Tesco, One of the World's Largest Supermarket Operators, Sets 300% Sales Target For Plant-Based Alternatives To Meat (theguardian.com) 126
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Tesco is to become the first UK retailer to set a sales target for plant-based alternatives to meat as it steps up efforts to offer shoppers more sustainable options. The UK's largest supermarket will on Tuesday commit to boosting sales of meat alternatives by 300% within five years, by 2025. Over the past year, demand for chilled meat-free foods -- the most popular line including burger, sausage and mince substitutes -- has increased by almost 50%, the retailer said. As a result, it is expanding into more categories and creating larger "centerpiece" dishes for two people as well as family-sized portions.
The target is part of a wider package of sustainability measures developed with its charity partner the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) to try to halve the environmental impact of the average UK shopping basket. Dave Lewis, who steps down as Tesco chief executive on Wednesday, said: "We know from tackling food waste that transparency and ambitious targets are the first steps towards becoming a more sustainable business." Among 11 new plant-based foods going on sale at Tesco this week are centerpiece dishes using the wheat protein favorite seitan as a meat substitute, including a beef-free joint and hunter's chicken-free traybake. Turkey-free crowns and vegan mince pies are launching in time for Christmas.
The target is part of a wider package of sustainability measures developed with its charity partner the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) to try to halve the environmental impact of the average UK shopping basket. Dave Lewis, who steps down as Tesco chief executive on Wednesday, said: "We know from tackling food waste that transparency and ambitious targets are the first steps towards becoming a more sustainable business." Among 11 new plant-based foods going on sale at Tesco this week are centerpiece dishes using the wheat protein favorite seitan as a meat substitute, including a beef-free joint and hunter's chicken-free traybake. Turkey-free crowns and vegan mince pies are launching in time for Christmas.
300% (Score:1, Troll)
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I suspect they either expect some kind of legislation, or its wishful thinking that relevant manufacturers will have large scale advertisement campaigns.
Or it could be standard greenwashing PR. Results don't matter, because this campaign will be forgotten in a week.
No, they're serious (Score:3)
These meat replacements are way the f*** more profitable than actual meat. They're dying to make them take off.
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It depends what they make it from. At the moment Lentils seem to be the go and upon a meat substitute basis, a lot can be done to improve Lentil genetics. Then you have the glaringly obvious which the vegans seem to absurdly oblivious to, the pushing of higher protein, lower carbohydrate versions of wheat, rice, potatoes and corn. They should have really been all over government to subsidise the development of those items, it should have been vegan goal number one, high protein potatoes.
Of course the number
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Most vegans are like atheists.
They actually do not at all talk about being vegan ...
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Modern life is insanely expensive to produce. You just don't notice because it's also insanely heavily subsidized.
Literally, everything about it.
So?
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meat is insanely expensive to produce. You just don't notice because it's also insanely heavily subsidized.
I've heard this argument so many times, but I've never heard any compelling evidence to prove it. Just people repeating this statement over and over.
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Nowhere in that linked article do they mention that meat is subsidized (heavily or otherwise) so I'm not sure how it helps NateFromMich understand the subsidy issue.
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All of that is true. Their big marketing push is about environmental impact [beyondmeat.com], instead.
Re:No, they're serious (Score:5, Insightful)
More accurately, meat is expensive because it consumes vast tracts of land, the conversion ratio is poor if you want beef, and it takes tons of water.
Conversion ratio of chicken is about 1.7 to 1 (1.7 pounds, grams, kilograms, etc of food produces 1 pound/gram/kilogram of meat), pork is around 3, and beef is around 5-7. If you include everything, it drops to about 3/5/12 or so to 1 respectively.
The goal isn't to make a completely healthy replacement (if you're eating a hamburger...), but one that consumes far less resources to produce and makes an acceptable substitute. So plant-based substitutes of beef for burgers will go a long way towards everything "green" since less resources are needed to make that burger from plants than from beef.
Vegans, if you ask them, detest these plant-based substitutes because they feel it cheapens their "sacrifice" - if you can slap on plant based burger on the grill and have it bleed and act basically almost like a regular burger, and then enjoy it since for the most part it feels like a beef burger, they are offended you took the easy route.
