Every once in a while I get that ominous feeling that killing and specially making animals suffer just for me to eat meat, fish and lactose is extremely wrong, but then I kinda forget.
I kinda see myself hunting wild game though so it’s weird.
For the most part, if you’re eating meat in 2020, you’re eating more vegetables indirectly through the animals you’re eating, so whatever slave labor is used to grow the vegetables that the animals eat is still more than whatever slave labor is used to grow the vegetables a vegan eats.
So now we judge the quantity of slave labor that an individual indirectly causes? Does that mean that people who require higher calorie based are now more guilty based on the food to slavery index? I personally don’t eat sweets, and for every 100 tonnes of sugar cane harvested, only 8 tonnes of sugar is produced. Does this make me better than the vegans who do eat candies and such then?
I hope you understand how pedantic and purposeless this conversation gets when we’re trying to weigh how much slave labor each of our diets produce to artificially see who’s the better person.
Slave labor is one metric, water resources is another. It’s something that we all need and there is only so much of it. Veganism is just less wasteful than other forms of sustenance, from resources to labor.
Making a case based one the .1% of the population that requires a high calorie diet for things like ultra competitive athletics is bordering on ridiculous. Most people can function on a modest caloric diet.
Higher calory diets aren’t just for pro athletes, some people just need to eat more food to sustain themselves, i.e. hetero men needing to eat 25% more than hetero women, or just larger and taller people needing to eat more in general.
But that’s not even the basis of what I’m trying to say and I have a feeling you didn’t attempt to read it past the first sentence. Like I said, I don’t eat sweets, meanwhile crops like sugar and coco require huge amounts of raw harvest to produce only a small amount of the final product, and are infamous for abuses of slave labor and unlivable working conditions in places in South America.
Does this then make me, a non-sweet eating omnivore, better than a vegan who likes to have candy? Do we need to each determine how much slave labor our individual diets support to see who the best leftsist is? This whole argument applies to other foods like oils, grains, etc. too. If you want to be vegan, then that’s okay, but attacking omnivores is just so unnecessarily devisive and counterproductive towards solving issues like slave labor.
I’m not sure what to tell you. It’s my position that less slave labor is better than more. This is not a difficult proposition.
And yet I’m sure you still eat things, purchase things, take part in things that are completely unnecessary towards basic human needs.
In that case, what point does comparing the total percentage of slave labor you contributed towards do except create a moral hierarchy of good to bad leftists (or just people in general) that you want to put yourself in? Should the omnivore be shamed that they rank worse on that hierarchy than the vegan? Should the vegan be shamed that they rank worse than the monk? I would argue that it is the intent behind people’s actions- do they oppose slave labor, do they believe in equality- that matters much more than individual lifestyle choices. And arguing that such a moral heirarchy should exist only serves to alienate and divide.
