#ToVeganOrNot Comment Contest Wrap-Up Post

A great question to ask Kenny, nice one! Most people don't really understand or want to understand much of the reasoning behind a vegetarian or vegan diet.. I'm happy to contribute as i have a thing or two to say! I grew up eating meat, and almost no vegetables. Since 25 years im mostly vegetarian after discovering how to cook using spices and visiting India for the first time.

Morality (Is it moral to kill when it's not necessary to survive/thrive?)
This question is well put. There is a HUGE difference between eating ethically sourced meat once in a while or eating 'tortured' meat with every meal.

I eat meat once in a while, or when im ill i often like chicken soup. When i buy meat i always buy the most ethical brand I can find and also buy local meat when possible. I consider that OK morally.

All of life is about birth and death. Most animals kill to survive, and the deeper question looms as to whether it is any more acceptable to kill a plant than an animal?! Life is life, and some people do seriously ask this question. I think to be 100% morally perfect we should only eat the parts of plants that have been designed to be eaten.. like animals do.. without killing the whole plant. Examples are most vegetables such as pumpkin, cucumber, lettuce etc.. and all fruits.

Health (Which diet is better for the human body?)
I have studied this and learned a few intersting things about our digestive system and how it handles meat. Our stomach has different enzymes and chemicals needed to digest meat or vegetables, and our intestines are very long indeed compared to true carnivores like dogs. This is because our intestines are primarily designed to digest vegetables over longer periods of time. Many people have several kilos of undigested rotting meat in their intestines because they eat too much of it. We are actually not designed to eat a mostly meat diet! Our canines are pretty lame compare to a dog, and most of our teeth are dedicated to grinding food as we do when we eat vegetables.

Also, due to bio-accumulation, toxins and hormone mimicking chemicals are at much higher concentrations than found in vegetables.. especially in fish! One animal eats so many vegetables, and the toxins get stored and build up in the animal fats that people eat.

It's well accepted that eating a balanced Vegetarian based diet is much better for your health and vegetarians generally have a lower risk of developing high blood pressure, several forms of cancer, heart disease, diabetes and obesity because these diets are usually lower in fat and higher in fiber.

Environment (Which diet has a lower negative impact on biodiversity, water quality, and air pollution?)
It is fair to say that there is NO comparison when looking at which diet has less impact on the environment. The list is extremely long and concerning when you compare the two! For instance, a single pound of beef takes, on average, 1,800 gallons of water to produce. Compare that to 22 gallons for the same weight of Tomatoes! Water is a HUGE issue globally and meat production is a big part of the problem!

There are many more points to make on this, almost too many to discuss them all! Global Warming is our great threat, and the methane produced by centralised mass scale animal farming is a big part of the global warming problem. Methane is around 30 times more toxic as a global warming gas than CO2! The entire industry is responsible for at least 20% of global warming effects. If you take into account the amount of deforestation taking place to accommodate livestock, this figure is actually much more. We are clearing land and forests and losing our biodiversity at an astonishing rate...

Economic (Where is our money going, who are we supporting?)
I don't know a lot about this, and so to put something more positive into the mix I would like to say that some of the biggest USA meat producers are now putting significant money into developing lab grown meat. This new type of very ethical meat is soon to hit our shelves, and in my opinion might be the way forward for most of the world who refuse to give up meat. This new type of meat deals with most of the issues around environmental and pollution concerns, but not health!

@truthabides

To vegan or not to vegan, that is the question
whether it is nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous animal cruelty or to end it all with kindness and love. :)

By what right, do we kill and eat animals?

Thanks for this question, @kennyskitchen , the timing is interesting since I only stopped eating dead animals about a month ago. To address the topic, the first question I have to ask myself is do I have a right to kill any living creature.

I can think of nothing that gives me the right. But knowing right from wrong is no guarantee that a person will do the right thing.

There were two things that tipped the scale for me:

My health. It's illogical to me to eat things that are unhealthy. Meat is acidic, gives your body an acidic ph which is the preferred environment for disease. That's what you get for doing something unnatural I guess.
Knowing that didn't stop me though.
But I've been feeling bloated and sluggish lately, not a good feeling. I feel so much better now after just a few weeks not eating meat. I can tell you that I move much better, much lighter on my feet. Yesterday, my wife thought my footsteps belonged to our son so it's not just my imagination. I expect this to only get better.
When I look into an animals eyes, I see someone in there, whatever you want to call it, it has feelings, expresses the same basic emotions that I do. I feel love for them. I talk to them every chance I get, whether it's a bird or a rabbit, or a baby deer, I'm touched by them.

