this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2026
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The BBC has a good article on this concept
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200203-the-hidden-biases-that-drive-anti-vegan-hatred
I'm skeptical of this... I think it's because vegan-ism is so puritanical, and everyone hates puritans.
It would be different if 1) it was necessitated by a health concern, or 2) they were just people who tried to eat as few products made from commercial farming as possible, but would eat animal products as circumstances necessitate. But they cut out all animal products, to the point that it can be really really difficult to prepare food for them. And I understand that usually vegans try to be accommodating and just bring their own food; they aren't trying to be dicks to everyone. But they still forgo the aspect of social bonding created by preparing food for others and sharing food with others, which drives social distance between themselves and others on purely ideological grounds.
I mostly eat meat when it's served to me, but if making my own food or eating out, it's mostly vegetarian. At the same time, though, I fish and eat the fish I catch.
A friend of mine makes faces at me when I mention fishing and says stuff like how she feels bad for the poor fish. When I point out she is not a vegetarian or vegan, she just straight up says she tries not to think about it. But "poor fish" when I look at my kill directly and gut it with my own hands. 🤷🏻♀️
Yeah, people much prefer the far away abstract violence compared to a softer violence they have to face
I have so much more respect for hunting for food than industrial agriculture. But in some ways there's a stigma that hunting carries in a way industrial agriculture doesnt, even though the way it treats animals is infinitely more horrifying
I'm a lot like you, I make vegetarian food myself. But if I'm visiting someone and they serve meat, I'll have a slice.
My exception is game, as a large chunk of my family are hunters
...or in some cases it's much simpler: some of us have conditions that make it impossible for us to survive or to thrive on a vegan diet and we're sick unto death of vegoons pushing Evangelical Veganism and acting like we don't exist or we're making it up to justify the moral failing of eating meat. And there's the constant push to normalize veganism, which just expands the number of places I can't eat and/or people I can't eat with.
If that type of vegan didn't exist I wouldn't immediately start side-eying vegans until I find out of they're safe or not.
the number of places you can eat at went from like 99% of restaurants to like 97% because of vegan places opening up. youre not a victim here.
What do you mean “can’t eat at”?
Do you have an allergic reaction when you consume non-meat foods?
Something kinda like that, yeah.
Forgive my ignorance, but how tf are you alive?
Multivitamins and luck, mostly
Additionally, what conditions make it impossible to survive or thrive on a vegan diet? I'm not challenging you, I'm genuinely curious. Is it like multiple allergies? I know some people believe the "you can't get nutritionally complete diet from veganism" thing, which isn't true. All vitamins, proteins, and nutrients we need are available while vegan. Is it like a fiber sensitivity or allergy problem?
There are about a dozen common ones that limit bioavailability of things like vitamin A or iron from plant sources. I don't keep the list in my pocket, and the enshittification of search has risen to the point where trying to find it again just gets me lectured by an AI about how I should go vegan.
Also:
While that's technically true, it's not actually easy to get things like Omega-3 from plant sources, and most of the nuts and seeds that have it are expensive and/or difficult to source.
You also have to basically spend a lot more of your free time figuring out a meal plan that will allow you to actually get all the vitamins, minerals, and nutrients you need on a plant based diet, and you'll still likely wind up eating the same meals every week bcs there's only so many vegan sources of things your body really needs.
At the end of the day, veganism is a consumerist solution to structural problems. Much like snake oil to "reduce your carbon footprint", it pushes responsibility for a societal problem back on the individual.
Is eating less meat, and having that meat be mostly fish and poultry a good thing for both your health and the environment? Absolutely. Is it nearly as impactful on either as getting rid of your car? I'd say probably not.
I agree, but every little bit matters. You're preaching to the choir here, I'm a leftist that would very much like massive structural changes.
It IS true.
There are not many nutrients only available on meat, but they do exist nevertheless, just as there are some nutrients on vegetables not present at all in meat, and the same for mushroom with these two.
But even if we don't count that, the amounts and forms matter. For example, both have iron, yeah, but almost only animals have hemo iron, while there's barely vegetables with hemo iron, although in mushrooms is more common, but even then in those two hemo iron is found in really low concentrations, and the non-hemo iron is barely metabolized by human body because it needs structures that we humans lost. Like, cows have a crazy big stomach with four compartments to be able to process non-hemo iron. And even if so, they still have to be most of their day eating to be able to survive, because vegetal nutrients are simply not as dense as their counterparts in meat.
That's only one example.
