I’m going to share some information about my meat-heavy diet, not because I’m trying to troll or distract from this post, but because I think there is value in trying to triangulate between the experiences of successful vegans and continued meat-eaters. The theme here is “refuting anti-vegan myths,” and, on reflection, my resistance to becoming vegan comes from a different source, which I’ll share in case anybody else has information that might be relevant.
I eat meat, and am currently dieting for the first time after ballooning to a near-obese 210 lbs, 5′11″ during a sedentary two years in grad school eating far too much pizza. My diet essentially involves replacing grains and cheese with meat, vegetables, fruit, and low-fat yoghurt. I don’t have anything like your exercise routine, so my aim has been to target high protein, low calories, and fillingness while making what food I do consume palatable and very simple.
I do think that it would be possible to get enough protein in my diet by swapping out meat for beans, tofu/seitan, and protein powder. Unfortunately, I have never eaten anything based on tofu/seitan/protein powder that’s better than “edible,” and it would take a lot more patience with cooking to make beans consistently delicious-enough to form the basis of a palatable diet.
When meat eaters are trolling vegans, they sometimes justify their meat consumption by saying “meat is delicious!” On reflection, I actually do think that’s the explanation for why I continue to eat it—food’s one of the few hedonic pleasures I can access regularly in my otherwise spartan and sober lifestyle, I hate cooking, and it’s easy to make meat taste delicious while using it as the primary protein source in a healthy, balanced diet.
I also don’t share the intuitive impulse to not eat meat. I’ve owned pets, I’ve watched the documentaries about factory farming, I’ve worked with animals on farms, I’ve read the essays about animal cognition, and none of that has sparked a particular intellectual or emotional impulse to not eat meat. I recognize veganism as a morally safe choice. I just viscerally care about my diet and my enjoyment of food and shared eating experiences much more.
What I’ve rarely or never seen are anecdotes from “reluctant vegans”—people who, despite hating vegan food, not particularly feeling passionate about veganism, not having vegan friends, and missing on the easy sharing of meat-based meals with friends and family, nevertheless have made a principled choice to be vegan over the long-term purely on the grounds that it’s a morally safe choice. If I did see such anecdotes, I think that understanding why and how they made the switch might be helpful in making the switch myself. Unfortunately, I fear that promoting messages of “being vegan sucks—here’s why I do it anyway” might attract fewer vegans than it drives away, if there are even any vegans who feel this way.
What I’ve rarely or never seen are anecdotes from “reluctant vegans”—people who, despite hating vegan food, not particularly feeling passionate about veganism, not having vegan friends, and missing on the easy sharing of meat-based meals with friends and family, nevertheless have made a principled choice to be vegan over the long-term purely on the grounds that it’s a morally safe choice. If I did see such anecdotes, I think that understanding why and how they made the switch might be helpful in making the switch myself.
This largely applies to me.
Growing up, I loved steak and meat-heavy meals, and I disliked salad and vegetarian dishes.
I wasn’t very passionate about veganism, since at the time, I didn’t know about factory farming. As a result, I dragged my feet for around two years from when I accepted the arguments until I actually went vegan.
I didn’t know any other vegan when I decided to go vegan.
My family and most friends are religious conservatives who frequently make fun of vegans.
My family and friends were very sad that I wasn’t able to partake in meat-based meals with them anymore.
When I went vegan, I wasn’t well-versed in moral philosophy. I was familiar with the analogous debate around abortion. Abortion opposers often argue from marginal cases that there’s no consistent dividing line between fetuses and born babies, and I considered how similar arguments from marginal cases would imply that we shouldn’t kill animals for our own pleasure.
After being vegan for over a year, I stumbled across Matt Adelstein’s article about how factory farming is the greatest atrocity in history. Somehow, I’d just never learned about factory farming prior to this. Veganism went from the “morally safe choice” to the overwhelmingly morally mandatory one. That, I think, is the difference between our approaches to veganism.
To me, calling veganism the “morally safe choice” is like if we have two choices: (a) burn a hundred pigs to death because it’s fun to watch them running around screaming, or (b) not do that, and calling (b) the “morally safe choice”. On the contrary, (a) is the choice only a psychopath would take, and (b) is the choice any person with a drop of morality or consistency would take, if they truly understood what was at stake.
