 100 kcal, referring to approximate calorie need per hour, effectively converting it to Hours of Suffering per Hour of Existence.