If I had a nickel for every LotR Vegan/Vegetarian meme I’ve seen I’d have two nickels. Which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice.
Transcipt
Uruk-Hai Orc labelled “vegans”, holding chickens: “They are not for eating!”
Mordor Orc labelled “vegetarians”: “What about their eggs? They don’t need those!”
Rennet makes this a much more complicated decision for vegetarians. Like, if I know that the cheese was made with bacteria-derived enzymes, then that’s cool, but it’s really hard to know and trusting random cheese is just like still eating beef sometimes, so even though I’m vegetarian I end up being so picky about cheese that I hardly eat it anyway.
I had to look up what that is.
If it’s any help, according to wiki 90% of cheese is made with artificial enzymes, because it’s cheaper.
It depends a bit om where you are and what kind of cheese. For instance in the EU, Parmigiano Reggiano always has calf rennet, otherwise it’s not allowed to have that name. Nowadays a lot of cheeses in the Netherlands do specify it on the ingredients list though.
Spoiler: milk cows get murdered as well. A milk cow is productive for about 5 years, after which they usually get slaughtered for pet food. In that time, they need to have about 3 calves, to continue producing “good returns” amount of milk daily. Two of those calves are not needed to replace the cow, so they get - guess what? - slaughtered and processed to pet food.
Stupid me grew up next to a milk farm and didn’t realize that until way later than I care to admit.
Also, I still eat cheese (reduced amounts) and that’s a moral dilemma for me.
That ethical problem could be solved (well, not if you are “fully” vegan, and view even keeping pets and livestock, unacceptable), by doing good small-scale production. Factory farming producing the inhuman conditions, is needed to make the operations economically sustainable, in the way it is build into capitalist systems. But if you would keep the cows well, milk products could be made quite ethically… Now of course the costs needed to do that would make milk extremely expensive, and small-scale could not replace the massive demand, so people would have to consume way less anyway.
But if you would keep the cows well, milk products could be made quite ethically…
Could be - but that would also mean taking milk away from the calves for a while. Not sure how much milk a cow would be able to continue to give and what the quality would be after the calf has had enough to outgrow infancy.
Now eggs however, those could be absolutely produced without animal suffering. Just be willing to pay more for the eggs so that hens can live free range in natural environments, and still get to continue living when they produce less or even no more eggs until they die from natural causes.
I don’t see a big ethical problem with snatching an unfertilised egg, considering that hens are able to lay like one egg a day. They won’t miss it if you take away a bunch of them and let them breed out the odd one.
Could be - but that would also mean taking milk away from the calves for a while. Not sure how much milk a cow would be able to continue to give and what the quality would be after the calf has had enough to outgrow infancy.
This is doable, especially with the cows, that have been bred to produce milk. You do not even need to separate the mom and calf, for more than a moment, to milk, so we do know it is possible. You just get less milk, than by taking the calf away, so it is not profitable in comparison. There are other problems though, like they should be able to feed mostly by pasture grazing, which takes a lot of land, and if you do not kill some of the cows and bulls for food, you will have way too many… etc.
And with eggs - yes. The EU standards for “bio” eggs are already better (very far from perfect though), so it might be possible to do profitably even. A big ethical problem with factory farming chickens right now, though, is the process of mass producing the egg-laying chickens themselves. Hens are kept, but the male chicks might be just thrown into a shredder. Even if all of them were raised, a lot of the cocks would have to be killed, since there would be carnage otherwise, as you cannot keep them together, and you have to have multiple hens more than cocks in a flock. This also applies if you keep chickens in your backyard, so there are always excess cocks being given away, that nobody wants, and many end up as food.
Poor roosters. I believe the best solution for that would be the “in ovo” gender detection. One article here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S003257912300425X - in an ethical egg production scenario, the quoted machine learning could actually be viable: the false positive roosters are simply lucky, and get raised to adulthood / live a happy life ;) If the reason for false positives is not self-enforcing through genetics, they could even be the normal “fathers of the next generation”.
Assuming, of course, the false positive rate can be lowered enough.
Re: milk - I have to say, for drinking, if you find a good brand, oat milk can be very tasty - I personally even think it tastes better in coffee / cappuccino than regular milk. And cheese - I just happen to have bought this hour for the first time a delicious vegan “Brie” variant: https://vanozza.de/en/produkte.html#brie-pfeffer I am positively surprised, after the last couple of tries I no longer thought I would see the day - but this one is actually yummy!
For oat milk: tastewise best is Oatly Barista, but Oatly is in bed with investors from fascistan, so I go for the second best option which is also delicious: Lidl house brand vemondo, barista drink. Important: it must be the one produced by Grønvang (https://gronvang.dk/?lang=en) - the one by Green & White from Vlissingen/NL tastes bland / watery in comparison.
Oh, I hope they make breakthroughs with the “in ovo” system, that sounds really promising.