I’m curious, do you consider veganism more than “morally safe” if the meat-eater takes scrupulous care to source pasture raised and what we might call “artisanally slaughtered” meat and other animal products?
It kind of makes sense to me that veganism and being anti-abortion would go together—the points of view harmonize well. I personally have the opposite view, and think that both abortion and eating ethically raised meat are basically fine, even though many factory farming practices are apalling and there are probably some cases in which I would be disturbed by how a particular abortion played out.
I tend to think that it’s a combination of extended pain, awareness of death, and a principle of granting individual liberty to a conscious, aware individual that makes it impermissible to kill, and these don’t apply in the case of abortion or in the case of ethical animal farming and slaughter. However, I personally fail routinely to take fully scrupulous care to avoid factory farmed meat (although I have plans to do better starting in the fall, when that will become more logistically possible), and I also acknowledge that it’s hard to be sure of where your animal products come from. Furthermore, I could be wrong about the extent of the distress of consciousness-level of even putatively ethically farmed livestock, and for these reasons, despite me thinking meat-eating is theoretically fine, I think that in practice, uncertainty makes veganism “morally safe.”
Thanks for the response! I think the care required to be a “morally safe” meat eater would have to be very scrupulous indeed. Effectively, one would have to be vegan when eating food bought by others, unless they are confident that the buyer shares their philosophy of scrupulously verifying humane raising and slaughter.
Almost all restaurants optimize for cost reduction when sourcing their animal products, so one would eat vegan at restaurants. This also means being vegan for Uber Eats, street food, food at the baseball game, etc.
Anytime one goes to a friend’s house, they shouldn’t eat the friend’s meat, unless they know the friend shares their philosophy, or they had the friend specifically buy the meat for them. This means being vegan or extremely scrupulous for barbecues, hangouts, etc.
I scrupulously kept kosher during my childhood and adolescence, which seems to require a similar level of effort. I almost never ate out, except at the single-digit restaurants in my town which were certified kosher. At baseball games, I had drinks but not food. I didn’t eat any meals prepared at my non-religious or non-Jewish friends’ houses, unless it was obviously raw (like a carrot) or in kosher packaging (like kosher snacks).
Let me tell you, that was a lot of work! Even though veganism is much more restrictive, I actually find it far easier to keep, since it’s relatively easily verifiable and communicable.
I’m sure that it would be difficult to eliminate all unethical meat consumption, and I applaud you for trying before you went entirely veg*an. I don’t have a very absolutist take on it. “Morally safe” is a relative term to me, and I don’t feel like a moral disaster has occurred if I eat factory farmed meat once in a while. It’s a bit like how I approached COVID safety: I will accept greater levels of harm/risk in order to enjoy a socially meaningful experience than I will in circumstances that are less meaningful. Similarly, I’ll eat ethical meat at home and not worry about the origin of the meat when eating out or at a restaurant. I think that if everybody followed this policy, that would represent a radical improvement in the way we treat animals.
I guess on a broader level, I’m interested in small dietary interventions that still make a big difference in terms of decreasing one’s marginal contribution to animal cruelty. It’s way easier for some people to reduce meat consumption and shift toward pasture-raised meat and home-layed eggs in their home cooking than it is for them to become vegetarian/vegan or to rigorously check the origins of all meat consumed at restaurants and social occasions. That doesn’t apply to everybody, of course—for some, it’s more straightforward to cut out meat entirely, others are more committed to eliminating meat on ethical or compassion grounds, and still others simply can’t afford meat unless it’s factory-farmed, enforcing a binary choice between veg*ism or unethical meat consumption.
A third aspect is social and signaling considerations. I have a lot of respect for veg*ans such as yourself who took a principled ethical stand and fought for it despite social pressure and inconvenience. I think that can be very persuasive to some people, although unfortunately as you may have experienced, some people will be rude or frustrated by it. I think there is room for modeling multiple approaches to reducing unethical meat consumption, and one of them is the “80% is good enough” approach that I’m trying to practice. Big tent meat reduction?
I think there is room for modeling multiple approaches to reducing unethical meat consumption, and one of them is the “80% is good enough” approach that I’m trying to practice. Big tent meat reduction?
Just in case it wasn’t clear in my post, I am very interested in this approach as well! I applaud you for thinking along these lines. Every little bit helps. This Future Perfect article titled “the difference you make when you eat less meat” does a great job of showing how eating less meat can make a big difference in terms of animal welfare and climate concerns.