But really, in the end, it's something that's likely to be appealing - if people accept that the plant based substitute works, then you can help the planet by simple things like that. Convincing the world to go vegan is impossible. But convincing a family to perhaps try a plant based burger and maybe even substitute it in for a real burger one day a week has a much bigger effect.
It's why the substitutes all go for beef - because at the lousy conversion rate beef has, and its popularity, you can do quite a lot of good. Replacing chicken with a plant based substitute is much harder since chicken is much more efficient to produced and little is gained going plant based.
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Well, at the moment they're trying to replace burgers. That's.. pretty irrelevant.
Give me something that has the taste and texture of a nice fat beef fillet steak, cooked how I like it, and I'll buy it, I'll eat it and I'll enjoy it.
Until then, cows die.
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Vegans, if you ask them, detest these plant-based substitutes because they feel it cheapens their "sacrifice" - if you can slap on plant based burger on the grill and have it bleed and act basically almost like a regular burger, and then enjoy it since for the most part it feels like a beef burger, they are offended you took the easy route.
Not a vegan here, but have a lot of vegan friends. I can say that it is very clear that the set of vegans who have a problem with this is a small but very vocal fraction of all vegans. Most of them are pretty happy with this. I have one vegan friend who actually has been trying to get himself to eat the Beyond and Impossible synthemeats to help support this, even though he doesn't actually like them that much (not because they are bad but because they taste so much like meat that they just make him emotion
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Vegans, if you ask them, detest these plant-based substitutes because they feel it cheapens their "sacrifice"
... What? Where did you get this idea? Setting aside the fact that, "they're all the same," is laughably stupid, I'm struggling to picture any vegans who detest fake meat for this reason. I'm sure there's one, somewhere, but why would you believe this?
Let's pretend, just for the moment, that you are someone who believes that murder and cannibalism are wrong. So, because you try to be a good person, you give up all of your murdering and you feel like you've done something good. You've changed for the bett
I know vegans (Score:2)
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Cows are fed cheap grains like corn and others that they do not digest well if at all. They were evolved to eat grasses not grains.
Absolutely BS. Because if you understood your plant biology, corn is grass! It's a grass that has been bred to grow especially big and tall, and produce big fat seeds, but it is grass nonetheless.
Since you admit that cows evolved to eat grasses, and corn is grass, then you should be capable of figuring out that cows can eat corn just fine. This idea that cows can't eat corn is total make believe baloney that I guess must've gotten started by some ill-intentioned "green initiative" propagandists or maybe som
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Given a choice between eating corn or plain old grass, a cow will chose to eat corn every time, because it's far more tasty and it's just as digestible for the cow.
Given a choice between sitting on the the couch watching TV or exercising, most people choose the TV.
Doesn't mean it's the healthier choice. And people are smart enough to know the difference...Are cows?
I'll just leave this here [ndsu.edu]
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Strange, because millions of us have that choice and choose exercising, because it's a lot more fun than sitting on a couch and being fat. CSB: I stopped sitting on the couch and dropped 60lbs, and now lead a very active and very fun lifestyle as a result. I can't begin to tell you how much I was missing out on sitting on my ass all of the time.
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Wow so you're telling me that since apples are plants, and trees are plants, that I'd be fine if I just chomped down on some twigs? Or could it be that it is actually important what part of a plant you consume?
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That's strange. The beef I bought yesterday wasn't corn fed. It wasn't injected full of antibiotics. It wasn't brimming with hormones.
It was cheaper than the lamb sat on the supermarket shelf next to it.
The problem is not cheap meat. You sound like the EU, warning the UK that they're in danger of importing cheap food.
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Many (most?) CAFO operations dont feed corn as a grain, they feed corn silage (ie: they chop up the entire corn plant, put it in a busker to undergo anaerobic fermentation and then feed that to the cows mixed in with some grain and minerals as a "total mixed ration" aka TMR). The cows are on that for the last 3-4 months before they go to the slaughterhouse, prior to that they are usually on pasture.