Those nutrients solely available in meat are easily replaceable by your body. I do not eat any meat, and most weeks I eat only vegetables. I am not deficient in any nutrients. Much of Southeast Asia and India eat only vegan or vegetarian, and aren't nutrient deficient. The nutrient excuse has been endlessly debunked, scientifically and practically. Again, you can choose to eat meat for your own reasons without shaming or excuses.
Copy-paste from another comment I made:
This take is also especially crazy to me because I'm dirt poor, like one missed check from homelessness poor. I'm living entirely off of savings while I try to earn a certification and also work full time to survive. Kinda insulting to call it elitist when I'm barely surviving.
Bro, I'm fucking Venezuelan, here the fucking income for a decent work is less than $4/month, I can't even study because of that, I'm unemployed because both AI and the horrible administration in my country are crushing any work possibilities out there, my mom's need an special diet and I have to take 6 fucking chronical meds that are expensive as hell, I eat the same shit everyday because I can't afford anything else, I only have a house because it's the same one from my mom-side grandfather and it's falling into pieces, I fucking know what I'm talking about.
I'm not suggesting everyone must go vegan, but I guarantee there are Buddhists in your community in similar economic positions that are vegan or vegetarian. It sounds like it's more a mental bandwidth thing than a requirement. It's objectively cheaper to eat vegan if you subsist on rice and lentils, like much of the most impoverished do. Again, I'm not suggesting you need to do anything, but the idea that going vegetarian or vegan is an elitist or privileged thing is objectively false, economically. You could absolutely go vegan for cheaper than you are eating now, if you were willing to restrict your diet. It's not the right decision for everyone, but don't make it about money or privilege.
Not going vegan or vegetarian because you have more important things to worry about than a diet change is a totally valid reason. Don't make excuses or punch left because your feelings are hurt. You can choose to not go vegan or vegetarian for your own reasons without shaming those that make the difficult choice to do so.
Yeah, I understand that, and actually, I'm sorry for the really harsh response, I was a bit stressed although that's not justification, I felt bad afterwards.
And I'm not trying to shame those who want to be vegan. I have vegan family, and I respect and love them. But I'm tired of being shamed and attacked for being omnivore (I'm not even carnist, and I hate industrialized meat production).
But it's not objectively false my claim.
Maybe I was too broad, it can be more nuanced, but at least where I live, is cheaper not to be totally vegan, and I know because I have to read the price of everything everytime I go to buy stuff with my mother (I'm the one that knows how to use the calculator, she doesn't). Meat consumption should be reduced, nevertheless, but never totally removed.
I know you're not forcing anyone to be vegan too, but there's a really noisy group of vegans and vegetarians that want to ban it, and will demonize and shame and attack non-vegan and non-vegetarian people in the process.
Banning would be absolutely impractical until affordable replacements for staples exist. Obviously regional availability differs, but I suspect if you were to go shopping with a vegan or vegetarian in your community they could show you how to eat vegan affordably. You can buy bulk legumes and rice, supplement that with seasonally affordable other vegetables for fiber and nutrients, and season for flavor. You won't be eating a diverse diet, but you certainly can eat cheaper vegetarian or vegan, just by the law of thermodynamics. It way more expensive to feed plants to livestock to then be eaten by you, compared to just feeding you directly. Keep an eye out for seasonal maize family vegetables, squash family vegetables, onions, and cabbage. Its all about when and how much you buy. The only meat that comes close to vegetable pricing per calorie is chicken.
Actually most of my diet is just chicken and cow meat, and cow meat here is really cheap because we live relatively near to where it's locally produced.
I actually asked my vegan family to teach us to affordably eat vegan (like, still consuming eggs, cheeses and the like, because for me these dense proteins are something I can't leave, I have an accelerated metabolism and I feel hungry really fast, and fiber-rich foods are expensive here because most of them are imported and we have international commerce problems), but they told us that was impossible here because of our countries situation, even when they'd like us to eat less meat.
I'd actually like vegan food to become more universally accesible but that's unfortunately something hard with the current worldwide events.
What? You don't need replacement meats. I eat veggies and cheap plant protein crumbles or tofu, both cheaper than meat equivalents, and I have regular blood work done and all levels are normal. I don't take any supplementary vitamins either. Going vegetarian is definitely not more expensive, and going vegan isn't either if you're willing to change your diet. Obviously, one to one replacements for egg, cheese, and meats are gonna be pricey, but you don't need those.
You're taking veganism much too personally. I can count on one hand all the places that don't serve meat at all within my city. Your options are not limited. Other's dietary choices are not a slight to you. It is so easy to find a place that has at least one dish for either dietary preference. What if they were Buddhist, or another religion that restricts diet around meat, would that irk you as well? Why must others consume meat for your comfort?