I think basically all of veganism is just degrees of this harm reduction approach. Someone like Brian Tomasik might look at my supposedly vegan lifestyle and weep, seeing that I crunch springtails underfoot when I walk in my lawn, I buy some produce that was grown with pesticides, and I buy non-vegan products for my wife and other family members.
If more people took your 80% approach there would be far fewer conscious animals tortured in tiny cages. Which would be a huge win.
I have experience with that: eating meat at home but rather strictly not at restaurants for exactly the reasons you mention: it tends to simply be almost impossible to find a restaurant that seems to serve not-crazily-mistreated animals.
Doing that as vegan-in-restaurants (instead of vegetarian-in-restaurants) is significantly more difficult, but from my experience, one can totally get used to try to remain veg* outside but non-veg* at home where one can go for food with some expectation of net positive animal lives.
Few particular related experiences:
Even people who knew me rather well, would intuitively totally not understand the principle. I at times kind of felt bad to buy meat when they’re there as I knew they thought I’m vegan and will be confused, even though I would have told them time and again I simply avoid conventional meat/in restaurants and/or at their place etc.
I’m always astonished at the so many people who supposedly care about animals do the other way round: In restaurants they eat meat but not at home. Weird, given it’s so obvious in the restaurants is the worst stuff ((and they’re not the kind of perfect EA where a dollar saved would be used towards most effective causes, which could naturally complicate the choices))
Restaurants indeed do, behaviorally, absolutely not care about animal welfare. For a food animal welfare compensation project we tried to get a bunch of restaurants to accept that we source higher-welfare meat for them, without them having to pay anything for it. It was in almost all places not possible at all: (i) Even just the slightest potential logistical extra step and/or (ii) potentially a reputational fear from anything about their usual sourcing being leaked to the unconscious public, seemed to make them reluctant to participate.
(Then, I don’t want to praise my habits; I hope I find the courage again to become more vegan sometime, as everything else feels like inflicting unacceptable suffering and/or wasting a lot of money on expensive food, and I’m not sure my ‘maybe it helps my health’ justifies it/there must be better ways. All my sympathy if someone calls health a bad excuse for non-veganism, but I definitely maintain, if it’s not about health questions, once one gets used to avoid meat and/or animal products, it only becomes easier over time, in terms of logistics and getting to know tasty alternatives, either simply only outside or also at home)
This part stood out to me, because I had the opposite reaction:
When meat eaters are trolling vegans, they sometimes justify their meat consumption by saying “meat is delicious!” On reflection, I actually do think that’s the explanation for why I continue to eat it—food’s one of the few hedonic pleasures I can access regularly in my otherwise spartan and sober lifestyle, I hate cooking, and it’s easy to make meat taste delicious while using it as the primary protein source in a healthy, balanced diet.
I used to love eating meat. When I went vegan I realized I could get just as much satisfaction from any protein rich, umami-filled, sauce covered or well seasoned food. My pet theory is that what everyone mostly likes when they eat animals is the added sauces and seasonings, not the meat. Bland, unseasoned chicken breast is terrible.
But like I said in my post, I don’t have a refined palate, so maybe to those with better taste buds meat really is that delightful.
For me, palatability is about texture at least as much as taste. What I’ve found, unfortunately, is that even the best imitation meats, like beyond burgers, certain vegan sausages, and chick’n, are in the uncanny valley of meatlike textures. I agree with you that chicken is rather bland on its own, and if an imitation chicken could nail the texture, I would probably be fine crossing over. Red meat supplies much of its own flavor, and beyond burger and its similars have yet to really approach either the texture or flavor.
I think vegan sausage might be approachable, and have the added benefit that, AFAIK, vegan sausage has no need to contain carcinogenic nitrates. Also, since a lot of sausage is either chicken or pig based, which I believe have the worst factory farming, it would be nice to eliminate meat based sausage and replace it with a vegetarian/vegan alternative. I haven’t put much effort into locating the best vegan sausage, or heard much hype about it.
Surprised. Maybe worth giving it another try, looking longer for good imitations—given today’s wealth of really good ones (besides admittedly a ton of bad, assuming you really need them to imitate the original so much): I’ve made friends taste veg* burgers and chicken nuggets and they were rather surprised when I told them post-hoc that these had not been meat. I once had to double-check with the counter at the restaurant as I could not believe what I had in my plate was really not chicken. Maybe that speaks against the fine taste of me and some, but I really find it’s rather easily possible to find truly great textures too if one really cares.