As for pasture vs grain for finishing, it depends on the pasture and how good it is. Its easier to get a consi
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> Cows are fed cheap grains like corn and others that they do not digest well if at all. They were evolved to eat grasses not grains. As a result their GI tracts turn septic, requiring antibiotic treatment to control it.
> Of course to make the land use as efficient as possible they pack them into sheds at maximum density. If any of them gets a disease they all get it. More drugs to control that.
Where on earth did you find this disinformation?!? You know those cows you see in pastures as you drive down
Re: No, they're serious (Score:2)
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"So you said that" is always followed by an incomprehensible lie on the internet. Every time.
But let's entertain your argument anyway, because it's an interesting one. Do you really think that enough people would disagree with it and actually fight it, and would this amount of people be able to resist the same people we're seeing agitating for harshest possible penalties against anyone who goes against them feeling safe?
Because I think you would have had an argument about five years ago. Today UK government
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Re: 300% (Score:2)
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Actually, the Impossible burger tastes pretty damn good. Have you tried it? It's 100x better than veggie burgers. Maybe it got left on the shelf where you are because people haven't tried it.
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I don't see the appeal myself, and I am vegan. Tofu and okara are fine with me. No need for Impossible Burgers.
But the price of fake meat is falling and the quality is rising. The meat shortage has resulted in many people giving it a try. Some of them may switch permanently.
After electricity generation, transportation, and heating, meat is the biggest contributor to AGW. So more people switching to plant-based protein is a good thing.
Re: 300% (Score:2)
This 'seitan' cereal gloop sounds like really unappetising stodge though. I'm struggling to understand the demand for it over vegie burgers made from chickpeas or lentils.
But as a meat-eater, surely it's about adding more vegetarian dishes to one's culinary repertoire rather than pursuit of faux-meat. e.g. before covid closed all our restaurants, being adventurous and trying the veg-option - "these zucchini fritters are really yummy; can I have the recipe?"
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It adds some variety. I'm not so much interested in it being a perfect replica of the best beef burger I ever had, just that it tastes good.
Re:300% (Score:4, Insightful)
I can preemuch 100% guarantee you don’t live in the UK, and have no clue who Tesco is, nor how they operate. They are hard-nosed retailers in the most competitive market of its kind in the world. They fought and survived a vicious price war with discounters, and there is no way they’d allow PR noise on this unless it was meaningful for them. If this were a small thing, then Tesco would have to waste energy countering accusations like yours but from people who actually know what they’re on about. So it’s a big thing. Cursory research shows meat-based alternatives are currently at about 10% of meat sales, and the proportion is growing fast. Not surprising Tesco are seeking to capitalise on that growth.
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there is no way theyâ(TM)d allow PR noise on this unless it was meaningful for them
You do however need to differentiate between being meaningful in terms of sales of these products, and meaningful in terms of boosting their brand with people that politically align with the anti-meat agenda.
It could be meaningful with both, but doesn't have to be. Bear in mind also that their 300% increase can include traditional 'vegetarian sausage' and comparable products, although frankly they're going to have to work hard on the taste of those to sell any more.
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They're amoral and smart marketers. They're not going to build brand with people who want meat-free food if it damages reputation with a larger cohort who have a problem with meat-free food.
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I don't understand the "even" in the last paragraph of your post. M&S and Waitrose are the British supermarkets I would least expect to engage in a price war, because their selling point is that they're up-market.
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The main battle with the price discounters happened about 5 to 10 years ago, and presented a major challenge for all the incumbent supermarkets, Tesco included. See for example: https://www.lovemoney.com/news... [lovemoney.com]
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If you ask a vegan, they seem to think that all that's needed is a plant-based alternative and people will start buying that and eating that instead. It doesn't occur to them that the rest of us don't want to not eat meat.
Percentages alone are meanigless (Score:3)
The article doesn't state what they started with. Maybe they sold 2 plant based burgers, then one more got them 50% increase, so another 300% is to setting their targets on 12 burgers a year.
Given that, this article is completely meaningless as it lacks details.
Vegetarian here (Score:4, Informative)
Anyway there's a ton of meat alternatives out there. You'll find a pretty big frozen section. I've been eating the black bean burgers for years. I've had to various fake hamburgers too, they're alright but not all that much better than a plain black bean burger. But the base line of sales is higher than you think. Even without vegetarians you still have folks who abstain for religious reasons.