I believe our consumption of meat is part of the perversion that "The Masters of The Universe", have inflicted upon mankind.

The greatest threat to their continued exploitation of humanity, is our solidarity, our harmony with one another and the planet as a whole.

It stands to reason that unnatural actions will have unnatural consequences. Farming animals to supply everyone with meat is not natural and since everything is connected, the negative impact of perverting nature is far reaching.

Specifically, I don't know where the money's going but I know without researching where it's not going and that's to anyone who gives a damn about their fellow human.

@tavsanmavsan

Imagine you're living in a utopia, and everyone you know is prudently naive, intellectual and conscious about everything around you. You spent hours talking about philosophy, existence, bird nests, newly discovered tropical plants. The air you are breathing is always fresh, the tap water is so delicious and pure you don't want to waste it while bathing and cleaning. It's like an aged wine. This is a world where mass production of every food is limited by laws which ensure your nation won't waste any, where bad capitalists do not exist. Any kind of bad "-ism" was annihilated many years ago. Sexism, racism, speciesism are forgotten words. There are no zoos, safari tours, experiments on animals because it is a constitutional act too. Can you imagine? Of course, you can not.

We, human beings were never like this, and never will be. We are still acting with our survivalist instincts. We are still selfish and reckless about every living and nonliving creatures. But in a very tiny place in my brain, I can imagine not all above but sort of a world in a 100 years time. I am a believer.

I am a childless, married, 29 years old female, so I don't have to think about creating a better world for my grandchildren. But I have a very crowded family and lots of friends I care about their future and present life. I believe living on this planet as an individual have to cause minimum harm. Harm to water, air, people, animals and the soil must be at its least. Our carbon footprint should be minimized in every way we could. This is where veganism starts.

I became a vegan 1 year ago, vegetarian/pescetarian 4 years ago. It started with questioning the fallacy of animal eating, continued with any kind of animal usage. I had started with only eating fish, then I realized my mistake, fishes were animals too, they can feel pain too. The key point there was "pain". Killing a cat and a dog is still a taboo for us but when it comes to farm animals, everyone finds it normal and natural.

Then I became a vegetarian. After 3 years of reading and researching, I became a vegan. So I did stop buying leather, wool, and silk. But it is not enough. Consuming itself is an ecological damage. When it comes to calculating carbon footprint and climate; adopting a vegan diet is not enough. It is just the start fire gun. We have to recreate our habits and behaviors that are engraved into our life if we care about our planet and new generations. Buying internationally shipped products, plastic usage, having a car, the fashion industry habits need to change. But this is the another article's, another big subject.

Since 2017 July, I am facing several questions about veganism. This article is about how I am answering these questions. A walkthrough for beginner vegans, curious omnivores and vegetarians. Read this as a Veganism 101 cheat sheet.

I always try to provoke people with my answers. Preaching is not my style. I recommend you as vegans to answer them with humility and try not to offend people who have sympathy and conscious for animals and ecology.

The first question is always:

"Why are you vegan, isn't it hard? "

It was hard when you are not prepared for social interactions. It was hard when you invited to a barbecue party with co-workers and the only option is grilled onions. But next time I have learned bringing my vegetables with me. It was hard when people say "But I love cheese, I can never be a vegan. Don't you miss doner kebap when you see it on the street?" Frankly, it was hard at the beginning. I won't deny. Because the taste information in my brain and mouth until these years has been shaped around meat and dairy. I had a love affair with Turkish yogurt, I was making my own homemade. So yes, for the love of tasting and eating habits, it was hard during the first months. But when I think about the cruelty, blood, and misery, there is no room for any good taste of them in my brain anymore.

The answer to why I'm being vegan is not just a simple sentence. It is absolutely about ending cruelty. This is the unquestionably first reason. Many reasonable people can understand and make a correlation between eating animals and cruelty. There are tons of videos on social media about how the meat industry treats them. But if I stop just there, the next question is always,

"I don't eat that much meat either. What if we breed our own cows humanely in our little adorable village farms and use their milk for cheese, yogurt, and butter?"

