Seen a lot of posts on Lemmy with vegan-adjacent sentiments but the comments are typically very critical of vegan ideas, even when they don’t come from vegans themselves. Why is this topic in particular so polarising on the internet? Especially since unlike politics for example, it seems like people don’t really get upset by it IRL
If you accept that there are moral/ethical problems with eating meat (contribution to climate change, health concerns, animals being killed and eaten, whatever), and choose to eat meat anyway, and encounter a vegan, what has to happen?
You can accept that they are making a better choice, but then you have to accept that you’re making a worse choice. Most people are cowards and protect the ego at any cost. Rather than shrugging and saying “yeah, i should eat less meat. Good for you taking the high road”, which requires accepting that you’re not being the best, you can instead grab onto any reasons why no it’s really them that sucks. That’s easier, more comfortable, and doesn’t require any painful introspection or changes.
It’s the same mechanism when people get mad at cyclists, pedestrians, people who go to the gym, people who don’t shop at Walmart, whatever. They’re doing something that makes you feel bad in comparison. Most people are terrible at that and will lash out instead of doing anything productive.
Alternatively, or maybe additionally, people are really tribal, and once they adopt the idea that vegans (or cyclists, or people driving small cars, or people wearing sandals, whatever) are in the outgroup, then they enjoy being hostile to them.
People are ego driven emotional morons. All of us. Me, too. It’s terrible.
I’ve been a vegetarian for 15 years. People IRL often do get offended if you tell them you don’t eat meat. I try my best to avoid saying it because it often leads to being lectured about proteins. Everyone suddenly becomes a nutritionist when you explain why you don’t eat meat.
Yeah. I try not to mention it to people if I can avoid it. I work construction and am surrounded by manly men tring to out man each other. I had one guy offer me bear jerkey and got bent out of shape when I declined. He wouldn’t stop. He just kept on me about why I didn’t eat meat. After about an hour of him asking again and again why I don’t eat meat I said “meat’s another word for dick and eating dick is gay”. As problematic as it was, it worked.
It never cases to amaze me that a 250pound dude with a 40oz soda in one hand and a mouthfull of gas station pizza thinks he has the responsibility to lecture me about nutrition.
“meat’s another word for dick and eating dick is gay”. As problematic as it was, it worked.
It’s both sad and hillarious that this worked. I wonder if you created a new vegetarian as well
Probably not but I like to think it’s created a feedback loop going on in his head endlessly. “Meat is manly. Meat is dick.'”
We need to take the small victories
My dad always acts like i’m close to dying because i’m vegan. I work out every day, he eats meat 3 times a day and even his vegetables are unhealthy as fuck. He’s so overweight that getting into his car is super exhausting. Pretty weird if someone like that gives you tips on how to eat right.
Why do they believe you only find protein in meat?
Lots of people are really stupid
And we’ve been (forgive the pun) fed propaganda by the industrial farming and food industry for generations, not to mention the religious right.
You are not wrong. I am vegetarian for about 15 years and I’ve literally have had a father of a friend yell at me. He was telling vegetarians aren’t real and if anybody would actually not eat meat for a couple of months they would die because they would be missing vital nutrients only found in meat. He was yelling at me to stop telling lies and be truthful.
The things he’s eating often didn’t eat any meat. Hehe.
Generations of marketing.
Some essential amino acids are difficult to find in adequate quantities on a vegan diet. If you don’t vary your protein sources or make sure you are getting the right amino acids, then you may develop a deficiency, which can lead to poor health or even be fatal.
I have read that this is largely a myth based on a book from the 70s, and that while there are varying proportions of amino acids in different vegan protein sources, there is still enough of each so that you could easily get everything you need.
I read this in a book years ago that I don’t remember the name of, but found a source instantly
Ya, it’s probably more correct to say any concerns are overstated. And I probably didn’t help by saying “difficult”. It’s not difficult, just not as simple as eating any meat. And like I mentioned, as long as you’re varying your protein sources, you will be fine.