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"higher than you think" is not a number. They are not planning to do 300% of global or even UK market number, just 300% of what only they sold in the past, so it could be almost nothing. It's not like there aren't stores out there with little to no selection of fake meat products. If McDonnads was to announce a 300% increase in their own sales of plant-based burgers, that would not be very much, would it.
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I've had to various fake hamburgers too, they're alright but not all that much better than a plain black bean burger.
A good bean burger is fantastic. It's not a substitute for a beef burger. It's an alternative.
I'm glad it exists, I welcome the introduction of more foods that taste that good, and will happily eat them. But don't go pretend (and you personally didn't; this is a more general statement) that they're substitutes for a beef burger.
Is that too much to ask?
Well it kinda is (Score:2)
That said I can guess you underlining worry, which is that if these meat substitut
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if these meat substitutes take off the price of actual meat is going to skyrocket as the subsidies get pulled
What subsidies? If my local meat was subsidised we wouldn't have so much meat imported from other countries.
Fewer people eating meat means production will fall purely to stop the price collapsing.
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Not a vegetarian here:
I like beef burgers, but a good black bean burger is a great alternative and I never go away disappointed if it is well prepared.
I like them better than things like beyond and incredible because they're their own thing, they don't try to pretend to be a crappier version of meat.
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I've noticed the plant based meat section growing over time.
I think the real motivation for this is that they can see the UK farming sector is about to collapse, there will be a flood of cheap low cost meat from the US that British people find disgusting, and meat imports will be heavily affected by brexit. So next year when everywhere has shortages they will have plenty of plant based meat products to sell.
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Typical Tesco Fridge [wordpress.com]
This section is a part of an aisle with maybe 10-15 sections on each side, 2-3 aisles for refridgerated meat. As someone else pointed out, it's not usually busy and the last to be emptied when there's a rush.
What's not mentioned is the cost of this stuff. Compared to meat, it often seems expensive and given the lack of f**ks the British public give when various celebrities and others try and push them t
Highly processed food (Score:3, Interesting)
is unhealthy. And fake meat is highly processed.
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This.
I'm saying this as someone that grew up in the third generation of a quite ideological vegetarian family. I started to include some red meat in my diet about 10 years ago due to health reasons, although I eat it maybe once a week and am quite happy with a diet that is a fairly good representation of the typical "Blood type A" vegetarian diet (which I read yesterday for what it's worth). I feel I eat quite tasty, and do the crossfit thing at an age where my peers' kids go to college or get married.
We
Meat (Score:2)
I don't want plant-based pseudo-meat.
I want meat.
I don't really care if it's grown in a lab, cut off a cow once a fortnight by making it grow extra, nerveless muscle so we have an infinite source of meat, or from a slaughtered animal.
I care about two things:
- the taste. You're telling me that this plant-free meat can taste like beef AND chicken AND turkey? Really? I highly doubt that. Unless it's 99% flavouring and 1% "meat". Every meat-substitute I've ever tried does not taste or feel-in-the-mouth any
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feel-in-the-mouth
Texture is different to taste, and does continue to be a challenge for the fake-meat purveyors.
Gammon tastes fantastic. It's a simple meat and yet manages to be one of the greatest tastes on the planet. But anybody can mix pork and salt; they're still never going to replace gammon as something I adore unless they can also match its texture.
Nothing else on the planet matches a thick slice of gammon. It's the taste and the texture, and I pity my weird religious friends that they can't enjoy it.
Tesco quality is horseshit (Score:2)
Meat substitutes are shit. (Score:3)
Fresh, well prepared meat is delicious and healthy. Fresh, well prepared fish is delicious and healthy. Fresh, well prepared vegetables are delicious and healthy.
Don't poison yourself with shitty "plant-based alternatives".
From Japan - the home of great food.
All natural processing (Score:2)
It's been working for millennia.
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Pricing scam underway! (Score:2)
Do it yourself ... (Score:2)
You can do this yourself, without having to buy overpriced mixes with many ingredients, and added fat.