I should note that technology is increasingly helping provide more options. With precision fermentation, there is a lot of ways to biologically identical proteins, enzymes, etc. For instance, you can now buy non-animal whey protein, egg white protein, non-animal heme iron, and more in the stores. It's super cool stuff and ironically the dairy industry was a big pioneer of it in the 90s for one of the enzymes they use widely in cheese. There's a lot more coming down the pipeline with it
The problem is that's an elitist and exclusionary take.
Vegan and vegetarian replacements are way too expensive for almost the 99% of the population, and while you can theoretically replace some of these with medication and supplementation, it will never be the same as the synthetic replacements will never have the exact nutritional matrix that the natural animal source has, and as such it will not interact the same with our metabolism and our organs, thus causing a higher probability on related diseases and health issues.
As they scale up, the costs will be lower. It's a supply chain thing, not a fundamental limitation. The input costs are lower. In the broader sense, plant-based diets from whole-foods are actually already cheaper
https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2021-11-11-sustainable-eating-cheaper-and-healthier-oxford-study
This is also true in real spending data
https://agrifoodecon.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40100-022-00224-9
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0921800915301488?via=ihub (looking at the US)
EDIT: I should also note that in an increasing list of countries, non-whole plant-based things like this are already cheaper too. With meat prices rising further, that's only likely to increase more
Yeah, I understad that.
But most countries are underdeveloped, or in ways of development, and there it's not really viable now.
Also, take into account this. The scalability IS a fundamental issue because the quantity, quality and speed of production needed to feed the global population are not compatible with the limited space, resources and the physics, chemistry and biology of soils. You will cause massive soil losses due to the mere fact that such soils will be above their limits.
There's also enviromental and echological issues, such as the point that you'll be displacing many native species (both from plants and animals) to be able to grow others that are edible to us, massively altering ecosystems. If with the scale of plant production that we now have that's a serious problem, imagine with such a drastic increase. We wouldn't give enough.
Moreover, think on the issues of transport: not all plants are able to grow in every country, and as such you'll have to move a massive amount of these around the globe, boosting the carbon footprints of global transport.
And then we have all the hydric issues, and all the issues with fertilizers and insecticides.
And it could go on, but it would never end.
I have to look better at these studies, tho, I'll do it later because nevertheless it looks like there are interesting advances I haven't heard of before, and that makes me a bit excited because anything that can help both humanity and animals is good.
Perhaps counterintuitively, it's the other way around. Meat, dairy, etc. production is what does not scale well. Low income countries don't have nearly as much of it because high income countries have to subsidize the hell out of animal farming to make it as common as it is. It actually takes significantly less plant farming to eat plants directly
https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1713820115
Pesticide and fertilizer use is significantly lower
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25374332/
Even if we maximally used manure, it's still lower
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0921344922006528
For transport, it's actually not the driver of food emissions. The production itself is more important, especially when it comes to animal products
https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local
Ah fuck. I didn't know iron was derived from animals. Fuck, it's basically blood!
Heme iron, specifically in animals, is in fact from blood. Heme being short for hemoglobin which is the protein in red blood cells that transfers oxygen around the body (both for humans and most non-human animals). Being able to make that from precision fermentation is pretty cool
I was joking about being a vampire and that being blood on Discord, I didn't know I was twlling the truth 😭
There is also plenty of non-heme iron, to be fair, which is not from blood. Plants have tons of it from the ground and such
Yeah, but it's barely metabolized by our organism, it's almost not bioavailable for humans.
That's not true. It's a little less bioavaliable, but hardly "almost not" and the bioavaliable improves with more Vitamin C (which you also get from plants)
Huh. I haven't heard of anything that explicitly requires meat protein for you to live, what do you have? And if you prefer not to say, obviously that is fine, I'm just curious. And not a vegan.
You must be like the only person in 100,000 to have a good reason to fear a vegan restaurant opening up nearby.
For me it's a neuropsychological issue, not a digestive one.
I "can't" eat most fruits and vegetables because they trigger my gag reflex so hard I can't swallow them. After years of working with a dietician and a therapist, I've managed to get to the point where there are a few things I can eat that aren't meat, bread, or ultra processed trash, but it's hard.
Also: to be clear, I have just as much or more disdain for any other voluntary dietary restrictions. Kosher and Halal get the same side eye from me, having lived to middle age with both the constant side-eye from people who like to rag on "picky eaters" and the constant struggle of trying to find something to eat when out with friends, I view anyone who limits their eating options just because they can and they think there's any kind of morality to what you eat as a person throwing away the massive gift of being able to just eat.