I’m not saying you’re incorrect. But I want to point out that many people who concern troll about how difficult vegan diets are to be healthy on are also people who don’t question how unhealthy their current choices are when it comes to consuming soda, energy drinks, red meat, other snacks, etc. Some people do, but most people who ask me about nutrition are not people who count their own calories or try to balance all their meals. It’s just as easy to be unhealthy as a non-vegan.
I know plenty of vegans and they’re all healthier than average. I don’t know any who have had issues with nutrition.
As a life-long vegetarian, this has been my experience as well.
I’m what I call “mostly vegetarian“ which means that I choose to not have meat, but will eat small portions on occasion. And boy does that just piss off people like no other. Worse is I get it from both sides, to either commit in full or just give in to my natural instincts and consume more red meat.
Sometimes I just want a salad. Sometimes I want some bacon crumbles on that salad. Sometimes I want 3oz of fish with a plate of veggies. But what I can tell you is 3/4 of my plate will have healthy veggies or fruit.
Just tell them you have alpha-gal, then they’ll leave you alone easier
I did get offended when, after a very successful date, I went to a shawarma place with her and we both had a super awesome shawarma with lots of meat. For the next date I made some pizza rolls with salami and she confessed that she actually doesn’t eat meat.
I still tease her about that when I meet her nowadays.
Same works in reverse, far more often than you think.
I’ve never once in the last decade seen a single vegan post other than recipes. What I do see is constant posts about how “vegans are always throwing it my face/holier than thou”, “I’m gonna eat extra meat because vegans make me feel bad”. I really don’t think vegans are the problem, I think these fools fall for every single piece of beef industry propaganda that comes across their screens.
From what I have seen, it more stems from the activism vegans are engaged in more than the actual veganism.
I think there’s nothing wrong with explaining your ideas and why you believe them to those willing to listen, but I can see why pushy activism for any cause can get annoying quickly. There are often Jehovah’s witnesses outside my local supermarket, for example, but they only give you a pamphlet if you specifically approach them
It’s not just pushy, it’s judgemental and vitriolic
Oh, you eat meat, murderer? Your shoes are made from the skins of defenseless creatures. The sugar you’re so callously adding to your coffee was processed with ground-up bones, you unredeemable monster.
Even the arguments for veganism that aren’t built on animal cruelty still take on an air of moral superiority. Don’t you care about the planet and future generations? How dare you trade carbon emissions for the temporary comfort of a bacon cheeseburger!
The vegan movement has always been associated with anger and contempt, even if it is justified.
In my experience it’s usually more like: Them: here have some of this meat thing Me: No thanks Them: why not it’s really good try some Me: i don’t eat meat Them: but why? Me: to reduce animal cruelty and environmental harm Them: wow how dare you be so judgy
I’m not really sure how I’m supposed to not offend this type of person in this situation and frankly I don’t think it’s my fault or my problem they’re offended. My theory is that that agree with my reasons but rather than change or live with the cognitive dissonance they just lash out at anyone that reminds them they could be living more ethically even if they basically MAKE them say it.
Blaming vegans for that is bullshit, frankly
That isn’t the type of behavior that I think most find annoying but I’m sorry that you get that reaction at all.
I think many people are so annoyed with feeling they are attacked for eating meat (and I do eat meat) that when that button gets pressed the anger just rises up.
For me I get a little true guilt. I know I’m not helping in the best possible ways that I can, all the time. I’m not perfect and won’t ever pretend that I am, and I also haven’t given up on getting better. When I go a day without eating meat, I congratulate myself. With a burger. (No, not really.)
Some people see “to reduce animal cruelty” as judgy because that’s just how nature is. The moral superiority comes from you acting like you’re somehow above everyone and everything else. It’s entirely in your wording and the implications that if you eat meat, you enjoy animal suffering vs seeing it as a natural outcome of nature.
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This is completely besides the point, but I personally view factory farming as different than what happens in nature.
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This is also beside the point, but you are making some wild logical leaps here. The fact that I personally don’t want to support factory farming because I think it is cruel in no way means that I think other people “enjoy animal suffering” and assuming that is arbitrarily assigning thoughts I have never had to me.