When making burgers, or anything with ground beef, mix the ground beef with one third or so of chickpeas or beans.
Spread the meat throughout the week: one day beef, another chicken, another fish, another legumes, and so on. That way, you are not eating red meat day after day.
Re:Good (Score:4, Insightful)
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Fake (meat) news! Sometimes they ate brontosaurus steak instead.
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I believe it was fast-food brontosaurus prime rib that tipped Fred's car over, though.
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Primates eat meat when they can get it, including startling amounts of cannibalism. Bonobos, which are very close to humans in biology and behavior, are well documented for it.
https://www.newscientist.com/a... [newscientist.com]
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That is not what you originally said, and it's certainly not what I said. I specifically dispute your claim that "primate diets actually consist of fruits nuts and bugs". We have teeth, and enzymes and digestive juices, that evolved to handle meat. "Meat when they can get it" turns out to be pretty frequent for the primates closest to humans, especially bonobos and chimps. Humans even in prehistoric times ate significant amounts of meat based on the measurement of hemoglobin in coprolites, fossilized feces.
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If meat is so natural to humans, why don't you eat what a cat eats? A cat can grab a passing mouse and eat the whole thing head to tail as I could pluck a fruit from the tree and do the same. I don't think you'd be able to tackle bigger prey.
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Bread can feed a society, easily. Raw fucking plants not so much.
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Humans cannot sprint after a gazelle and stick our teeth into it and bring it to the ground. But we also can't eat the vast quantities of plant material that ruminants do, and process it all, in giant vats for stomachs. Lots of people end up with irritable bowel syndrome, and so on, when they try to go that way. We do have brains, and we can jog long distances, and we have opposable thumbs, and language, so yeah, when we hunt, it does not look like what a lion does. We can also cook, and pre-processing our
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Out of curiosity, and continuing the theme other replies to you have established: Do you only ever eat raw unprocessed vegetables? Or do you process, prepare and cook them?
Do you never eat bread? Never slice a vegetable? Never use heat to change the texture or consistency of one? Never dry and grind them? Never mix two or more together? Never extract or use oils or juices from them? Never eat anything to which someone else has done any of these things?
If vegetables are so natural to humans, I fully expect y
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I dunno about your typical slashdot user, but I have a pretty comprehensive knowledge of the local wild edibles.
Used it to great effect in the spring of the year. Ate yard weeds for several months until it was suitably time to plant a proper garden. Kept me from the store during the dead-heat of the first wave of corona virus.
That you consider "Most weeds" to be toxic is kinda telling. Usually, most weeds are just so low in nutrition that you expend more calories than you consume, and are not pleasant to
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Sadly the issue isn't whether such approaches are viable on an individual level, it's that they're not viable on a 'large world population' level.
I could safely forage for food, but only by breaching local laws (and upsetting the farmers whose fields I'd ransack). There just isn't enough wilderness nearby to feed a village of people.
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I was fortunate to also have lambs quarters to go with the above two.
The major issue, dietarilly anyway, is that they are not complete nutrition. I balanced that with dried beans and powdered milk. (While lambsquarters is nicely rich in iron, magnesium, calcium, and various B vitamins, it is not that rich in protein. The white clover is quite dense on protein, but it is not a balanced protein. The deadnettles contain beta carotine and pals and vitamin C, but are deficient in other ways, etc...) It only nee
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Meat is a natural part of the human diet. We've been eating meat since before we became human. Vegan diets (to the degree they are now) otoh are unnatural and before the advent of civilization frankly impossible and very hard to do 'properly' without vast amounts of infrastructure and technology we have today. Its not like you could go skipping through the river valley as a caveman and easily procure a nutritionally balanced set of veggies and fruits at your local Target and vet it through a google search. Meat for the most part was about as tasty back then as it is today but you had to be very careful choking down the tasteless often poisonous weeds that look nothing like the glistening bananas and cranberries of today.
And there's also something called the Expensive Tissue Hypothesis. The presentations I've heard about it, to paraphrase: all tissue in the body needs energy and nutrients to live, so there's a direct connection between physical size and food consumed. And that energy is portioned out to each organ. But, humans are not like other animals of our size. Our brains are weirdly much bigger than they should be, so where does the extra energy come from to supply it? It turns out that our guts are also a lot smaller
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Meat is a natural part of the human diet. True.