Then, I personally don’t know any “uncanny valley” in that domain; make it a bit more or less fake feeling, it doesn’t really matter much to me, so maybe you really experience that very differently.
*I don’t know/remember whether vegan or vegetarian.
“I also don’t share the intuitive impulse to not eat meat. I’ve owned pets, I’ve watched the documentaries about factory farming, I’ve worked with animals on farms, I’ve read the essays about animal cognition, and none of that has sparked a particular intellectual or emotional impulse to not eat meat.”
Has any of that changed the kind of meat you eat, in terms of how the animals lived and died? I do get the argument-from-deliciousness (the sheer enjoyment of really good cheese is why I’m not fully vegan despite having been happily vegetarian for >30 years), but I’d find it really hard to eat, say, something containing eggs from caged hens. The visceral horror would outweigh any good sensory feelings, for me. Do you encounter any of that?
Yes, my partner keeps chickens in the backyard, so that’s the only eggs I typically eat, and we are considering buying a meat freezer and ordering shares of pasture-raised livestock instead of buying at the supermarket. I tend to think that eating meat is more or less perfectly fine as long as the animal didn’t suffer excessively during its life. I think that’s less of a morally safe position than not eating meat at all. I’d personally like to see more consideration (not necessarily endorsement, just consideration) within the EA movement of pasture-raised/low-meat diets as an alternative to vegetarianism and veganism. Right now I feel like there’s a lot of guidance available for people going vegan/vegetarian, but not much for people trying to do ethical/low-meat diets.
I found this to be a very helpful comment. In some of the recent discussions about veg*nism, I felt most people were assuming an implied binary choice between going vegan and ratifying the factory-farming system by consuming its products. We domesticated animals over 10,000 years ago, and have been eating them for thousands of years before factory farming was a thing. How to obtain animal products without factory farming is, from a historical perspective, a solved problem.[1] For people who have sufficient financial resources and some motivation, the biggest barrier may be differentiating between companies who want you to believe their products are consistent with animal welfare and those that actually are.
To be sure, non-FF animal products are expensive, and one could achieve more impact by donating the marginal additional cost to ACE-recommended charities. However, some of us have deontologists and virtue ethicists in our moral parliament. And consuming factory-farmed products likely generates epistemic bias through cognitive dissonance (e.g., by making it harder to expand the moral circle). Moreover, the extra cost of purchasing non-FF animal products should probably be considered a personal cost of one’s consumption choices, not a part of one’s effective altruism. People spend their own money on stuff that isn’t very effective in an EA sense (like pets), and that’s fine.
Overall I have been pleasantly surprised at how constructive this conversation has been, thanks to OP for creating space for it. Generally I find ethical discussion with EAs to be pleasant, but I had anticipated there might be an exception where veg*ism is concerned.
I would add one extra point, which is that while I do think that all of life’s activities come into the scope of ethics, I think it’s important to preserve space to make meaningful decisions without subjecting each one to conscious ethical deliberation. By analogy, sometimes we scrutinize all the available data before we make a decision; other times, we ask an expert or a friend for their opinion and defer; and still other times, we just go with our gut. I think this also applies to ethical quesitons.
There’s a perfectly good reason to elevate meat and animal product consumption to a higher level of ethical attention. But what ought our total “ethics budget” be, and what would an appropriate allocation of ethical attention be, considering all the many problems in the world? My ethics budget is relatively small, and mainly reserved for issues related to my professional work and expertise—I am interested in issues related to biomedicine because I am a professional biomedical researcher, and spend considerable time on the ethics of organ sales because that is a particularly important, tractable and neglected question to interrogate.
It seems to me that the idea that all our personal life decisions ought to be the subject of continuous moral scrutiny, or that we ought to be making “morally safe choices” in all areas of life all the time, is an overly restrictive and not very “ethically efficient” rule. So partly based on that idea, I see dietary ethics as being in the reference class of “personal life ethics,” which I downweight in my ethical calculus. That’s counterbalanced by the high level of suffering I have witnessed when I’ve watched factory farming videos, and counterbalanced again by the heavy integration into my culture and diet of meat consumption. And my current pattern of meat consumption—eating it, enjoying it, not feeling particularly guilty, but making gradual steps to phase out factory farmed meat—is the result of that balancing act.