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None of the above is really relevant because I should be allowed to go about my day without justifying my dietary choices just as people that eat meat should.
Look, you don’t deserve the treatment you’ve described. Everyone here agrees with you on that.
The person you were replying to was trying to explain why what you said might be interpreted as judgemental, even if that’s not how you meant it (and we all believe you, even if the people you’re talking about don’t).
I think the last line sums it up. You don’t eat meat, and that’s the only explanation you owe anyone.
However, I know that when I’m providing a meal and I learn someone doesn’t eat meat, I always ask follow up questions because maybe I cooked the 1rice with chicken stock, or maybe the vegetables were sauteed in butter. If it is a moral choice, I would appreciate a heads up so I can prepare a meal everyone can enjoy. I’m not irritated by the request, because that’s the whole reason why you cook food for friends. If it’s a healthy choice, you might still eat some of the brown rice, or maybe I sub oil for butter. Those are changes I can make on the fly.
I know I’ve probably unintentionally offended some vegans by probing for more answers. And I’ve met some vegans who are every bit as judgemental as you’ve been assumed to be. We could all do a little bit better at understanding each other.
I’d not see it as judgemental, just trying to inform. These days meatcis just a commodity, completely disasociated from the animals it comes from and without second thougt on how those animals are treated. If I go into detail like this, it’s really just to get the info out there in a casual way. The person in question might ignore it, or may think about it. I also needed nudges like this to realize the moral issue and I’m happy for every one of them. I don’t really go into detail much, and rarely inform someone about my preferences. But will answer truthfuly when asked
If someone chooses to ignore ot just not see the suffering behind eating meat in this day and age, it is frustrating though to say the least. Especially if simply reducing the meat intake and being more selective about the source of the meat comes a long way. But I get why it is so tough, as I’m not a saint myself and while I reduce meat most of the time, I still have some occasionally even if I feel bad about it.
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There’s also the ‘guilt by association’. Look at organisations like PETA: they even complained about things like the treatment of entirely fictional animals in video games, like Palworld. Basically, you can’t even argue that ‘they look like real animals so it encourages real-world mistreatment’ like they usually do.
That does not make you look particularly sane. I’m sure they do good work as well, but that sort of thing isn’t helping their cause.
Saying PETA is representative of vegans is rather like using Antifa as an example of liberals, or Info Wars for conservatives.
Which is exactly what everyone does. At least in the US. And every side is equally wrong about it.
The loudest voices always draw the most attention. And I don’t know any other vegan voice that’s as loud as PETA’s. That’s kind of the problem.
PETA might do something good by accident. They kill 60-70% of the pets they receive for donation, so I guess the lucky 1/3 that don’t get the ax are a good thing.
In my experience, your first sentence sums it up nicely.
They assume a moral high ground because they’ve adopted a diet that is generally deemed healthier and better for the environment (I don’t always agree with this).
But unless they’re also doing all the things we could all do better (e.g. not buying new, not upgrading the the latest and greatest, not taking 40 minute showers, not eating out every second day), they’re only somewhat less guilty of environmental damage than the average person, but they’re taking a generally undeserved “holier than thou” position and then shoving it down your throat. This isn’t everyone, and I don’t really care what you eat, but these are the vegans that get under my skin.
Eh, I can see it both ways. Like, nobody is, or can be, perfect. That doesn’t mean they don’t have a valid moral argument for the good choices they make. They’re trying to be a better person, and I think it’s fair to help other people recognize the poor decisions they are making. Climate change especially affects all of us.
On the other hand, you’re 100% correct. Nobody can lay exclusive claim to the high ground, so anybody acting superior is probably an asshole.
If I tell you that I bike to work, walk to the grocery store, buy most of my products used, and don’t have an Amazon account, will you listen to me?
It would be someone being less of a hypocrite so you would not be seen as as annoying as the other option
PETA was giving away free coloring books one time so I decided to order some for my kids thinking it would be good for them to hear from all sides.
One of the pictures was three people standing over a turkey dinner with the most horrific caricatures you can think of absolutely salivating over how juicy the turkey was going to be.
I shit you not.