And good tips for the oat milks and cheese! I usually just buy one cheap store brand, that is made here in Finland, since I like the really bland taste of it, lol. The least chemically tasting I have found! I also have one vegan cheese I like, but it too, is sold only locally…
I am aware and I do make every effort to reduce and remove dairy (and eggs) from my diet, but I recognize that I fall short of what I would consider vegan. Like if I’m at a party and am offered cake I’m probably going to eat it even though there’s probably egg in it, but I’m not going to order an egg-based dish, same with dairy if we’re having pizza or something. As I get older I’m increasingly lactose intolerant anyway, so I have additional incentive to avoid it.
The important thing is that you make a conscious effort to improve. I am the same. I eat cheese and occasionally eggs - rarely even meat, but I try to overall consume very little animal products.
Absolutely. For me it’s all about harm reduction so as long as I am trying to improve, I can still fall short sometimes without having a crisis of conscience.
Listen, I’m going to cast it into the fire, sure.
But then it’s going to get all goopy and crispy and I’m going to pull it back out again to eat it.
Fun fact, cheese is not always vegetarian. It can (quite often) contain animal rennet (from the inside of a young cow stomage, the cow needs to die for this)
Unless, of course, we’re talking about the German Leberkäse (liver cheese), which, naturally, isn’t cheese and doesn’t contain liver.
Usage of animal rennet requires disclosure on the packaging, in my country, thanks to a majority of religions being against meat and stuff.
I would really like to be the case more often. I’m a cheese eating vegetarian and I have to look on the ingredients every time I buy cheese. Some brands will even switch from animal to microbial rennet and viceversa within the same product without warning.
i think most of the industry uses synthetic remnet.
I think many French protected cheeses are not allowed to, but I’m not sure about that
As a person who check all cheese in the supermarket for this. The current state (EU/NL) is almost 60%, 60% of the cheese in our supermarket is without murdering baby cows. Which I up from last year, and it has been trending up for a while.
I have no clue how other countries are doing, my guess us worse. Some france people still label ‘Fish’ as ‘Vegan’
That number moves much closer to 0% if you start counting the baby cows killed in order to keep their mothers perpetually lactating, rather than just those whose bodies were used as a direct ingredient.
A cow will be impregnated 6-8 times during her life on a typical dairy farm, before she is killed af half her natural lifespan to be replaced by a younger cow. One of those baby cows will be raised as that replacement cow, the rest will be killed shortly after birth.
Killing baby cows is an inherent part of cow-milk production.
a dairy cows life span is like 5 years
ours were closer to twelve but go off the documentary you watched once
you are correct all of our cattle were born seven years old
A cows natural life span is 20ish years. They’re kept perpetually pregnant for years until their bodies give out, then they’re slaughtered at around 5 years old.
cows don’t naturally live to 20 years. they can live that long if they are well fed and watered and protected from disease, predators, and the environment. that’s an artificial life span.
most dairy calves are brought to full weight before slaughter.
It’s highly market-senstive what happens to them, but I have previously worked on dairy farms in NZ and AU, and in both countries, calves(except replacement heifers) that get raised at all are a rounding error, maybe a handful per farm that are kept for personal slaughter and consumption.
If the bobby-calf (aka veal) market is paying well enough, then they are shipped off for slaughter at ~4 days old. If the market doesnt pay well enough to justify 4 days of rearing costs, then they are killed immediately and sold for their skins.
a man who has never eaten veal.
hardly any dairy calves end up as veal.
the math
https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/DataFiles/48685/milkcowsandprod.xlsx?v=1413.4
thousands_of_head_of_cows = 9448.0 actual_cows = 1000 * thousands_of_head_of_cows annual_male_calves = .5 * actual_cows veal_weight_of_calves_in_pounds = 260 annual_veal_production_in_millions_of_pounds = 58 annual_percentage_of_bobby_calves_that_become_veal = ((annual_veal_production_in_millions_of_pounds * 1000000) / (veal_weight_of_calves_in_pounds * annual_male_calves))*100 print(annual_percentage_of_bobby_calves_that_become_veal)4.722204129486094
That would be huge news if true but it doesn’t sound like you have a source
What fresh hell is this?
I cut way back on cheese because of the salt, also it’s expensive and high in calories. I could easily go through a large block (or even two--8000 calories!) of sharp cheddar in a week, and that was too much.
This is why I gave up red meat, and processed meat:
https://health.clevelandclinic.org/is-red-meat-bad-for-you
Here’s something you may not realize: The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) classifies red meat as a Group 2A carcinogen, which is described as “probably carcinogenic to humans.” Carcinogens are substances with cancer-causing potential.
