[I just want to clarify that, of the large existing diets, I think that vegans probably have the morally best diet. I also don’t want to discourage anyone from becoming vegan or vegetarian. I just want to somewhat push back at the idea that being vegan comes at trivial personal costs.]
Yes, I was vegetarian for around 5 years, 2 of which I was vegan. I’ve since become what you might call reducetarian (of which no chicken or pork, mainly milk, sometimes beef and eggs).
Personally, I can say that the costs of transitioning are quite high. I guess that during the whole transition it took me around 30 to 150 hours of work, which I wouldn’t have had with a standard diet (it’s hard to quantify in retrospect and depends on how you define work). But transitioning has also quite some fun aspect, restricting your diet forces your creativity, you get to know new people etc. So I’d say that costs of transitioning are hard to evaluate.
I suspect that I would pay anywhere from $400 to $1200 per year from my non-altruistic budget to keep my standard diet (depending on lots of factors, especially income at the time). The main reasons for reverting were taste, ease and nutritional value. I could well be that my WTP for a standard diet is higher than average. I also suspect that this cost estimate will dramatically decrease over the next years as vegan products become tastier and more available, and this could very well mean I’ll become vegan again.
For some people, like Michael, the costs involved appear to be rather small. But it doesn’t seem very plausible that 84% of vegans, or so, revert to consuming animal products if they typically perceive the cost of not eating meat to be only $100 per year (let’s say adjusted to an average american income).
One bad aspect of the vegan movement is the insistance that personal costs are very small. Claims that are often made circle around “You won’t miss the taste of animal products after a while.”, or “Having a healthy vegan diet is easy.”. I believe that both these points are simply untrue for many people.
I think we have good reason to believe veg*ns will underestimate the cost of not-eating-meat for others due to selection effects. People who it’s easier for are more likely to both go veg*n and stick with it. Veg*ns generally underestimating the cost and non-veg*ns generally overestimating the cost can both be true.
The cost has been low for me, but the cost varies significantly based on factors such as culture, age, and food preferences. I think that in the vast majority of cases the benefits will still outweigh the costs and most would agree with a non-speciesist lens, but I fear down-playing the costs too much will discourage people who try to go veg*n and do find it costly. Luckily, this is becoming less of an issue as plant-based substitutes are becoming more widely available.
My impression is that people do over-estimate the cost of ‘not-eating-meat’ or veganism by quite a bit (at least for most people in most situations). I’ve tried to come up with a way to quantify this. I might need to flesh it out a bit more but here it is.
So suppose you are trying to quantify what you think the sacrifice of being vegan is, either relative to vegetarian or to average diet. If I were asked what was the minimum amount money I would have to have received to be vegan vs non-vegan for the last 5 years if there were ZERO ethical impact of any kind, it would probably be $500 (with hindsight—cue the standard list of possible biases). This doesn’t seem very high to me. My experience has been that most people who have become vegan have said that they vastly overestimated the sacrifice they thought was involved.
If one thought that there were diminishing returns for the sacrifice for being vegan over vegetarian, perhaps the calculus is better for being vegetarian over non-vegan, or for being vegan 99% of the time, say only when eating at your grandparents’ house. I see too many people say ‘well I can’t be vegan because I don’t want to upset my grandpa when he makes his traditional X dish’. Well, ok, so be vegan in every other aspect then. And as a personal anecdote, when my nonna found out she couldn’t make her traditional Italian dishes for me anymore, she got over it very quickly and found vegan versions of all of them [off-topic, apologies!].
I also suspect that people are comfortable thinking about longtermism and sacrifice like this for non-humans but not for humans is because they may think that humans are still significantly more important. I think this is the case when you count flow-on effects, but not intrinsically (e.g. 1 unit of suffering for a human vs non-human).
I think the intrinsic worth ratio for most non-human animals is close to 1 to 1. I think the evidence suggests that their capacity for suffering is fairly close to ours, and some animals might arguably have an even higher capacity for suffering than us (I should say I’m strictly wellbeing/suffering based utilitarian in this).
I think the burden of proof should be on someone to show why humans are significantly more worthy of intrinsic moral worth. We all evolved from a common ancestor, and while there might be a sliding scale of moral worth from us to insects, it seems strange for there to be such a sharp drop off after humans, even within mammals. I would strongly err on the side of caution when applying this to my ethics, given our constantly expanding circle of moral consideration throughout history.
I claim cost of not-eating-meat is drastically over-estimated. Have you tried it?