I had to trash the sons of bitches.
Really killed that group for me, I always that people were exaggerating about them and how bad they are.
They killed that little piece of me.
I will go and shoot the next dog I see. You won’t judge me for that, right?
Yes, good example. It is precisely that sort of judgemental strawman bullshit that gives vegans a bad rep.
And it’s history stems from religious ideology.
Edit: oh you downvoters. Go look it up. A woman had a vision from God that said “don’t eat things with faces”. Dead serious - that’s where it started.
All the sciencey justifications today are post-hoc rationalization.
The current vegan movement has nothing to do with religion, except at the individual level. You’re conflating being vegan for religious reasons with being one for secular moral reasons. Modern vegans came from a split in vegetarian activist groups because too many vegetarians weren’t willing to criticize the dairy industry and its practices.
Well said.
think there’s nothing wrong with explaining your ideas and why you believe them
That’s actually not the problem. The problem are those who repeat themselves ever louder, even to people who have expressed disinterest.
The UK has a high rate of veganism, and part of that is attributed to the fact that the major vegetarian and vegan organisations in the UK generally recommend persuading people by offering them delicious food that is also vegetarian/vegan and saying it’s more ethical. On the other hand, the equivalent organisations in the US tend to lean more towards recommending telling people that eating animal products is unethical, and it’s difficult to accuse someone of unethical behaviour without being insulting. It also doesn’t help that multibillion-dollar organisations have run successful smear campaigns against groups like PETA - everyone’s heard of the time they took someone’s pet dog and killed it, but most aren’t aware that it happened once and gets reported on as if it’s news every few months, or that it was an accident as the dog’s collar had come off and it was with a group of strays, and got muddled with another dog, so was put down weeks earlier than it was supposed to be, bypassing the waiting period they had specifically to avoid this kind of mistake.
PETA has a lot more fucked up behavior under its belt than the one time they “accidentally” euthanized a dog they stole from someone, and much of their bad behavior has been very much maliciously intentional. Here just a small sample.
ETA: A few more, because why the hell not? Fuck PETA.
- https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/03/petas-terrible-horrible-no-good-very-bad-history-of-killing-animals/254130/
- https://www.boredpanda.com/anti-peta-hate-rant-dear-tumb1r/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=organic
- https://speakingofresearch.com/2013/02/08/a-lesson-in-hypocrisy-as-peta-cries-foul-over-one-cats-death-while-secretly-killing-hundreds-more/
- https://www.foxnews.com/us/peta-shelter-was-a-slaughterhouse-group-claims
- https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/peta-taking-pets/
- https://petakillsanimals.com/
It doesn’t strengthen your point to link Fox News and the literal website for the smear campaign I mentioned: https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=PETA_Kills_Animals
As for PETA putting down lots of animals, that’s no secret. It’s really easy to get people to donate to a no-kill animal shelter, so there are lots of them. However, when you’re a no-kill animal shelter, and you’re full of animals you can’t kill, or are asked to take an animal that can’t be ethically be treated with anything other than euthanasia, you have to turn the animal down, and it ends up wherever will take it. Usually, that ends up being a PETA-run shelter. When a PETA-run shelter is being given all the rejects from everywhere else, it’s obviously going to end up putting lots of animals down. It’d be better for PR if they didn’t, but less ethical, and they prioritise the ethics above the PR.
If you look at one of your more reliable sources, the Snopes article, it backs up what I’m saying, and not what you’re saying. It corroborates the story from my original post, lists another incident where PETA staff were accused but not convicted, and then discusses that they put down a lot of animals in their shelters, and how it includes healthy animals. The only controversy there is the definition of adoptable - a healthy stray kitten is theoretically adoptable, but if you get ten times as many kittens in a week as you do people wanting to adopt a kitten, 90% of them won’t get adopted, and your shelter will get quickly overcrowded if you insist on ignoring that fact.
I’m no fan of Fox News in general myself, but just because we don’t like them doesn’t make everything they publish false. And yeah, the PETA kills site clearly has an agenda, but their agenda is to try and save animals from PETA’s “love.” There’s sensationalism on that site, but there are also numbers, many of which come from PETA themselves.
