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There is a lot of privilege in being able to decide to be vegan-and a healthy vegan at that.
Access to "affordable" fruits and vegetables in this country is heavily dependent on one's class.
I live in Chicago and there's a good number of reports and articles written about the food deserts here and how there are more food deserts in the more poor and minority neighborhoods. I look at my own neighborhood as an example. About a mile down the street there's a chain grocery store. I'd never shop there because I know the quality of the produce is crap. About a mile and a half there's a locally owned grocery store with good quality produce but it's a tad expensive. I say expensive because I'm a graduate student living off student loans at the moment. However, I have the luxury not having children, not having to pay a car note, etc. and so I can sometimes afford to "splurge" and shop at this store.
The nearest full service grocery store (full service in terms of being a vegan or vegetarian) is about 6 miles away. 6 miles may not sound like a lot to you but imagine being poor and having to depend on public transportation. Your transportation cost is a good $5. Again, $5 may not sound like a lot to you but for some people, it makes a difference. It also isn't just about the money coming out of one's wallet but the time it takes. It takes me 10 minutes to drive. If I relied on public transportation, it would take about 30 minutes.
The amount of groceries I can buy when relying on public transportation is limited versus when I have the space in my car.
I could go on but let's just say it isn't as "easy" as you make it sound.
i did vegan for a while, cost me 125 a week to eat like that.. and at the end of it i was mineral and vitamin deficient, only after 8 months of it...blood tests dont lie, get checked regularly on that diet, its a very experimental diet for certain, as no other culture or population ever existed on a 100% vegan diet in the past (that science knows of).
i did vegan for a while, cost me 125 a week to eat like that.. and at the end of it i was mineral and vitamin deficient, only after 8 months of it...blood tests dont lie, get checked regularly on that diet, its a very experimental diet for certain, as no other culture or population ever existed on a 100% vegan diet in the past (that science knows of).
What were you buying? Our household is vegan and we eat very well for about $175 a month for two of us. I like to cook and I don't like boring, processed, pre-packaged food. We live in a small mountain town with no chain supermarket and higher than average prices. I've been vegetarian my whole life and vegan for most of it and I've never had any health problems. I don't remember the last time I even had a cold. Nutritional deficiencies can happen to anyone, regardless of their diet, if they don't make a conscious effort to provide their body with what it needs. It's not a vegan thing.
If someone doesn't want to be vegan, then they don't have to be. They don't need to give a laundry list of bogus excuses. If someone does want to be vegan, there's no excuse to not be.
What were you buying? Our household is vegan and we eat very well for about $175 a month for two of us. I like to cook and I don't like boring, processed, pre-packaged food. We live in a small mountain town with no chain supermarket and higher than average prices. I've been vegetarian my whole life and vegan for most of it and I've never had any health problems. I don't remember the last time I even had a cold. Nutritional deficiencies can happen to anyone, regardless of their diet, if they don't make a conscious effort to provide their body with what it needs. It's not a vegan thing.
If someone doesn't want to be vegan, then they don't have to be. They don't need to give a laundry list of bogus excuses. If someone does want to be vegan, there's no excuse to not be.
I agree 125 a week is a lot for a single person. I spend about 60 a week for myself and get at least 20lbs of fruits and veggies. The only way one can spend that much for themselves is they buy 100% organic or live in an area where it's insanely expensive to ship produce (ie Alaska)
When being Vegan becomes no big deal, say you go to a Mc Vegan and buy one Vegan Whopper and Vegan fries, and you go to any REGULAR PRICE supermarket were you can find absolutely everything, from TV dinners to Vegan Ice creams...and you can even buy vegan hot dogs with relish at stands..
Being Vegan is tough, so many people are Faux Vegans like myself.
I sometimes eat fish and I absolutely love the so-called "ecological wine", not only that, I'm a renegade..when I'm invited to a social or family dinner, I eat whatever is served, meat included...
Anyways, better be a Faux Vegan that omnivore..so far I lost 130 pounds.
Well, they are moving away from that, as they aremoving away from dissecting animals and testing new surgeries on animals -- they are leaning much more these days on CGI dissection and human testing. I have even heard that computer models are much more useful for chemical experiments than using real chemicals -- also much less likely to explode. Scandals like the Vioxx disaster make clear that animals testing is often actively misleading when it comes to determining whether a prescription is helpful for a human taker.
Oh I agree with you 100%, I only wrote to address the earlier comment that pointed out that vegans should not be so hasty to judge omnivores if they take medications that by definition have gone through animal trials - it's a good point, I just wanted to highlight the concept of harm reduction. If a person who usually followed the Standard American Diet eschewed meat for one month, they might save as many animals as died to have one drug approved in Docendo's example. Don't let that scare you away from reducing or eliminating animal products from your diet.
This goes to the point of the thread, why is such a fuss made about how hard it is to go vegan? If you think of "going vegan" as an absolute, that requires you to give up meat, eggs, dairy, leather, wool, silk, honey, beeswax, cosmetics with animal byproducts, cosmetics that were tested on animals, supplements with gelatin, medications that were tested on animals, vitamins with fish oil, all at once - that might be overwhelming. You don't have to do it all at the same time. You don't have to do it all, period. If you eat meat, try eating vegetarian one or two days a week. If you're vegetarian but not vegan, try a couple new recipes that are naturally vegan. Fake cheese is pretty good these days but it's not fooling anybody. Maybe a stir fry, a nice stew, a tasty pasta primavera. Asian, African, and Mediterranean recipes are a great place to start. Spices are your friends.