But I would also add that I approve of people who are passionate about an ethical stance and take action to implement it in their lives, and so I applaud vegans and vegetarians, even though I do not join them. To me, it seems like there are many ways to be more virtuous in one’s live, and veganism and vegetarianism are two good examples but not mandatory for everyone.
Good information and worth sharing.
I’m going to share some information about my meat-heavy diet, not because I’m trying to troll or distract from this post, but because I think there is value in trying to triangulate between the experiences of successful vegans and continued meat-eaters. The theme here is “refuting anti-vegan myths,” and, on reflection, my resistance to becoming vegan comes from a different source, which I’ll share in case anybody else has information that might be relevant.
I eat meat, and am currently dieting for the first time after ballooning to a near-obese 210 lbs, 5′11″ during a sedentary two years in grad school eating far too much pizza. My diet essentially involves replacing grains and cheese with meat, vegetables, fruit, and low-fat yoghurt. I don’t have anything like your exercise routine, so my aim has been to target high protein, low calories, and fillingness while making what food I do consume palatable and very simple.
I do think that it would be possible to get enough protein in my diet by swapping out meat for beans, tofu/seitan, and protein powder. Unfortunately, I have never eaten anything based on tofu/seitan/protein powder that’s better than “edible,” and it would take a lot more patience with cooking to make beans consistently delicious-enough to form the basis of a palatable diet.
When meat eaters are trolling vegans, they sometimes justify their meat consumption by saying “meat is delicious!” On reflection, I actually do think that’s the explanation for why I continue to eat it—food’s one of the few hedonic pleasures I can access regularly in my otherwise spartan and sober lifestyle, I hate cooking, and it’s easy to make meat taste delicious while using it as the primary protein source in a healthy, balanced diet.
I also don’t share the intuitive impulse to not eat meat. I’ve owned pets, I’ve watched the documentaries about factory farming, I’ve worked with animals on farms, I’ve read the essays about animal cognition, and none of that has sparked a particular intellectual or emotional impulse to not eat meat. I recognize veganism as a morally safe choice. I just viscerally care about my diet and my enjoyment of food and shared eating experiences much more.
What I’ve rarely or never seen are anecdotes from “reluctant vegans”—people who, despite hating vegan food, not particularly feeling passionate about veganism, not having vegan friends, and missing on the easy sharing of meat-based meals with friends and family, nevertheless have made a principled choice to be vegan over the long-term purely on the grounds that it’s a morally safe choice. If I did see such anecdotes, I think that understanding why and how they made the switch might be helpful in making the switch myself. Unfortunately, I fear that promoting messages of “being vegan sucks—here’s why I do it anyway” might attract fewer vegans than it drives away, if there are even any vegans who feel this way.
This largely applies to me.
Growing up, I loved steak and meat-heavy meals, and I disliked salad and vegetarian dishes.
I wasn’t very passionate about veganism, since at the time, I didn’t know about factory farming. As a result, I dragged my feet for around two years from when I accepted the arguments until I actually went vegan.
I didn’t know any other vegan when I decided to go vegan.
My family and most friends are religious conservatives who frequently make fun of vegans.
My family and friends were very sad that I wasn’t able to partake in meat-based meals with them anymore.
When I went vegan, I wasn’t well-versed in moral philosophy. I was familiar with the analogous debate around abortion. Abortion opposers often argue from marginal cases that there’s no consistent dividing line between fetuses and born babies, and I considered how similar arguments from marginal cases would imply that we shouldn’t kill animals for our own pleasure.
After being vegan for over a year, I stumbled across Matt Adelstein’s article about how factory farming is the greatest atrocity in history. Somehow, I’d just never learned about factory farming prior to this. Veganism went from the “morally safe choice” to the overwhelmingly morally mandatory one. That, I think, is the difference between our approaches to veganism.
To me, calling veganism the “morally safe choice” is like if we have two choices: (a) burn a hundred pigs to death because it’s fun to watch them running around screaming, or (b) not do that, and calling (b) the “morally safe choice”. On the contrary, (a) is the choice only a psychopath would take, and (b) is the choice any person with a drop of morality or consistency would take, if they truly understood what was at stake.
Thanks for the information!
