Memes

Personal growth :)

As a vegan myself, I completely agree! I won't tell others what to eat and they shouldn't tell me what to eat. If I were to ever get "preachy" it's purely about reducing impact on the factors mentioned in the meme and by no means forced... One less meal a week with meat in? Go you! Locally sourcing meat? Hell yeah, less environmental impact!

I use arch btw

Very few will force it on others, though. Anyway, I find it hilarious how people can get riled up about the idea of a person not eating meat or any animal products. I’ve seen it often that they take it personally for some reason and will “compensate by eating extra bacon/steak/chicken”. It’s bonkers.

What do you mean by "forcing" veganism onto others?

Same energy as "I don't hate the gays I just wish they'd stop shoving it in my face"

Yeah, they're always outside the Steakhouse picketing. Running at me constantly with a fork full of green vegetables.

THIS IS A REAL PROBLEM THAT I CONSTANTLY HAVE IN REAL LIFE.

Like you force your lifestyle on animals, by exploiting and killing them?

That being said, they still come out ahead in comparison to animal-based foods due to the fact that you need to grow massive amounts of feed crops to raise other creatures. It turns out that pretty much every environmental metric comes out ahead

Transitioning to plant-based diets (PBDs) has the potential to reduce diet-related land use by 76%, diet-related greenhouse gas emissions by 49%, eutrophication by 49%, and green and blue water use by 21% and 14%, respectively, whilst garnering substantial health co-benefits

[...]

Plant-based foods have a significantly smaller footprint on the environment than animal-based foods. Even the least sustainable vegetables and cereals cause less environmental harm than the lowest impact meat and dairy products [9].

https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/14/8/1614/htm

In terms of workers, the meat industry is arguably worse on that front. It's one of the most dangerous industries anywhere for workers

US meat workers are already three times more likely to suffer serious injury than the average American worker, and pork and beef workers nearly seven times more likely to suffer repetitive strain injuries

[...]

Amputations happen on average twice a week, according to the data

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jul/05/amputations-serious-injuries-us-meat-industry-plant

And there's great risk of PTSD from the workers that you don't see for harvesting crops

There is evidence that slaughterhouse employment is associated with lower levels of psychological well-being. SHWs [slaughterhouse workers] have described suffering from trauma, intense shock, paranoia, anxiety, guilt and shame (Victor & Barnard, 2016), and stress (Kristensen, 1991). There was evidence of higher rates of depression (Emhan et al., 2012; Horton & Lipscomb, 2011; Hutz et al., 2013; Lander et al., 2016; Lipscomb et al., 2007), anxiety (Emhan et al., 2012; Hutz et al., 2013; Leibler et al., 2017), psychosis (Emhan et al., 2012), and feelings of lower self-worth at work (Baran et al., 2016). Of particular note was that the symptomatology appeared to vary by job role. Employees working directly with the animals (e.g., on the kill floor or handling the carcasses) were those who showed the highest prevalence rates of aggression, anxiety, and depression (Hutz et al., 2013; Richards et al., 2013). https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/15248380211030243

Almonds are a big one that I know of. The vast majority of the world's almonds are grown in California, a state that has been facing severe drought for years now (though maybe not so much this year), but somehow still finds hundreds of billions of gallons of water yearly to keep almond farms irrigated.

And eating almonds is one thing, but processing them into milk is an order of magnitude more wasteful. It takes about 400 almonds to make a half gallon of almond milk, and each one of those almonds requires a gallon of water to produce. So that's 400 gallons of water spent to produce a half gallon of almond milk. A single almond tree can make about 30 gallons of almond milk per harvest, so we're looking at 24,000 gallons of water consumed per tree, which yields a full shelf of Almond Breeze at a single grocery store.

And as farms keep expanding and conditions become drier and drier over time, it's going to destroy the ecosystems of the state. And all so that people can have a decent milk alternative to have with their morning coffee and cereal.