A review of studies on the relationship between red meat and cancer found that eating high levels of red meat is associated with a higher risk of:
Breast cancer
Colorectal cancer
Uterine cancer
Hepatocellular carcinoma
Lung cancerThat’s not all: Processed meats are categorized as level 1 carcinogens. This puts them in the same category as cigarettes and asbestos and means they’re known to increase your risk of cancer.
Whats the difference between vegans and vegetarians?
Dairy and eggs. Aka animal products that don’t involve flesh.
…unless you’re Catholic in which case you make up bullshit to spread your religion and call beavers and fish vegetarian for…reasons.
I know you don’t care but the fish thing has to do w symbolism not ethical constraint. Just fyi
one is a diet, the other is a religion.
Kekw
I looked it up on urban dictionary and I still don’t understand what the fuck you mean.
This means Kekw.
laughng?
Dairy is the most challenging thing to give up. There are good alternatives - particularly when they’re made of nuts and seeds that have been fermented traditionally - but they’re good in their own way, don’t expect them to be the same.
The stuff made out of almost pure coconut oil is universally disappointing, and coconut is arguably not vegan given the environmental footprint and resulting animal endangerment.
I’m lactose intolerant and even for lil old vegan me is difficult to avoid the seductive siren song of cheese.
From my experience, there is no good Vegan cheese. Daiyo cheese is awful.
I mean, Daiyo is an example of the artificial-basically-mostly-coconut-oil cheeze I mentioned previously. Most stuff that you can find in the average grocery store is going to suck. Have you tried anything along the lines of, say, this almost award-winning plant-based cheese? Stuff like that is way better, but again, unique. Don’t expect it to be the same, although things may be changing soon since people have figured out how to get one of the key dairy proteins from non-animal sources.
There’s also homemade stuff, which varies. It’s pretty easy to make super creamy mac and cheese with plant-based sources only, for instance.
One of my close friends went vegan right around the pandemic beginning, when everything first started shutting down. Our local bar shut down the day of St Patrick’s day so we invited him over to our place instead for shitty beer with green food dye (it was 3 of us total and we worked in close proximity daily, AND we were very pro-mask)
He used it as an opportunity to introduce us to a vegan version of the cheesy spinach and artichoke dip from like Applebees/Chilis/insert old people restaurant here, but it was made with cashews.
It took him an hour but OH MY LAWD my husband and I still talk about that dip to this day as non-vegans. Better than anything we’ve ordered at a restaurant. We tell everyone about that shit.
Damn that sounds tasty. People hate plant-based food, until they try good plant-based food.
I’ve had some good vegan cheese, and I’ve had bad real cheese, but only one of them cost 3.50 for a pound
Something is better than nothing. “I could never be a vegetarian/vegan because of bacon” “Ok, then eat vegetarian AND also eat bacon then?”
flexitarian is the way to go first: my understanding is thats its more controlled, not everyday (maybe even only to special occations) eating of meat
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Someone who cuts most meat out of their diet is closer to a vegetarian than they are to the average diet. But saying they are vegetarian most of the time is going to upset a lot of people.
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See, this is why the label exists, so we can say “I decided to cut my meat eating down to ecologically sustainable levels and support animal cruelty as little as possible while acknowledging that it’s a hard, nearly impossible thing to do on a budget to go even fully vegetarian, much less the reality that there’s so many many things going wrong in the world and not everyone can care about everything,” only with one word because the vegan dorks will cry about you being vegetarian too anyways.
if I dont have a label and a flag how can I tell everyone all aspects of myself as the main character in life?
my understanding is thats its more controlled, not everyday (maybe even only to special occations) eating of meat
IS IT???
I thought flexitarian was someone who can perform very flexible oral sex. 🤯
No, I think that is a yoga cunnilingist or a pilates fellator.
Flexual intercourse?
🎵 When I get that feeling, I need flexual healing🎵
Right? Anything is better then nothing
I feel like this creates some sort of hostility between two groups which usually head into the same direction and respect each other
You vegans sure a contentious people.
You just made an enemy for life!
Then there’s me, a pesce-pollotarian. Because not everywhere has fish.
No unity. No strength. No true scotsman.
Fight, fuckos, Fight!
As with politics, purity culture leads to being ineffective.
Coalitions are important if you want to get anything done.
I feel like it’s just a silly joke.
I’ve never tried to convince anyone to take up veganism. Instead I avoid bringing it up at all cost because people get weird about it.
Could always source ethical human milk…and other cheeses.
ethical human milk
Imagining this overlayed on a man with a big smile on his face.
My Hu-cow sub consents.
If you’re a vegan do this and partake in society, you are brain rotted.
That’s almost a real sentence
Can you translate?
I must be genetically predisposed to veganism because I genuinely don’t like cheese or bacon very much.
Still really like lamb and chicken though, so 🤷
Cast it into the fire! Grill it!
Great, now I want halloumi…
When I first saw this meme, I was a vegan… Now I’m a vegetarian
