Yeah? And what part of the meat most people buy is natural? Tell you what, if you insist on eating meat, then go get a sharp stick and hunt it yourself. Not with a rifle or anything like that btw, that’s not “natural” either. Sharpen a stick with your own teeth and face that herd of wild bison with it, good luck! Not only will we won’t bother you in that case, but if you can pull it off and make it out alive none of us would even be in a position to bother you and will probably be scared as hell of you.

And don’t you start with “do you know how processed and full or cHeMiCaLs those vegan meats are?” Yes, I’m aware you need to do a lot of processing to make plants look like meat. You also need a lot of processing to make meat look like the meat you’d recognize. You can make fairly convincing plant based meats fairly easily from grocery store ingredients in your own kitchen btw, in that case it’s still processed food (processed by you), processed isn’t this scary word that means the food is evil.

“What about all the artificial flavours?” What about them? Just because it’s artificial does not mean it’s dangerous or even that it did not come from a natural source. When you eat organic almonds, you’re ingesting something called “benzaldehyde”, which is the primary flavour compound that we associate with almonds (it’s not cyanide, that’s a myth, cyanide smells like bitter almonds, not the sweet almonds people normally eat, because bitter almonds actually produce quite a bit of HCN, but most people have never smelled bitter almonds before since it’s very uncommon, and even then most of the smell of bitter almonds still comes from benzaldehyde). When you eat an artificially flavoured almond bread, you’re ingesting that exact same chemical, but because we synthesize it in a factory instead of milling tons of almonds to get a comparatively tiny amount of oil it’s “artificial”, does it mean it’s evil?

And you know who else gets tons of nutritional supplements among numerous other drugs? Livestock. The ironic thing is that the drugs they give livestock doesn’t actually end up as nutrients for us, they’re to keep the animals alive long enough to produce an economical amount of meat because they live in environments they are totally unsuited for and would die immediately if not heavily supplemented. So yeah, tell me again about how raising livestock is “natural” while a human taking supplements is not.

Also, I’m about to dive into the concept of “natural” and “nature” here. I’m an environmental science/conservation major, which is where I get my hatred for modern meat production from. The notion of “humans are not part of nature”, that we’re above it or parallel to it is totally false. We evolved on this planet, we’re subject to its rules. Everything we do is “natural”, including using our naturally big brains to develop alternatives to meat and then choosing not to eat meat anymore.

Deviating just a bit from veganism to colonialism: The concept of “humans are not apart of nature” has historically been used to justify oppression of indigenous peoples. Those national parks that no one is allowed to live in because they want to “preserve the nature”? They were filled with Indigenous peoples doing their things for ten thousand years, until Europeans came and said “well we want to preserve nature and humans aren’t apart of nature so all of you savage natives have to GTFO.”

So the entire notion of “this is natural” and “this is not natural” is invalid. If we find a way of doing things that produces better results overall compared to how we used to “naturally” do things, switching from meat based to plant based diets for example, nothing in “nature” prevents us from doing that or says we shouldn’t. Again, we evolved big brains as part of our niche in the natural ecosystem, we should really use those things more and come up with mutually beneficial solutions.

  • Dochyo
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    811 months ago

    One farmer says to me, “You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make bones with”; and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying his system with the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plow along in spite of every obstacle. Some things are really necessaries of life in some circles, the most helpless and diseased, which in others are luxuries merely, and in others still are entirely unknown.

    ~ Henry David Thoreau, Walden

    I always think of that paragraph whenever I hear anti-vegan nonsense.

  • @pingveno@lemmy.ml
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    211 months ago

    The ironic thing is that the drugs they give livestock doesn’t actually end up as nutrients for us, they’re to keep the animals alive long enough to produce an economical amount of meat because they live in environments they are totally unsuited for and would die immediately if not heavily supplemented.

    From what I understand, they’re also given so the animal’s immune system doesn’t take time to fight off infections, allowing the animal to grow faster.

    • JoYo
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      111 months ago

      it’s a mixed bag, but ultimately the reason why falls to the consumer. why do we feed livestock anything?

  • What_The_Josh
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    110 months ago

    It is commonly just B12 that you really might want to supplement. B12 is not made by animals either. It is dirt from the ground. Since we sanitize most of our food it can be hard to get unless you are eating b12 fortified foods or taken a supplement. You don’t need much though. Just a small weekly serving is enough for most people.

    However, you can get blood tests done to check your levels and I believe it is commonly thought that people have YEARS worth of B12 stored up before becoming deficient.

    Also D3 if you are not outside 30-60 min a day depending on the sunshine level at your location.

    Iodine if you aren’t using iodized salt.

    and that’s it. Everything else can be gotten in adequate supplies from plants and whole foods.

    • @OrlandoDoom@feddit.uk
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      8 months ago

      B12 is not made by animals either. It is dirt from the ground.

      According to wikipedia, it’s produced in the colon of animals but that’s after the lower intestine so they poop it out then ingest it again by eating plants and soil that has manure in it.

      Even if that’s not completely correct, it’s certainly gross enough for me to mention it to meat eaters

      Yeah i’ll stick with the suppies

      • @jerkface@lemmy.ca
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        -18 months ago

        Livestock get B12 by consuming supplements. It’s like giving a pill to your cat, where you have to wrap it in the flesh of an intelligent creature to get the evil asshole to eat it.

  • JoYo
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    111 months ago

    they specifically fortify beef with vitamins for us to consume.

    why not just rake the vitamins ourselves?

  • @jerkface@lemmy.ca
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    -28 months ago

    Vegans have better B12 levels than the general population. They should be taking the supplements just as much as us.