I linked the Snopes article knowing that it supported points from both sides. The point in linking that article is that it’s despicable that any of those reports of PETA’s disgusting behavior are true at all.
You know what no-kill shelters try to do when they don’t have space? Coordinate with local foster programs, coordinate with other shelters to see if they have space. There are other alternatives besides taking in a perfectly healthy animal and dropping it in the euthanasia queue.
I’m quite sure there are quite a few things PETA has been accused but not convicted of. When you’re a group of assholes as big as that, you get pretty good at skirting the fine lines of what’s legal and what’s not. They’re hardly the first example of groups like that.
And yeah, the PETA kills site clearly has an agenda, but their agenda is to try and save animals from PETA’s “love.”
Their agenda’s to make PETA look bad so people don’t become vegan or demand higher welfare standards from meat producers, and they can continue selling meat to Americans of such low standards that it would be illegal in the rest of the civilised world.
You know what no-kill shelters try to do when they don’t have space? Coordinate with local foster programs, coordinate with other shelters to see if they have space. There are other alternatives besides taking in a perfectly healthy animal and dropping it in the euthanasia queue.
As I said, they can’t do that once the foster programs and other shelters are full, too, and then overflow into PETA-run shelters because they’re the ones that still have a capability to receive more animals after they’re full. There aren’t enough shelters to keep every animal in good conditions until it’s either adopted or dies of natural causes, and no amount of coordination can magically create extra capacity.
I’m sure PETA shelters would have more capacity if they didn’t prefer to see an animal dead than a pet. They have significantly higher kill rates than any other shelters, and have made their stance pretty clear that they’re against animals being pets. No wonder they just keep killing them.
Check my comment history about 3 posts back to see my interaction with peta
Have you heard about our lord and saviour of our sins?
Because of the trope that vegans are pretentious twats that publicly chastise anyone not vegan.
Like most things it’s one of those situations that’s blown out of proportion and the vast majority of us will never interact with a preachy vegan. I’ve encountered many vegans in the wild and they’ve most all been decent people, and I love picking their brains for decent vegan or vegetarian foods. I don’t mind vegan/vegetarianism, it’s just not easy to do well, so it helps to talk to people who do it for real. That said, I have encountered a few that are on the preachy side, but whatever. They’re no different than the tool who has the “eat tasty animals” bumper sticker and the like.
The same reason people hate leftists, feminists, trans athletes, “gamer girls”, people on welfare, blacks, etc. An image the right cultivated of the group, out of convenient easily-hateable annoying people in it that they could use to create a generalization/stereotype out of. It’s something that’s able to happen to any group, I could portray any hobbyist or activist in this way the same exact way as these “annoying” groups are portrayed, but the right is particularly willing to just flat out lie, slander, and cheat their way into making countercultural/anti-status-quo groups look as absurd as possible, to the point that the majority of the population falls for it (even those that don’t consider themselves to be conservative).
I’ll make a comparison. Conservative/“anti-sjw” thumbnails often have a picture of some angry-looking rainbow haired woman, usually the same few, in order to be like “look how irrational and crazy these feminazis are, she must hate men so much” and like 4 out of 5 of those times it’s a picture of a woman that was protesting a literal neo-nazi gathering or something, not some sort of radical crazy man-hating feminist. But the internet has conditioned the average person to look at someone like that and immediately think they’re an irrational “feminazi”, and conservatives showing these pictures everywhere and making 100 videos on the same person makes people subconsciously believe they’re rampant and have a massive (and bad) grip on society.
Same kind of thing happens with vegans, you have the same 10 or so internet vegans people use to portray veganism that conditions people to think poorly of the concept “vegan”, and when these influencers are confronted about it they say “I don’t hate veganism, I just hate the annoying vegans” then they go onto Twitter to complain about the vegans and how they’re irrational for not eating meat and their brains must be de-evolving or something. They know what they’re doing, but they can hide behind plausible deniability, and the majority of viewers fall for it.