This naive looking expectation is impossible since we're all living in big cities but; "Why we need to produce and consume dairy? Is it because our mothers taught us? Is it because the only way of gaining Calcium is eating cheese? Is it because you can't drink wine without cheese?"

On a daily basis, in 2018, in Istanbul, I have all the opportunities for a healthy nutrition style to live a healthy life. Even if I wasn't living in a big city, I would be able to supply my body's daily needs with simple touches on my diet.

So we do not need little, innocent dairy farms of our own. We do not have any right on a cow just because we can domesticate and dominate them as humans. Cow milk is for baby calves. We can gain Calcium from dark leafy greens, collard greens, turnip greens, kale, tofu.

And then this magic question occurs:

" What about GMO of soy products? Also, they are expensive and hard to find in small cities?"

As vegans, we do not have to consume soy products. This is not mandatory. But with a little research, you will find that soy; which is produced for humans are not related to GMO. The soy for feeding farm animals contains GMO. Two cups of chopped and boiled dark leafy greens are enough for our daily Calcium needs.

Then the nightmare of every vegan comes:

"What about Protein and B12, why do I have to take pills for B12, this is not natural?"

In elementary school, we taught that Protein resources are meat, chicken, and fish. This is not wrong. We can gain highly amount of protein from them. But this is not the only way for Protein intake. Plants have Protein too. Beans, lentils, peas, peanuts, quinoa, pistachio and pumpkin seeds are high in Protein and the Amino acid lysine foods.

When it comes to B12; things get harder, because of plant foods contain a very small amount of it. So we have to take it from supplements. There are B12 pills produced from Chlorella and Blue-green algae. And please do not forget that even if you are consuming meat, you can still have a low amount of B12 in your body. So taking a little B12 pill twice a week is not a big deal in my opinion. And what is natural actually? The idea of a cow, chicken or pig never saw sunlight, pumped with growth hormones and suffered their whole life does not sound that natural.

I kept the famous defense for the end of this article.

"Our ancestors were omnivores. Eating meat, eggs, and dairy is natural"

It was natural and necessary while the human race was evolving. If our ancestors had been adopting a vegan diet, we could not evolve into Homo Sapiens.

We are not trying to survive in jungles anymore. We can, interrogate, think, object and protest our race's old, wrong looking and wild eating habits.

We have scientist that proofed a cow can get depressed when farmers took away her calves after birth. We know that baby calves are crying for their mother's milk while we are sucking her udders with machines for dairy.

In nature, a mammalian baby does not need the milk of another mammal to grow if we are talking about naturalism.
It is always hard to break habits if it is related to eating. Many people ignore veganism even if they find it rational. They do not want to think about what they are eating. People don't want to know where the food on their plate is coming from. Besides eating habits, vegans have to change their mindset about daily routines. Changing shopping rituals, replacing the fashion brands we loved, finding a local vegan restaurant, or consuming Vegan and Cruelty-Free cosmetics can be challenging, will be challenging. But we have to do this for a better and humane world.

Long story short:
Veganism is NOT just a diet. It is NOT about just animals, but also about ecology and our planet.

Go vegan! Save lives and our planet!

@fjmb86

There are many who see vegetarians as people obsessed with health. However, being vegetarians (or vegans) is another form of respect for Nature, and also a way of respect for others, especially in a world where so many people suffer from HUNGER, so hungry that many die every day for this cause. In short, being vegetarian or vegan is a way to contribute to a cleaner and fairer world. Nor is it necessary to be a strict vegetarian. It's about knowing the reasons for vegetarianism and then choosing freely.

The problem of the production and consumption of meat is of such dimension that it is included among the five very simple things that are greatly improving the world.

A strict vegetarian or vegan diet may not be a complete diet, especially in growing age, if it is done without knowledge. The good vegetarian eats a great variety of foods, and admits foods of animal origin whenever it has not been necessary to kill the animal, especially eggs and dairy products (milk, cheese, yogurt ...). Veganism does not admit any food of animal origin (and almost always animal products for other uses: dressing, decoration ...). On the other hand, it is not uncommon to be vegetarian with an occasional consumption of meat or fish, because vegetarianism is not a religion nor has rigid precepts to fulfill (this is recently known as flexitarianism).

