A while back I looked into using lard and/or bacon in otherwise vegan cooking. The idea being that you could use a fairly small amount of animal product to great gastronomical effect. One way to think about this is to consider whether you would prefer: A: Rice and lentils with a tablespoon of bacon B: Rice with 0.25lb ground beef
I did the math on this, and it works out surprisingly poorly for lard. You’re consuming 1/8th as much mass, which sounds good, except that by some measures, producing pig induces 4x as much suffering as producing beef per unit of mass. So it’s a modest 2x gain, but nothing revolutionary.
On the other hand, the math works out really favorably for butter. Using that same linked analysis, if you can replace 100g beef with lentils fried in 10g butter, you’re inducing ~150x less suffering.
One upshot of this is that almost all the harm averted by consuming vegan baked goods instead of conventional ones is from avoiding the eggs, rather than the butter. So I would really love to see a “veganish” bakeshop that uses butter but not eggs.
A while back I looked into using lard and/or bacon in otherwise vegan cooking. The idea being that you could use a fairly small amount of animal product to great gastronomical effect. One way to think about this is to consider whether you would prefer:
A: Rice and lentils with a tablespoon of bacon
B: Rice with 0.25lb ground beef
I did the math on this, and it works out surprisingly poorly for lard. You’re consuming 1/8th as much mass, which sounds good, except that by some measures, producing pig induces 4x as much suffering as producing beef per unit of mass. So it’s a modest 2x gain, but nothing revolutionary.
On the other hand, the math works out really favorably for butter. Using that same linked analysis, if you can replace 100g beef with lentils fried in 10g butter, you’re inducing ~150x less suffering.
One upshot of this is that almost all the harm averted by consuming vegan baked goods instead of conventional ones is from avoiding the eggs, rather than the butter. So I would really love to see a “veganish” bakeshop that uses butter but not eggs.