Philosophical Vegan Forum

Food Sustainability / Sovereignty / Autonomy / Traditionalism - the strongest argument for eating meat (and the reason why we need more investment in vegan agriculture now)

Before anyone bites my head off for my controversial choice of title, I mean best of a bad bunch, obviously I still think it should be rejected.

As we saw in America with Trump riding on the votes of out of unemployed coal regions, small-scale farming regions here in the UK prop up the conservatives because they see them as the best bets for maintaining subsidies and are traditionalist.

Liberal talk of transition and technological singularity are the harder policies to stand on because it’s change and people are especially skeptical of the latter because it’s literally science fiction.

The move away from soil eroding cash-crops towards long-term higher yielding crops is a hard slog, because you need to provide the education and assurances in the form of environmental subsidies.

I’m reminded of Hugh Fernley Whittingstal’s first cooking series where he visited a vegan small holding in Cornwall called Plants for a Future, that experiments with co-planting 100s of edible plants and releasing their data online for growing a variety of nutritious foods that can sustain us on locally produced vegan diet year-round.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JA3G-Zcbz8

I couldn’t find that whole episode sadly but the next clip in that episode is Hugh cooking with grey squirrels he justified eating because they were an invasive species causing a menace to the environment.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VcfqGhfgxo

Now do I think sterilizing invasive species is a better ethical long-term solution – yes, and do I think it was fair to kill those squirrels whose population it will have no long-term effect on – no.

But until we can invest in vegan agriculture and show its positive results, these carnist traditionalists will hold political currency. Like local fishing in lakes controlled by conservationists maintaining stocks or rope grown oysters.

For example, I can feel confident about rejecting local meat because I think as a wealthy country we have the capital to invest in comprehensively transforming landscapes to long term vegan agriculture.

But if I was born in Palestine where goat herding on rough stony hillsides represents an important part of the economy and isn’t easily replaced with water intensive almond trees under an apartheid state that maintains a monopoly on basic resources, I would be more inclined to buy it to support my country.

Thoughts? Hugh later went onto get factory farmed caged eggs banned from major supermarkets here in the UK and is currently waging a war against food waste so I think they can make great allies, if also our closest ethical cop-out and strongest argument against veganism in my personal opinion.

We are desperately in need of industrializing wild food like they do in Asia with Sea-Buckthorn, a vitamin and mineral super food that we literally just slash and burn here. Also supporting important food sources grown abroad like monkey puzzle tree nuts that I think yield the highest fat and protein of any plant grown per square meter. Also the miracle fruit as a replacement for sugar that turns everything you eat sweet for around half an hour.

Seems like you posted the same thing twice. I moved the duplicate to the blackhole.

miniboes wrote: ↑Fri May 05, 2017 6:48 am Seems like you posted the same thing twice. I moved the duplicate to the blackhole.

Fank you, I'm always hitting the quote button instead of edit by accident, also the laptop has ground to furious halt trying to upload a youtube video in another tab, so was bashing the submit button which might not have helped

Tradition, no, but food security for people in developing countries I can understand. Of course, that's an argument only for them to make, not for people in first world countries to use to justify their own consumption.

It only really applies to borderline tribal populations, and those without enough money to buy food, though. These are people we need to help modernize.

Even at that, without modern infrastructure, the solution isn't animal agriculture. The solution is knowledge about suitable forms of plant and mycoculture for the region. These people need seeds and spores and basic instruction on cultivation.

brimstoneSalad wrote: ↑Sat May 06, 2017 2:34 pm Tradition, no, but food security for people in developing countries I can understand. Of course, that's an argument only for them to make, not for people in first world countries to use to justify their own consumption.

It only really applies to borderline tribal populations, and those without enough money to buy food, though. These are people we need to help modernize.

Agreed, literally not having the means to live on a vegan diet, but I'm talking about the most insidious rationalizations for eating meat because they are wedded to very real circumstances that necessitate eating meat.

Like I could imagine advocating for veganism would be a very sensitive topic in countries where if you lower demand for a local meat product you hurt that insecure tribe before charities or government ever have a chance to help them innovate. Especially where the ruling party in power sees nomadic people or traditional herders as a threat to their settlement expansion.

The same as in the west where you have food deserts and poor social welfare/education/urban planning/policing resulting in job and food insecure people falling through the social security net. Stories of Black Panthers providing free breakfasts to kids in the neighborhood with deer they managed to hunt and chop up the night before are going to be appealing. I talked about ways to challenge that DIY ethic here:
- http://philosophicalvegan.com/viewtopic.php?p=29980#p29980

The other side of that is traditionalist conservatives we have here in the UK who love their fox hunting and everything to do with animal husbandry, I guess the equivalent to ranchers in the US and Australia cattle drives. Another feely anecdote you love so much aha; I found the ex-coal mining regions the most ardent campaigners against open cast coal mines in this country because they saw so little jobs in it and so much damage to the area, scraping out the bottom of the barrel of what they'd been digging for generations felt like an insult. They didn't want their kids down their with shovels doing the dangerous work they did but they were desperately in need of some large scale industry they could find jobs in. I suspect the same is true of farmers fed up with corporations and consumer demand forcing a rush to rock bottom prices and wanting a sustainable way out.

Even at that, without modern infrastructure, the solution isn't animal agriculture. The solution is knowledge about suitable forms of plant and mycoculture for the region. These people need seeds and spores and basic instruction on cultivation.

So we are in agreement that the solution lies in the form of a lot of well targeted investment.

NonZeroSum wrote: ↑Sat May 06, 2017 4:01 pm

Even at that, without modern infrastructure, the solution isn't animal agriculture. The solution is knowledge about suitable forms of plant and mycoculture for the region. These people need seeds and spores and basic instruction on cultivation.

So we are in agreement that the solution lies in the form of a lot of well targeted investment.

I think the market itself solves the job loss; vegan food creates jobs where animal foods cost them. A veggie burger takes man hours to produce rather than cow hours.

There's just potentially much more to vegan cooking, spicing, and food processing. An animal is only killed and heated over fire in many cases.

It may compel those people concerned about local jobs to support locally produced value added vegan food with the money they save not buying meat.