If you want to be a vegetarian but you really want bacon every once in a while - it's ok. Don't let that stop you from not eating meat the rest of the time. If you want to go vegan but still eat a cheese pizza once a month - it's ok. Don't let that stop you from not eating animal products the rest of the time. Nobody will call the PETA police on you. Every meal you eat that doesn't include an animal product is good. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
I eat a variation of this four or five times a week - any kind of beans, any kind of greens, any kind of grain. You do not need anything fancy or special to be vegan, and it is not expensive. Vegetables, beans, and grains are about the cheapest foods there are. If you have difficulty finding quality fresh produce in your area, there is absolutely nothing wrong with unprocessed frozen vegetables - they are often fresher and more nutritious, having been frozen at or near their point of origin, than "fresh" vegetables that are out of season and have been transported a long way and/or stored for a long time. You do not need seitan nor tempeh nor quinoa if that is hard to find. You do not need tofu, though I've seen that in almost every supermarket I've been in these days - if it's not in yours, it's ok. You don't need it. Most Americans eat far more protein than they need. It's pretty easy to get as much as you need from plants. Many of the largest land animals are primarily or exclusively herbivores - elephants, rhinos, hippos, buffalo, giraffes, etc. They are adapted to get all the protein they need from plants, and so are you. (Some of these are ruminants, some are monogastric, to varying degrees of success. Humans are monogastric and are omnivorous, not obligate carnivores. /nerd) Eat some beans and legumes, also some nuts, and some whole grains. If you don't eat fortified cereal or almond or soy milk, take a B12 supplement. It's not hard and it's not complicated and it's cheap.
Quote:
Originally Posted by MJ7
since when was it your obligation to tell everyone how to eat?
relax, if people dont want to eat vegan then they dont want to eat vegan...most people just try to find an easy and/or nice way or saying no...those simple excuses are them telling you no.
thanks have a nice day
I don't think anyone was telling anyone how to eat. The OP was just wondering why people give all these excuses. If you don't want to be vegan, just say so, and acknowledge that you think it's ok to treat animals the way they are treated in the factory farm system. In my experience many people don't like being confronted with the reality of that treatment, specifically the cruelty, brutality, and torture that is inextricable from that system, so give excuses that help them rationalize and thereby stave off cognitive dissonance.
I can only speak for myself, but I do not think this is ok, so I am vegan. And because I do not think it is ok, I advocate for this to end, and I do try to change people's minds about it, because I can't stop it by myself. I'm not going to tell you how to eat, and if you're not receptive to what I have to say then I won't bug you about it. But if you're in this thread because you're a little bit interested, maybe try a Meatless Monday - it's all the rage! Any meal you eat without an animal product is good.
Maybe these people just really don't want to go vegan and their "cliche excuses" are to give you some kind of answer that they hope will shut you up because you can't just leave it and stop trying to make everyone be like you...
The only fuss I ever see over Vegan, Vegetarian, wheat free etc lifestyles are by the people who choose them, who feel like they have to proselytize about it to everyone around them like some kind of religious fanatic.
In my case, it's because I can't figure out what to eat and I get hungry and go back to what I know. I would have no problem with being vegetarian because meat doesn't appeal to me that much anyway. But when you also take away cheese, milk, eggs and all kinds of other foods, it gets harder. I try to that way and feel hungry and unsatisfied and I start wanting something satisfying to eat. Maybe it's just that you have to change your thinking about the food. But when you have eaten a certain way your entire life, it IS hard to change everything and change your thinking and your taste.
For sure there is animal testing required before the FDA will approve a drug, but to use your example: if 20 rats, 10 rabbits, 5 monkeys and 5 beagles had to die to get this one drug approved, that is a one-time process - once it's approved, it's approved. No more animals are harmed no matter how many times I use the medication, and my decision to take this medication in no way caused those animals to be harmed, the drug company did those trials long ago. But every time you eat however many burgers you get out of a cow, another cow has to be killed to fill the next order. If you didn't eat them, that many fewer cows would have to be killed. Every time you choose to eat meat, you are choosing that more animals die.
Think about this..
Cows are domesticated because they are useful for food. If cows are no longer useful for food people will stop keeping/breeding them. How many wild herds of cows have you come across i the world? What is happening to wild habitats? What is slowly happening to wild horses? we don't eat them (in this country) and fewer and fewer people are keeping them for recreational purposes. Horses are becoming less useful. This is not good news for them.
If cows were not useful for food, they would be extinct.
Domestication is not something mankind did to animals it is an evolutionary adaptation for survival of the species. So the fact that we eat a lot of cows is the trade of that cows as a species selected in order for the species itself to continue to survive. By choosing to be vegan you are saying that cows are no longer useful. Therefore you are advocating the eventual extinction of cows.
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Scandals like the Vioxx disaster make clear that animals testing is often actively misleading when it comes to determining whether a prescription is helpful for a human taker.
