Thanks for this. I agree it doesn’t neatly follow from the principles earlier in the piece: if you measure diets monolithically, there are only a few, then it is not that surprising to have one keep coming top. Conversely, if measured as classes, as you say it becomes less surprising to find a particular (large) set of diets keep coming top.
However, I still think it is a bit surprising. I think on most reasonable measures vegan diets are a minority of the space of diets available—both in practice and in theory there are a lot more ways of having animal products and non-animal products than just the latter. So if this minority set keeps coming up top when looking at many disparate considerations, we should ask why. If it were just two, maybe that isn’t so bad, but X, Y, Z, W etc. becomes more and more surprising.
(I agree with your determinations on the object level issues. There’s a clear case for veganism being best for animal welfare, and that expectedly correlates with environmental impact, but less so health and taste. I wouldn’t be altogether surprised to find that a diet optimized purely for low environmental impact might include some animal products, much less surprised if one for optimized for health did, and pretty confident one for taste would.)
Thanks for this. I agree it doesn’t neatly follow from the principles earlier in the piece: if you measure diets monolithically, there are only a few, then it is not that surprising to have one keep coming top. Conversely, if measured as classes, as you say it becomes less surprising to find a particular (large) set of diets keep coming top.
However, I still think it is a bit surprising. I think on most reasonable measures vegan diets are a minority of the space of diets available—both in practice and in theory there are a lot more ways of having animal products and non-animal products than just the latter. So if this minority set keeps coming up top when looking at many disparate considerations, we should ask why. If it were just two, maybe that isn’t so bad, but X, Y, Z, W etc. becomes more and more surprising.
(I agree with your determinations on the object level issues. There’s a clear case for veganism being best for animal welfare, and that expectedly correlates with environmental impact, but less so health and taste. I wouldn’t be altogether surprised to find that a diet optimized purely for low environmental impact might include some animal products, much less surprised if one for optimized for health did, and pretty confident one for taste would.)