The meat and dairy industries have been pumping out propaganda for years, mostly aimed at right-wing dudes. It’s just kind of part of right-wing culture at this point to kneejerk react to veganism with tired old tropes and stereotypes.
It was worse back in the 90s and early 2000s.
Do-gooder derogation Basically, some people perceive others’ moral choices as criticism or as some kind of bragging.
Because I sat at a table for an hour with a work colleague lecturing me on veganism. I couldn’t care less if you don’t lecture me.
Holier than thou attitude from new vegans whose world view changed overnight and cognitive dissonance on the part of non vegan with the need to deflect than to make substantial changes.
My personal experience has actually been quite whew opposite of everyone here apparently. Of the 3 vegans I’ve spent time with, not one of them has ever brought it up to preach or to sound smug. It only ever comes up because I ask for a recipe they served and they say something along the lines of “now, this is a vegan recipe, but you should be able to substitute ‘x’ with ‘y’ if you wanna avoid that.” It’s never preachy, it’s always in the “don’t let this being vegan ruin it for you” kind of way.
My low stakes conspiracy is that vegan hate on the internet is like people that don’t like the word moist. They either watched friends and decided to adopt that as a personality trait, or they look up to someone that did just that. They hate veganism because they watched a comedian quip about it and agreed or they saw someone that watched a comedian and agreed. It’s all too consistent to not be feeding from the same bowl.
Yeah. I think 90% of these guys complaining about militant vegans have never actually come across one. But have heard sotries about them from other people or the news and just assimilated that as part of their own experience. Much in the same way racists here stories about how bad immigrrants are from newpapers and use that to form their opinions.
I’ve not had this experience with vegans because I don’t really know many people who are vegan, but I always find it funny when a vegetarian says something like “you could add chicken or beef if you wanted” when the whole point of asking for the recipe is that you liked it enough to try to make it again… It’s kind of adorable and sweet.
Yeah I find it delightful, it’s inspired me to make vegan, gluten, free, and allergen free variations of all my recipes incase someone ever needs them.
My ex was vegan. While I have absolutely no problem with the practice of being vegan, she would critique and criticize nearly everything I ate. It was extremely exhausting. Nothing against vegans personally however some of them won’t shut up about it and try to make you feel bad
This is so frustrating. People saying “Oh I just don’t like those self-righteous vegans”. Thing is, it doesn’t really matter what vegans say or how reasonable/logically sound it is, the knee-jerk reaction is always the same.
Because the experience of the loud-mouth preacher vegan has become the stereotype of that movement. It might be frustrating for the rest, but it even more frustrating for the recipients of this preaching.
Thanks for the example of exactly what I mean.
If you’d like to break the stereotype of insufferable vegans, you might consider starting that process by not being one.
And another example.
I don’t hate people who are vegans.
I do hate the person who righteously yelled at me about eating meat while I was eating her vegan food at her house which she invited me to. And then proceeded to send me Facebook farm videos that were obviously staged. I worked on a farm… so when I corrected her what actually does happen on a farm Vs what these idiots were staging to get reactions, it was even more disgusting to me that she wasn’t doing any of this for the animals as she claimed but doing it so she could feel important. So she can fuck right off up a mountain.
So no:I don’t hate people who are vegans. I hate self involved, insincere shitheads.
That said yeah, we need to address commercial farming. It’s an issue. We need to cut down the meat products that are getting produced and stop creating diets that get capitalists richer. But also we need to be honest with what is actually happening. No, they do not give hormones to animals on farms. That practice was discontinued prior to the 1990s. We need to out assholes who spread this bullshit online, dampening the real issues as to why introducing more plant based food is necessary. We also have to keep plant based food healthy and not just inject it with sugar ,salt and fat creating the same health issues we had with consuming commercialized meat.
Also I think this is why vegan is a ruined word and why ‘plant-based’ is now becoming a substitute. To replace this damage that many of the self called vegans did that were just as much lying and cheating as the industry they so much hate. two wrongs do not make a right. So I’m all about the pivot away from that dumpster fire
People don’t like to be made to feel uncomfortable (via knowledge) about something that they enjoy
