Unless someone is a on a serious carnivore diet, then we probably eat “vegan” more than we realize.

I had an English muffin with some homemade wild raspberry jam and a banana with my tea this morning. I have already planned an Indian lentil curry and rice for supper tonight. I don’t know what I’m having for dinner today, but I could have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich I suppose.

A whole day without meat. Not that I actually considered doing that because “vegan.” But because that’s what sounds good to eat today. Tomorrow, maybe some smoked oyster stuffed venison loin chops for supper perhaps or some eggs and bacon for breakfast.

what you believe is not shown by what you just tell yourself in your head, but shown by how you act. it means that if you say you believe in the ideals of veganism but can’t give up a meal of bacon for it, you simply don’t hold that value strong enough.

which is fine, its okay to be unsure about your values, but lets not confuse ourselves here by saying we can hold certain values without behaving like we actually do.

Vegans will hate me for this but I only eat animals that I don’t find particularly cute.

I don’t eat pig or cow meat because they are beautiful, intelligent animals with great personalities. I do eat lamb because I’ve worked on sheep farms and they are dumb assholes. I eat chicken because they are basically vicious dinosaurs who would eat me if our sizes were reversed.

I’ve yet to get first hand experience with live sausages in their natural environment so I proceed with caution on a case by case basis.

On the one hand I approve of this strategy, on the other hand there are so many people that lie to me and themselves that they only eat animal products rarely or only from the most local grass fed farmer and then you spend time with them and you see they always choose the meat option, every single opportunity and since its the cheap corner restaurant that pece of meat has never seen grass in its’ life. It’s disheartening.

FUCK YES to oat milk. I love oat milk. I also love cheese and haven’t really found a good substitute yet, but oat milk is the GOAT milk.

As a vegan I’m in favour of this because it makes it very clear in what specific way I am superior to someone

If I went vegan+bacon I would just end up eating a grotesque amount of bacon.

Everything in moderation, including moderation.

Sure, but there are really good vegan substitutes for bacon now. I think that tempeh bacon tastes better, and it’s healthier, too.

An issue with boycotts in general is that people are constantly talking about what not to do and not what to do alternatively or the specifics on how to get there. Eventually it makes you realize that literally anything you do will cause someone to get genocided or abused somewhere, and when they way out isn’t clear or straightforward, now you’re overwhelmed with thousands of things you hate that you do and have to figure out how to change on your own one by one, and those changes result in new problems that overwhelm you or turn out to also be unethical and you have to change them yet again. And in the end you hate yourself because your change attempts made you miserable while you’re still doing doing harmful things and other people hate you because you’re still causing genocides and the rest think you’re an idiot or a hypocrite for trying at all, while meanwhile everyone else around you is just enjoying themselves and not giving a fuck, and you’ll always be a terrible person anyways so you might as well give up.

I think if more people instead of saying “don’t do this” instead said “do this instead” when they talked about what to boycott and why, that would help with harm reduction a lot more.

i always wanted to quit smoking, but couldn’t drop the first cigarette with my morning coffee. it took me way too long to make peace with that single cigarette, turns out i can easily forgoe the other 19 I’ve been smoking every day

I feel like this is a labels issue though… Lots of people don’t want to go “vegan” or “vegetarian” because of a small group of vegans, but if you were to give them a meal without announcing it was vegan they’d probably enjoy it.

Same to an extent for me: I could never give up dairy because I love milk, cheese and butter too much, but I do eat (asian style) vegetarian meals multiple times a week and have at most one meat meal per day, instead of at every meal, and I have a mindset that meat is nice but not that you can’t make other nice dishes with mushrooms, tofu, cheese, etc. - you just have to make different things.

Reframing it as “look at these nice things you can have” seems I think is a lot more accessible than telling people they shouldn’t eat meat, or they should eat less meat, or that the other proteins are just a substitute for meat, which makes it seem like you’re missing out on sobering.

In a sense they’re not wrong, but it depends on what is actually happening, and what the person’s attitude is. It’s good to pursue a lifestyle that’s increasingly less dependent on animal products, even if imperfect. But is an actual progression occurring? It can often be the case, especially with dietary things, that a person will do something they believe is good once, and then treat themselves with a “cheat” day three times to that one good choice.

My change didn’t happen overnight. But I approached it the same way that I did when I quit smoking: I kept track of how long I went without eating animal products. When I messed up and caved in, I would start over at 0 the very next day, and resolve to go even more days without animal products than I had done on the previous attempt.

One of the larger barriers I had to break through was an anxiety about nutrition. By that point I had a pretty firm grasp of nutritional science already, and knew that people can get all of their nutrients from plants. Consciously I knew better. But unconsciously there was still this wild fear as to whether or not I could keep living on plants only. It felt dangerous. I was going up against a lifetime of propaganda.

The last time I intentionally ate meat was some pepperoni. At that point I had gotten so used to living on plants that it didn’t taste the same anymore. For one, it turned out at least for me, that after being without meat for long enough, it didn’t smell the same anymore. The odor became more rotten. It didn’t and doesn’t matter how fresh the meat is, it all smells like putrefying carcass now. That was one thing that made the pepperoni taste off. The other was that apparently I had gotten used to having less salt in my diet, because it was a completely overpowering, disgusting salt bomb.

And something had clicked in my head by that point. As I was eating it I kept thinking, “Why am I doing this? I’m not even enjoying it. I don’t need it. This isn’t right.” So I stopped eating it, and I haven’t felt the need to consume any animal body parts ever again.

Anyway, I think where things become frustrating depends on how a person is framing their habits. If it’s something like, “I’m trying, I am working on doing better,” then it’s understandable. But if it sounds more like the person is trying to justify eating animals or their products, and they’re either talking about it in a way where they’re trying to seek validation or using “militant vegans” as a strawman to criticise (see: the majority of the comments here) - that kind of makes it hard to remain diplomatic.

In cases like the latter, why are you so preoccupied with what other people think? It’s not about vegans, it’s about the animals. Going vegan requires going against an immense tide of social pressure, and that burden will never go away. You need to learn to think for yourself. Because when you do, you can look more objectively at how humankind treats every other species of sentient being on the planet and use your own internal moral compass to finally recognize what’s right in front of your face: it is wrong to eat them. It is wrong to exploit them. What happens in factory farms and slaughterhouses is horrific. And it can never stop until we stop supporting it.

It’s a hard conversation because y’all are demanding we tiptoe around a vast injustice that is urgent and actively resulting in the extreme suffering and deaths of billions every year. That’s not even getting into the other issues like health problems, environmental destruction, and pandemic and zoonotic disease potential.

I very often have whole days in my week, probably 2 or 3 where I don’t eat any meat at all. I am definitely no vegetarian, I love pork in all it’s forms. But the whole idea of having to have meat with every meal is ridiculous. Beans, falafel, cheese, tofu, etc are all tasty ways to get protein and are usually quite cheap as well.

And yeah the only non open source software I use is games. It took a couple years to get off windows, but I’ve been Linux as my daily driver since 2015 or 2016.

I’m not foss at my core OS level unfortunately because of nvidia hardware and my brother insisting “Windows 11 is fine dude! Stick with Windows!”, its funny hes got a AMD card…

I have a Windows 11 gaming 4070 SUPER Desktop as well as an elderly Windows 10 TV “Console” 2070 desktop. I have both LCD & OLED Steam Decks and some “revived from Windows bloat” linux laptops.

I am tempted to convert the “console” to Bazzite once I get the time to set that up but its my old gaming PC and I know they’re old irreplaceable files I want to scoop up before I wipe it and install that.

That all said, on my windows machines I use foss whenever available.