this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2023
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Vegan
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Does your impact have to be massive for you to act? me not throwing trash out the window isn't going to stop millions of others from doing it, but my impact is still there (ex:go vegan for a year, and your local grocery/fast food place/etc sees a reduction in meat sales and orders 0.001% less for their next shipment)
Right. It's also the right and good thing to do and you should be commended for it. The two aren't mutually exclusive.
People who eat meat know it can be healthy and terrible for your diet. The same way any other foodstuff is. They also know you're killing animals, often in terrible conditions. If you go through life caring about everything that has ethical dilemmas though, you wouldn't be using microprocessors, any clothing that wasn't made and grown by yourself, etc. You DEFINITELY wouldn't be on the internet lol. The Good Place had a wonderful look on going through that moral extreme.
Even going the living healthier route, the bigger issue is ultra/processed foods.
Veganism equating boycotting the meat industry is great for your mental, but does a basically non-zero hit to their margins in actuality. People advocating, voting, and being vocal are what makes the small then large changes to shift the food industry paradigm to non-sentient meat options. The people smart enough to make real efforts into alternatives are doing so. Yeah, you want to participate too and feel like you're doing something, and you are, but let's not pretend it's not for your own mental benefit. Both through how you feel by advocating for animals that can't help themselves, and by not participating directly in something you don't like as well.
so slightly irrelevant since I assume you're speaking generally but, have used the same clothes/computer/phone, for ~10 years, not to say I'm living with the bare necessities but I do try to limit those as well.
I do agree it's impossible to be 100% moral in modern society and do harm to no one, but paying $200 every 10 years to a company that far down the line has poor labor practices (without my money these people have no job so even this is debatable), when I essentially can not participate in society without doing these smaller harms, seems to me leagues different.
With meat, you are as closely as possible saying with your wallet "please raise and kill more of this animal as your company does now" while knowing many suppliers either nearly torture the animals they raise, or raise/kill them in really inhumane ways. If you're still eating meat, you are the direct cause of several animals living that terrible life. I can also exist in society with an inconvenience of not eating meat, whereas I can't without shoes, a phone, a computer for work, etc