I’m curious, do you consider veganism more than “morally safe” if the meat-eater takes scrupulous care to source pasture raised and what we might call “artisanally slaughtered” meat and other animal products?
It kind of makes sense to me that veganism and being anti-abortion would go together—the points of view harmonize well. I personally have the opposite view, and think that both abortion and eating ethically raised meat are basically fine, even though many factory farming practices are apalling and there are probably some cases in which I would be disturbed by how a particular abortion played out.
I tend to think that it’s a combination of extended pain, awareness of death, and a principle of granting individual liberty to a conscious, aware individual that makes it impermissible to kill, and these don’t apply in the case of abortion or in the case of ethical animal farming and slaughter. However, I personally fail routinely to take fully scrupulous care to avoid factory farmed meat (although I have plans to do better starting in the fall, when that will become more logistically possible), and I also acknowledge that it’s hard to be sure of where your animal products come from. Furthermore, I could be wrong about the extent of the distress of consciousness-level of even putatively ethically farmed livestock, and for these reasons, despite me thinking meat-eating is theoretically fine, I think that in practice, uncertainty makes veganism “morally safe.”
Thanks for the response! I think the care required to be a “morally safe” meat eater would have to be very scrupulous indeed. Effectively, one would have to be vegan when eating food bought by others, unless they are confident that the buyer shares their philosophy of scrupulously verifying humane raising and slaughter.
Almost all restaurants optimize for cost reduction when sourcing their animal products, so one would eat vegan at restaurants. This also means being vegan for Uber Eats, street food, food at the baseball game, etc.
Anytime one goes to a friend’s house, they shouldn’t eat the friend’s meat, unless they know the friend shares their philosophy, or they had the friend specifically buy the meat for them. This means being vegan or extremely scrupulous for barbecues, hangouts, etc.
I scrupulously kept kosher during my childhood and adolescence, which seems to require a similar level of effort. I almost never ate out, except at the single-digit restaurants in my town which were certified kosher. At baseball games, I had drinks but not food. I didn’t eat any meals prepared at my non-religious or non-Jewish friends’ houses, unless it was obviously raw (like a carrot) or in kosher packaging (like kosher snacks).
Let me tell you, that was a lot of work! Even though veganism is much more restrictive, I actually find it far easier to keep, since it’s relatively easily verifiable and communicable.
I’m sure that it would be difficult to eliminate all unethical meat consumption, and I applaud you for trying before you went entirely veg*an. I don’t have a very absolutist take on it. “Morally safe” is a relative term to me, and I don’t feel like a moral disaster has occurred if I eat factory farmed meat once in a while. It’s a bit like how I approached COVID safety: I will accept greater levels of harm/risk in order to enjoy a socially meaningful experience than I will in circumstances that are less meaningful. Similarly, I’ll eat ethical meat at home and not worry about the origin of the meat when eating out or at a restaurant. I think that if everybody followed this policy, that would represent a radical improvement in the way we treat animals.
I guess on a broader level, I’m interested in small dietary interventions that still make a big difference in terms of decreasing one’s marginal contribution to animal cruelty. It’s way easier for some people to reduce meat consumption and shift toward pasture-raised meat and home-layed eggs in their home cooking than it is for them to become vegetarian/vegan or to rigorously check the origins of all meat consumed at restaurants and social occasions. That doesn’t apply to everybody, of course—for some, it’s more straightforward to cut out meat entirely, others are more committed to eliminating meat on ethical or compassion grounds, and still others simply can’t afford meat unless it’s factory-farmed, enforcing a binary choice between veg*ism or unethical meat consumption.
A third aspect is social and signaling considerations. I have a lot of respect for veg*ans such as yourself who took a principled ethical stand and fought for it despite social pressure and inconvenience. I think that can be very persuasive to some people, although unfortunately as you may have experienced, some people will be rude or frustrated by it. I think there is room for modeling multiple approaches to reducing unethical meat consumption, and one of them is the “80% is good enough” approach that I’m trying to practice. Big tent meat reduction?
Just in case it wasn’t clear in my post, I am very interested in this approach as well! I applaud you for thinking along these lines. Every little bit helps. This Future Perfect article titled “the difference you make when you eat less meat” does a great job of showing how eating less meat can make a big difference in terms of animal welfare and climate concerns.