Vegan diets (to the degree they are now) otoh are unnatural False.
very hard to do 'properly' without vast amounts of infrastructure and technology we have today False.
You are spreading ignorance. Allow me to share some facts:
1) Humans have thrived on vegan diets throughout ancient history and to the modern day source [wikipedia.org]
2) Humans are omnivores [wikipedia.org], meaning that plants are just as "naturally" nutritious to us as meat.
3) The modern-day shao-lin monks are some of the mos
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Most of those are things are stuff the right wing would say. You may be correct that meat is healthy. But then, avoiding meat is a choice based on ethics not primarily for health or science. Not wishing to fund terrible conditions for animals .. what does that have to do with science? Animals are alive and can sense pain .. not wanting to eat animals is not first a health thing but first an ethics thing.
As for anti-vaxxers .. haha those are like 99% conservatives .. don't put that on leftists.
Also, I never
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Oh good, we get to add vegetarianism to the list of idiotic culture wars now. Sentience is the motivating factor for many vegetarians. And chickens are sentient but bacteria are not.
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avoiding meat is a choice based on ethics
Bullshit. Avoiding meat is a choice based on virtue signalling.
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You are basing that on the fact that you personally can't care about causing harm to other beings, not everyone is as evil as you. Just FYI, there are people who don't want other entities to suffer. You may not believe it given your own despicable character.
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People eat organic matter. Are you seriously claiming a pig has a greater right to life than the dozens of carrots, mushrooms, cauliflowers, nettles, nuts and other vegetables that would have to be sacrificed to provide sustenance and nutrition were someone to not eat it?
Maybe I'm despicable because I didn't stop to take into account your inability to think more deeply about these things.
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It has little to do with right of living, it has to do with cruelty. Carrots don't have a central nervous system. We have zero evidence to believe a carrot suffers when harvested, farmed, or eaten. The pig on the other hand we can easily see it has a nervous system and reacts to pain. I'm against animals, or anything, suffering unnecessarily. I believe there is strong evidence that animals have awareness and can suffer. If we can prevent them from experiencing pain unnecessarily we should do that. I don't b
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I can't respond to this properly due to
Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
Filter error: Your comment looks too much like ascii art.
Plants respond to pain. Carrots can scream. I'd link references but instead I'm going to have to email the admin.
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I'm happy to take a risk on cancer - even though it's taken two grandmothers, a great grandmother and a grandfather (i.e. four of the five grandparents alive when I was born), my cousin's had it, his wife died from it and my father is currently undergoing chemotherapy following surgery.
I'm still more likely to die from heart disease, a car accident or suicide long before cancer can get me, so I'm going to enjoy what little life I have left.
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As for anti-vaxxers .. haha those are like 99% conservatives .. don't put that on leftists.
Also, I never heard of any leftist wanting to forced anyone to live in cities.
Quite a few antivaxers are Christian fundies ("Vaccines are made of ground-up babies!") but the heart of the movement is the California/Oregon hippie mom cohort. And although the left went through a phase of promoting off-the-grid living, inner cities are where their remaining voter base is located. Hippie mom activism doesn't much extend to voting.
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The science is pretty clear.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... [nih.gov]
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Meat is the tobacco of the 12st century.
In that it is a thing people pay for with money? Because it's certainly nothing like it from a health point of view, or from an industry point of view, or from an economic point of view.
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Indeed. If all shops stopped selling all food then I'd be popping out with my bow and bringing home a sheep.
Not because I can't or don't eat vegetables, but because it's the quickest easiest source of nutrition available, and because it tastes damn good, and because I can supplement it with far harder to acquire vegetables and other plant matter.
Many plants need themselves to be eaten (Score:2)
They can't distribute their seed otherwise. As such, they would have evolved to not be distressed by being eaten.
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If an 8 year old made this argument in school in a “philosophy for kids” lesson, you could be confident one of the other kids would point out that animals are sentient and plants are not, and that the difference matters. They wouldn’t use the term sentient, but they’d understand the concept, because it’s instantly obvious.