Hey Rupert
[I just want to clarify that, of the large existing diets, I think that vegans probably have the morally best diet. I also don’t want to discourage anyone from becoming vegan or vegetarian. I just want to somewhat push back at the idea that being vegan comes at trivial personal costs.]
Yes, I was vegetarian for around 5 years, 2 of which I was vegan. I’ve since become what you might call reducetarian (of which no chicken or pork, mainly milk, sometimes beef and eggs).
Personally, I can say that the costs of transitioning are quite high. I guess that during the whole transition it took me around 30 to 150 hours of work, which I wouldn’t have had with a standard diet (it’s hard to quantify in retrospect and depends on how you define work). But transitioning has also quite some fun aspect, restricting your diet forces your creativity, you get to know new people etc. So I’d say that costs of transitioning are hard to evaluate.
I suspect that I would pay anywhere from $400 to $1200 per year from my non-altruistic budget to keep my standard diet (depending on lots of factors, especially income at the time). The main reasons for reverting were taste, ease and nutritional value. I could well be that my WTP for a standard diet is higher than average. I also suspect that this cost estimate will dramatically decrease over the next years as vegan products become tastier and more available, and this could very well mean I’ll become vegan again.
For some people, like Michael, the costs involved appear to be rather small. But it doesn’t seem very plausible that 84% of vegans, or so, revert to consuming animal products if they typically perceive the cost of not eating meat to be only $100 per year (let’s say adjusted to an average american income).
One bad aspect of the vegan movement is the insistance that personal costs are very small. Claims that are often made circle around “You won’t miss the taste of animal products after a while.”, or “Having a healthy vegan diet is easy.”. I believe that both these points are simply untrue for many people.
I think we have good reason to believe veg*ns will underestimate the cost of not-eating-meat for others due to selection effects. People who it’s easier for are more likely to both go veg*n and stick with it. Veg*ns generally underestimating the cost and non-veg*ns generally overestimating the cost can both be true.
The cost has been low for me, but the cost varies significantly based on factors such as culture, age, and food preferences. I think that in the vast majority of cases the benefits will still outweigh the costs and most would agree with a non-speciesist lens, but I fear down-playing the costs too much will discourage people who try to go veg*n and do find it costly. Luckily, this is becoming less of an issue as plant-based substitutes are becoming more widely available.
My impression is that people do over-estimate the cost of ‘not-eating-meat’ or veganism by quite a bit (at least for most people in most situations). I’ve tried to come up with a way to quantify this. I might need to flesh it out a bit more but here it is.
So suppose you are trying to quantify what you think the sacrifice of being vegan is, either relative to vegetarian or to average diet. If I were asked what was the minimum amount money I would have to have received to be vegan vs non-vegan for the last 5 years if there were ZERO ethical impact of any kind, it would probably be $500 (with hindsight—cue the standard list of possible biases). This doesn’t seem very high to me. My experience has been that most people who have become vegan have said that they vastly overestimated the sacrifice they thought was involved.
If one thought that there were diminishing returns for the sacrifice for being vegan over vegetarian, perhaps the calculus is better for being vegetarian over non-vegan, or for being vegan 99% of the time, say only when eating at your grandparents’ house. I see too many people say ‘well I can’t be vegan because I don’t want to upset my grandpa when he makes his traditional X dish’. Well, ok, so be vegan in every other aspect then. And as a personal anecdote, when my nonna found out she couldn’t make her traditional Italian dishes for me anymore, she got over it very quickly and found vegan versions of all of them [off-topic, apologies!].
I also suspect that people are comfortable thinking about longtermism and sacrifice like this for non-humans but not for humans is because they may think that humans are still significantly more important. I think this is the case when you count flow-on effects, but not intrinsically (e.g. 1 unit of suffering for a human vs non-human).
I think the intrinsic worth ratio for most non-human animals is close to 1 to 1. I think the evidence suggests that their capacity for suffering is fairly close to ours, and some animals might arguably have an even higher capacity for suffering than us (I should say I’m strictly wellbeing/suffering based utilitarian in this).
I think the burden of proof should be on someone to show why humans are significantly more worthy of intrinsic moral worth. We all evolved from a common ancestor, and while there might be a sliding scale of moral worth from us to insects, it seems strange for there to be such a sharp drop off after humans, even within mammals. I would strongly err on the side of caution when applying this to my ethics, given our constantly expanding circle of moral consideration throughout history.