I think basically all of veganism is just degrees of this harm reduction approach. Someone like Brian Tomasik might look at my supposedly vegan lifestyle and weep, seeing that I crunch springtails underfoot when I walk in my lawn, I buy some produce that was grown with pesticides, and I buy non-vegan products for my wife and other family members.
If more people took your 80% approach there would be far fewer conscious animals tortured in tiny cages. Which would be a huge win.
I have experience with that: eating meat at home but rather strictly not at restaurants for exactly the reasons you mention: it tends to simply be almost impossible to find a restaurant that seems to serve not-crazily-mistreated animals.
Doing that as vegan-in-restaurants (instead of vegetarian-in-restaurants) is significantly more difficult, but from my experience, one can totally get used to try to remain veg* outside but non-veg* at home where one can go for food with some expectation of net positive animal lives.
Few particular related experiences:
Even people who knew me rather well, would intuitively totally not understand the principle. I at times kind of felt bad to buy meat when they’re there as I knew they thought I’m vegan and will be confused, even though I would have told them time and again I simply avoid conventional meat/in restaurants and/or at their place etc.
I’m always astonished at the so many people who supposedly care about animals do the other way round: In restaurants they eat meat but not at home. Weird, given it’s so obvious in the restaurants is the worst stuff ((and they’re not the kind of perfect EA where a dollar saved would be used towards most effective causes, which could naturally complicate the choices))
Restaurants indeed do, behaviorally, absolutely not care about animal welfare. For a food animal welfare compensation project we tried to get a bunch of restaurants to accept that we source higher-welfare meat for them, without them having to pay anything for it. It was in almost all places not possible at all: (i) Even just the slightest potential logistical extra step and/or (ii) potentially a reputational fear from anything about their usual sourcing being leaked to the unconscious public, seemed to make them reluctant to participate.
(Then, I don’t want to praise my habits; I hope I find the courage again to become more vegan sometime, as everything else feels like inflicting unacceptable suffering and/or wasting a lot of money on expensive food, and I’m not sure my ‘maybe it helps my health’ justifies it/there must be better ways. All my sympathy if someone calls health a bad excuse for non-veganism, but I definitely maintain, if it’s not about health questions, once one gets used to avoid meat and/or animal products, it only becomes easier over time, in terms of logistics and getting to know tasty alternatives, either simply only outside or also at home)
Thanks for the interesting comment and dialogue!
This part stood out to me, because I had the opposite reaction:
I used to love eating meat. When I went vegan I realized I could get just as much satisfaction from any protein rich, umami-filled, sauce covered or well seasoned food. My pet theory is that what everyone mostly likes when they eat animals is the added sauces and seasonings, not the meat. Bland, unseasoned chicken breast is terrible.
But like I said in my post, I don’t have a refined palate, so maybe to those with better taste buds meat really is that delightful.
For me, palatability is about texture at least as much as taste. What I’ve found, unfortunately, is that even the best imitation meats, like beyond burgers, certain vegan sausages, and chick’n, are in the uncanny valley of meatlike textures. I agree with you that chicken is rather bland on its own, and if an imitation chicken could nail the texture, I would probably be fine crossing over. Red meat supplies much of its own flavor, and beyond burger and its similars have yet to really approach either the texture or flavor.
I think vegan sausage might be approachable, and have the added benefit that, AFAIK, vegan sausage has no need to contain carcinogenic nitrates. Also, since a lot of sausage is either chicken or pig based, which I believe have the worst factory farming, it would be nice to eliminate meat based sausage and replace it with a vegetarian/vegan alternative. I haven’t put much effort into locating the best vegan sausage, or heard much hype about it.
Surprised. Maybe worth giving it another try, looking longer for good imitations—given today’s wealth of really good ones (besides admittedly a ton of bad, assuming you really need them to imitate the original so much): I’ve made friends taste veg* burgers and chicken nuggets and they were rather surprised when I told them post-hoc that these had not been meat. I once had to double-check with the counter at the restaurant as I could not believe what I had in my plate was really not chicken. Maybe that speaks against the fine taste of me and some, but I really find it’s rather easily possible to find truly great textures too if one really cares.
Then, I personally don’t know any “uncanny valley” in that domain; make it a bit more or less fake feeling, it doesn’t really matter much to me, so maybe you really experience that very differently.
*I don’t know/remember whether vegan or vegetarian.