1. For HEALTH

Eating meat in excess is bad for your health. All doctors and food experts advise a diet based more on fruit, vegetables and cereals than on meat and, among the meat, the best is poultry meat, due to its low fat.

2. Produce meat excess pollution

Our appetite for animal products is erasing our forests, dirtying our waters, polluting the air, devouring our natural resources and decimating our lands.

3. Meat is a luxury, in a HUNGRY world

The exact data little matter, when approximately 20% of humanity access daily to 40% more of the NECESSARY food, while 40% of humanity is not very healthy because it ingests 10% less than necessary daily.

4. The abusive consumption of meat entails MALTREAT the animals

For meat, fish or milk to be cheap products, animals are mistreated (overcrowded at least), over medicated, unnaturally fed and artificially fattened, but there is more: castration, separation the mother and her offspring, the rupture of herds, the brand, beatings, the trauma of transport ... This is a common practice in industrialized countries, because what is important is to produce a lot, regardless of quality.

The final question is not whether we want to be strict vegetarians, but whether we are capable of feeling responsible for the global influence of our actions and acting accordingly with such simple acts as REDUCING OUR MEAT AND FISH CONSUMPTION.

@imp.unity

I find this question so interesting and I'm super glad you're asking us to discuss it in your kitchen Kenny :)

So I became conscious of how much meat I was eating roughly 4 years ago and realized this was quite excessive. I did not eat many vegetables and ate way too many processed carbs and meats.

I quit all meat at 19 and became pescetarian which has more or less been my default diet for the last 4 years. So these are my thoughts on the topic

TO VEGAN OR NOT TO VEGAN?

Morality:

Honestly this to me is the biggest problem with consuming animal products is the lack of intimacy and connection between the meat of the animal and the person eating it. I think the idea of grinding cattle down to mince and selling 150g of shredded meat which is actually recombined pieces of tens if not hundreds of cows is sickening. It just seems like having unprotected sex with lots of partners, it's just not clean and I think it has a negative effect on our aura because I believe we do ingest the emotional/auric/etheric energy of what we ingest. It creates unnecessary clutter as it's just filled with toxins and other unhealthy molecules resulting from the carelessness of the operation.
However I'm specifically skeptical of factory farming and the idea of buying meat in a super-market. Actually the idea of eating animals caught in the wild, or even raising and butchering our own animals does seem like it could be very beneficial. I think the difference comes from offering a full, good life to an animal, and then when it gets sick or starts getting old, giving it an honorable death and making good use of its body. Personally, I don't know that I would need or feel the desire to do this, but I at least appreciate it. I've always maintained I'm okay with eating meat, I just don't believe killing an animal should be taken as lightly as picking up some meat at a supermarket. We outsource the inhumanity out and are alleviated of the responsibility of our choices, but it's all illusion. I think if I had to slit a throat, eating beef or lamb once or twice a year would be more than enough. I wouldn't do it every day, and so that's also how I eat meat. Once in a blue moon, when it is a really special piece of meat.

Health:

Now here is something I'm curious about because there is this supposedly pseudo-scientific "Japanese" theory that says that much of our dietary needs are determined by our blood-type. Now I don't know if this is true but what I have noticed is that all of my O blood type friends are very carnivorous and they have a metabolism that really can handle big quantities of red meat, whereas I (an AB) simply can't handle one/fifth the amount. I have a friend of mine who is blood-type O, he can lift 200+ kg in a dead-lift and digest 500g of beef in 30 minutes. Now if I ate 500g of beef at any given point I would be knocked unconscious and be sitting on a toilet for 36 hours trying to move what would feel like a steel cannon ball through my bowels. So far as I can tell, depending on whether A, B or AB (and a whole host of other genetic and epigenetic factors no doubt), our optimal sources of nutrition for fats and proteins can vary a lot. For some of us, we may really need quite a bit of fish, dairy or eggs. For others, legumes, nuts and seeds may do the trick. I'm not entirely sure, but I do believe there is a way of eating protein that puts no strain on the body. I just believe that despite the hype of "eating vegan", the vast majority of us do not have access to the kinds of foods that would really constitute a super vegan diet.
I think plant-based proteins are actually really healthy and abundant but one really needs to eat a much more varied and balanced diet in order to reap the optimal benefits of a plant-based diet. The reason why it is much simpler to eat animal products (in some cases) is because the nutrition gets carried up the trophic levels.

