What does being "vegan on principle" mean here? What specific principles are you talking about?
Some vegans do it because killing animals is morally bankrupt.
Some vegans do it because raising livestock is unsustainable. There is not enough land on earth for everyone to have a meat diet.
Some vegans do it because it's healthier. In general you can expect to ingest less toxins by eating lower on the food chain.
I'm not sure what vegan principles are violated by GMOs. I don't know of anyone who is actually against GMOs, the debate is around labeling them not banning them.
Personally I don't understand why someone wouldn't want to eat pesticide/herbicide drenched food. It's how we're going to feed the third world.
> Some vegans do it because raising livestock is unsustainable. There is not enough land on earth for everyone to have a meat diet.
I'm dubious about this statement. There is a lot of ocean, so seafood farming is probably quite capable of feeding humans meat. In addition, western societies currently overconsume meat. I suspect that if calorically balanced levels of consumption were observed, we probably have plenty of land.
> Some vegans do it because it's healthier. In general you can expect to ingest less toxins by eating lower on the food chain.
I see a lot of vegans eating far less healthy diets than those of carnivores. They up the oil and carb content quite significantly to make things taste better/create satiety.
I find that vegetarians (and even those who just back off on meat) seem to eat healthier than vegans, in general.
One pound of beef requires 1,847 gallons of water. Cattle produce a huge amount of methane. Ranchers use antibiotics profligately. Cows require a terrific amount of energy to grow, relative to plants, meaning lots of the corn we grow in the US goes to meat, which is far less energy efficient.
Not all people subscribe to the conventional wisdom that carbs and oils are unconditionally unhealthy.
Oils can help your body absorb nutrients more effectively and also aid in other cellular processes.
Carbs are energy and your body needs this.
The key is to not consume processed carbs/oils that your body can't integrate.
Carbs from fruits and natural oils (like coconut) are a large component of any thoughtful vegan's diet. You can eat lots of these foods because they not only have carbs but they also have fiber, protein and other vitamins in good proportion, so "carb the f* up!"
Obsessively starving your body of all carbs and eating lots of meat is an extreme and unbalanced diet and will certainly lead to an early death. Just eat whole foods.
I prefer (and am so far practicing my self) population control to bring the number of humans inhabiting Earth towards a /sustainable/ level with all living humans having the quality of life we'd like to see.
For the record, I know plenty of people who are actually against GMO's and want them labelled so that all consumers can boycott them and they get forced out of the market.
I don't think getting GMOs labeled is a plot to get all consumers to boycott them... It's so the subsection of the population that cares about ingesting GMOs can make an informed choice when buying food.
That's like saying getting kosher food labeled was really a plot to get everyone to boycott all non-kosher food.
That's not the plan by everyone who wants labelling, no. All I said is that I know people who do want/expect it to work that way. (I neither want it to or believe that it will).
A vegan or vegetarian diet (as commonly practiced, with loads of grains, potatoes, sugar, etc, etc) tends to be much less healthy than a meat-loaded keto diet.
It's an informal sociological clustering observation. Vegans are often sort of 'hippy' types, who place value on food being 'natural', 'organic' and dislike GMOs.
Ohhh I see. It's similar to how vegans generally consider all non-vegans immoral lazy unhealthy fat poison-eating murderers. The informal sociological clustering is efficient since the generalization is ~80% true. Nuance wastes too much time.
Is linking to some random opinion article on the Internet your way of arguing for the validity of stereotypes? Well, I'm convinced. Too bad "accurate enough" doesn't work in physics, we'd already understand the universe by now!
> It's a GMO, and people who're vegan on principle often don't like that.
veganism != primitivism
I understand that there's an overlap between "I don't eat that, I'm vegan" and "I don't eat that, it's not natural", but when I think of vegan principles I think of animal rights -- not fallacious appeals to nature.
> It's a GMO, and people who're vegan on principle often don't like that.
That's okay! They're already vegan, so clearly they've already found a way to eat a meat-free diet that works for them.
Carnivores are a much bigger market to chase than vegans. These new meat substitutes are targeted at converting more carnivores, not making existing vegans happier.
As a carnivore, don't try to make a fake steak, if I wanted a steak I would by one. Instead try to create food so delicious that I want to eat it, even if it happens to be vegan.