“I also don’t share the intuitive impulse to not eat meat. I’ve owned pets, I’ve watched the documentaries about factory farming, I’ve worked with animals on farms, I’ve read the essays about animal cognition, and none of that has sparked a particular intellectual or emotional impulse to not eat meat.”
Has any of that changed the kind of meat you eat, in terms of how the animals lived and died? I do get the argument-from-deliciousness (the sheer enjoyment of really good cheese is why I’m not fully vegan despite having been happily vegetarian for >30 years), but I’d find it really hard to eat, say, something containing eggs from caged hens. The visceral horror would outweigh any good sensory feelings, for me. Do you encounter any of that?
Yes, my partner keeps chickens in the backyard, so that’s the only eggs I typically eat, and we are considering buying a meat freezer and ordering shares of pasture-raised livestock instead of buying at the supermarket. I tend to think that eating meat is more or less perfectly fine as long as the animal didn’t suffer excessively during its life. I think that’s less of a morally safe position than not eating meat at all. I’d personally like to see more consideration (not necessarily endorsement, just consideration) within the EA movement of pasture-raised/low-meat diets as an alternative to vegetarianism and veganism. Right now I feel like there’s a lot of guidance available for people going vegan/vegetarian, but not much for people trying to do ethical/low-meat diets.
I found this to be a very helpful comment. In some of the recent discussions about veg*nism, I felt most people were assuming an implied binary choice between going vegan and ratifying the factory-farming system by consuming its products. We domesticated animals over 10,000 years ago, and have been eating them for thousands of years before factory farming was a thing. How to obtain animal products without factory farming is, from a historical perspective, a solved problem.[1] For people who have sufficient financial resources and some motivation, the biggest barrier may be differentiating between companies who want you to believe their products are consistent with animal welfare and those that actually are.
To be sure, non-FF animal products are expensive, and one could achieve more impact by donating the marginal additional cost to ACE-recommended charities. However, some of us have deontologists and virtue ethicists in our moral parliament. And consuming factory-farmed products likely generates epistemic bias through cognitive dissonance (e.g., by making it harder to expand the moral circle). Moreover, the extra cost of purchasing non-FF animal products should probably be considered a personal cost of one’s consumption choices, not a part of one’s effective altruism. People spend their own money on stuff that isn’t very effective in an EA sense (like pets), and that’s fine.
Of course, non-FF animal products are generally not financially competitive with FF ones. That is not a solved problem.
Overall I have been pleasantly surprised at how constructive this conversation has been, thanks to OP for creating space for it. Generally I find ethical discussion with EAs to be pleasant, but I had anticipated there might be an exception where veg*ism is concerned.
I would add one extra point, which is that while I do think that all of life’s activities come into the scope of ethics, I think it’s important to preserve space to make meaningful decisions without subjecting each one to conscious ethical deliberation. By analogy, sometimes we scrutinize all the available data before we make a decision; other times, we ask an expert or a friend for their opinion and defer; and still other times, we just go with our gut. I think this also applies to ethical quesitons.
There’s a perfectly good reason to elevate meat and animal product consumption to a higher level of ethical attention. But what ought our total “ethics budget” be, and what would an appropriate allocation of ethical attention be, considering all the many problems in the world? My ethics budget is relatively small, and mainly reserved for issues related to my professional work and expertise—I am interested in issues related to biomedicine because I am a professional biomedical researcher, and spend considerable time on the ethics of organ sales because that is a particularly important, tractable and neglected question to interrogate.
It seems to me that the idea that all our personal life decisions ought to be the subject of continuous moral scrutiny, or that we ought to be making “morally safe choices” in all areas of life all the time, is an overly restrictive and not very “ethically efficient” rule. So partly based on that idea, I see dietary ethics as being in the reference class of “personal life ethics,” which I downweight in my ethical calculus. That’s counterbalanced by the high level of suffering I have witnessed when I’ve watched factory farming videos, and counterbalanced again by the heavy integration into my culture and diet of meat consumption. And my current pattern of meat consumption—eating it, enjoying it, not feeling particularly guilty, but making gradual steps to phase out factory farmed meat—is the result of that balancing act.
But I would also add that I approve of people who are passionate about an ethical stance and take action to implement it in their lives, and so I applaud vegans and vegetarians, even though I do not join them. To me, it seems like there are many ways to be more virtuous in one’s live, and veganism and vegetarianism are two good examples but not mandatory for everyone.