/lit/ - Literature

>>14106581

To address some of your points:

1. Health and necessity: Human beings eat meat more than they ever did before. With the result being that its killing us slowly. In contrast, provided you do some preliminary research, a vegan diet *is* more healthy. This is because human beings are omnivores, they do not have to have meat, and in fact, they can make do without it just fine.

2. Tradition: Nothing about the modern system of industrialized mass slaughter bares likeness to how hunter-gatherers killed and ate animals 13,000 years ago. I really don't think you can understand the extent of the mechanised perversity of the slaughterhouse, of the breeding process until you have seen documentaries on veganism (If you are interested, google "Dominion" which is, I think, a particularly brutal and revealing, systematic study of the meat industry in Australia - though you may want to find one specific to your country). Besides this fact about the profound disjunction between how people did kill and consume animals and how they kill and consume animals now, I question the very idea that our morality should align with tradition. Really, that anything should align with tradition merely on the basis of its being tradition. Just because we have been doing things doesn't mean we should keep doing things - and in the case of meat eating there are very compelling reasons not to continue.

3. Cost: Veganism is often misunderstood as an overly expensive lifestyle choice affordable only to bourgeoisie hipsters; actually I have found a vegan diet to be much cheaper. I eat curries, bean dishes, stir fries etc. all very cheap and all very healthy. It is worth doing a bit of research, but all you are lacking in some vague knowledge, the kind of knowledge we have picked up around how to balance meat and fish in our diet, but which, because our society is not geared around plant-based eating, we don't have for veganism. This kind of intuition, then, is really all you need.

As for cost in the Third World, I don't think that veganism should be thrust on people who can't afford it, or for whom eating meat is necessary for survival. But for consumers in Westernised societies, or for wealthy citizens of developing countries, the choice is trivially easy, and the comparison is without use.