You won't convince me with ethical arguments, you won't convince me with guilt, you won't convince me with health (I am sitting with a glass of whiskey right now), but you might convince me with taste.
That actually ties into an interesting problem: People who are vegetarian/vegan for ethical reasons and lab-grown meat.
One idea is, instead of trying to make plant-based food taste like meat, just make meat that doesn't involve raising and killing animals. Efforts thus far have had only mild success (IIRC, it's been done at great cost, and it reportedly tasted terrible).
Assuming these efforts succeed, where does that leave me? I have no objection to harming cells, but I'd be against the killing/harming of the various animals necessary to GET the initial stem cells to be able to grow that lab meat. But, if they perfect a method of growing "meat" that no longer involves that mistreatment, at what point is it morally acceptable to me to buy and eat that "meat"?
I imagine it's similar to anyone in a field that benefits from ethically questionable research. Military smallpox testing, that one king that raised "feral" children to see what their tabula rasa state was, the Milgram experiments...I suppose this falls in the same, um, vein.
> Efforts thus far have had only mild success (IIRC, it's been done at great cost, and it reportedly tasted terrible).
I have so much hope for this. I'm not vegetarian, but I wouldn't mind cutting out animal cruelty from my life as much as possible, as it is a place I recognize cognitive dissonance in myself. I'm really hoping they can get the cost down, and since it's controlled, can start experimenting on ways to improve taste (artificial stimulation, etc). I see no reason why we can't eventually grow meat that tastes multiples better. It's not like nature selected for pigs and cows to taste good (although we may have, over the last few hundreds or thousands of years).
> Assuming these efforts succeed, where does that leave me?
Hopefully, it means you'll eventually be eating the best burger you've ever tasted. :)
> at what point is it morally acceptable to me to buy and eat that "meat"?
I would assume immediately at the point there's a version that doesn't harm animals, if you're in it for ethical reasons. I'm not sure I understand the question, or the implications, because it doesn't seem controversial to me at all, given the predicates.
> I imagine it's similar to anyone in a field that benefits from ethically questionable research.
I'm not sure it's related at all. What animals are harmed to help us get better lab-grown meat?
That said, questionable research it's a very interesting question in itself. I've been culturally indoctrinated to belief that it's bad, but rationally, if the resaerch leads to improved lives for people during the time we would not know that information until we found it otherwise, shouldn't we weigh that correctly? Would a study that resulted in the death of 1000 people but eliminated heart disease be worth it? Yes, but we can't know what any specific research will result in, so all we do is increase the risk of our gambles with the hope of a bigger payoff.
That said, I think we need more nuanced rules regarding some studies and people that want in them. If someone is already terminally ill, but it shouldn't affect the study, I don't see the problem with a large payout to participate in a very dangerous study.
> What animals are harmed to help us get better lab-grown meat?
I'm assuming the acquisition of the original cells is not done at all kindly, (as in, I suspect the animal doesn't survive it), and that this is done many, many times before they perfect the process, but I'll admit that's an assumption on my part and it could be well within my ethical boundaries.
I don't plan to prejudge any options until I actually know, this was more of a hypothetical exercise that I've pondered now and again because I assume the day will come when it's actually real and the question will no longer be hypothetical. Knowing what matters to me then is better than trying to figure it out on the spot.
> I'm assuming the acquisition of the original cells is not done at all kindly, (as in, I suspect the animal doesn't survive it), and that this is done many, many times before they perfect the process
I was sort of under the impression it's animal stem cells, which doesn't necessitate death on the part of the animal (although I'll give you it's probably likely, to easy harvesting in some way). Like human stem cells, they aren't consumed entirely in use, which is good since US law precludes any new lines of stem cells in research[1]. There are 279 approved lines of cells in the US, but most researchers just use two or three lines. They just culture more cells from that line when they need them.
Well, it's only hypothetical in that it costs far too much at the moment, but if if trends continue from the extremely small dataset I've seen[2], we're seeing a 60% drop in price per year. If it's $18k a pound now, it should be under $10 a pound in 15 years (which might match the cost of beef with inflation by then). So, count on it in 15 years. Totally scientific. ;)
It's a GMO, and people who're vegan on principle often don't like that.