Environment:

Well this one is probably the biggest no brainer. Monocrop intensive agriculture like it is practiced today is mainly to feed the earth's incredibly large population of stock animals. We definitely do not need this, it is literally bad for the planet in every way imaginable. So whatever we do, we should stop buying meat at the super-market, pure and simple. If we want some, it's best to get it from a local farmer's market, preferably from a farmer who raises his own animals.

Economics:

To be frank I perceive veganism is a very positive light, I wouldn't be surprised that increasingly more and more humans could thrive on an entirely plant-based diet, especially as we reconnect with the earth and discover all of these lost or forgotten super foods and super plants with incredible healing properties. Veganism seems like a kind of purification phase for a lot of people. I'm not entirely sure we don't decide eating bugs, or eggs, or some kind of seafood, would be an entirely bad thing 500 years from the future. I just think we're trying to wean off the industrial food-grid matrix and start finding nutrition from better sources.

So for me, whether its just a phase, or a permanent lifestyle change, I support it. I just hope that if it's a permanent lifestyle change that people will be educated enough to make it work. As I see it, being vegan and eating out of a grocery store seems flawed to me, unless it's a really happening market. There's so much more I could add but, I guess within animal product diets or exclusively plant-based diets there is reason and extremism alike, so as always, listen to your bodies and do what they tell you to is the right ethos for any diet selection.

I will say this, I personally tried vegan before I turned 20 and after two months I was encountering health problems but that was because I was surviving on oreos bread and spicy humus... I'm open to trying vegan out again a bit later in life, when I'll have my own garden and can get over 50% of my food from my back yard

@krishool

cow does not need to be raped in order to produce Milk.
Moreover, cows are able to continue being milked for several years after giving birth to their calves. I know people within the Krishna Consciousness society both here and abroad that do not engage in any of the standard industry practices in milking cows and it's factually wrong and ill informed to proclaim they are partaking in animal cruelty by milking cows.

See Ahimsa farms

The only question morally speaking is whether the interaction is consensual. If a cow does not want to be milked or worked on a farm, it would object to this through it's behavior. Anyone that is not emotionally retarded is able to observe this and thus forcing the cow to engage in the said activity would then be immoral.

There is nothing inherently wrong however with having a symbiotic relationship with an animal where you both benefit and the interaction is consensual. In using their manure, in benefiting from working sheep dogs, snow dogs, using eggs from backyard chickens when their eggs would otherwise go to waste, or milking a cow once you remove the violence and ensure they are being looked after. To imply so has more to do with being in line with the dogmatic views of an ideology than to eliminate suffering.

Let's not forget that we are all complicit to varying degrees in our support of animal agriculture but the question is where one draws the line.

Being Vegan you are NOT removing yourself from all exploitation and violence, however are striving to do so.
This is evident in the taxation system which in most countries subsidizes the cost of meat and dairy and there are a plethora of other examples.

It may be humbling as a Vegan to bear in mind that there are branches within Vegetarianism e.g. Jainism and Fruitarianism that take the virtue of NonViolence/Ahimsa further than Veganism.

It would be just as valid for these groups to maintain that being a Vegan is hypocritical and is not going far enough. Moro-ever whereas obtaining animal bi-products often requires violence to be perpetrated on these animals within the dairy and egg industry, it does NOT require one to do so. This is evident in backyard-eggs, and farmers that treat their cows as family members, abstaining from industry standards like the rape of cows, separation of calves from their mothers and the shipping of these cows to slaughter.

The 'current' definition of Veganism is rooted in Marxist ideas e.g. commodification and exploitation which are philosophically flawed. The original meaning of Vegan, coined originally from one of the readers of Donald Watson's newsletter, simply meant Non-Dairy, Non-Egg eating Vegetarians. The philosophy around Veganism was later codified by the Vegan Society and over several years morphed into the obfuscated definition we now have around abstaining from exploitation and commodification.