3 ms·
Actually, I'm pretty sure vegans need many energy-intensive or non-local complements or alternatives to simple, local animal products providing essential nutrie
by wazoox 10y ago
Actually, I'm pretty sure vegans need many energy-intensive or non-local complements or alternatives to simple, local animal products providing essential nutrients like eggs or butter (avocado, or almonds for instance, are almost everywhere terrible from an environmental point of view). Vegetarian is certainly better for the planet; vegan is probably hardly better if not worse.
For instance having a couple of hens in your backyard may be exploitative in your book, but it provides a rich, free source of food (several hundred eggs every year), while consuming all of your food remains, vegetables peels, rotten fruits etc. in the most efficient way imaginable. And the hens would be perfectly happy and not harmed in any way, as long as they have reasonable space with some grass and a bush to peck around.
- greglindahl 10y agoWait, are you saying that "having a couple of hens in your backyard" is similar to buying eggs from the grocery store? Because the typical vegetarian eating eggs doesn't get them from hens in their backyard.
- wazoox 10y agoNo, this is different for me but apparently not for vegans (no animal product of any sort because it's exploitative, every animal is a person, etc).
- greglindahl 10y agoThe vegans I know call one bad and the other worse. However, the point that I was getting at is that you're recommending that people be vegetarians instead of vegans because of the environmental efficiency of feeding chickens scraps in the backyard, but almost everyone doesn't have a backyard, or chickens.
- wazoox 10y agoUnfortunately this is a deep political problem I don't feel like treating in a HN comment box :) I'd simply say that I think that we need to reorganize our world at a simpler scale, build smaller communities, sharing more local resources (like backyards and chickens and potato plots), step back on globalisation, reduce our consumption and environmental footprint, reduce division of labour, share work more, ...