3 ms·

Why aren't you simply eating the most popular food and popular omnivore diet then? Meat is very popular so why not appeal to that logic and eat heavily processe

Why aren't you simply eating the most popular food and popular omnivore diet then? Meat is very popular so why not appeal to that logic and eat heavily processed meat?

ben_w 5y ago
You seem to be conflating successful with good, in both directions. Success is popularity, and popularity is absolutely a metric for success. If this product is popular, it is necessarily successful. You are explicitly denying this specific thing. All of the food items currently sold (at least around here), on an individual and personal basis for the consumer, basically fine. The fact that a normal person has a bad diet does not alter this, as the products themselves are not the issue, the aggregate is (and indeed one of the issues with the normal person’s diet is too much red meat). Many dietary options exist, both those subsets which are and are not individually fine for the consumer, including a lot of foods you’re rejecting. Because the individual foods are all safe, the questions society now has to consider are: (1) ethically, do animals have intrinsic value, or are they things we can just exploit without care? And (2) what are the non-personal consequences, e.g. pollution, land and water use, habitat destruction, and crop diversity to avoid all the issues that monocultures bring. These two are independent, any given thing (not just meat and non-meat human products, also the food which feeds livestock) can be good or bad on each and either the same or different on the other. And it’s a spectrum for each sub-part of those two big bullet-points, not a Boolean. I’m vegetarian (and try to reduce milk consumption) because I want to err on the side of assuming too many minds might be sentient than too few, but note that despite this belief my comments do not denounce “meat is murder” or similar slogans, because that’s not something other people find relevant, rather they find it annoying. Likewise, I am not arguing against meat (and leather) by saying it is disgusting and therefore nobody would eat (wear) it, because while I find it disgusting even on a conceptual level, I can clearly see that most people don’t. Meat is popular, meat is successful. The only way to replace meat is to make something more popular. That is success. If I was working in that sector, that would literally be my metric for success. But you aren’t discussing on that level, you’re going “ewww pea protein, nobody can possibly want to eat that” like your body wouldn’t do a similar chemical reaction if you ate peas.

Why aren't you simply eating the most popular food and popular omnivore diet then? Meat is very popular so why not appeal to that logic and eat heavily processed meat?

ben_w 5y ago

You seem to be conflating successful with good, in both directions. Success is popularity, and popularity is absolutely a metric for success. If this product is popular, it is necessarily successful. You are explicitly denying this specific thing. All of the food items currently sold (at least around here), on an individual and personal basis for the consumer, basically fine. The fact that a normal person has a bad diet does not alter this, as the products themselves are not the issue, the aggregate is (and indeed one of the issues with the normal person’s diet is too much red meat). Many dietary options exist, both those subsets which are and are not individually fine for the consumer, including a lot of foods you’re rejecting. Because the individual foods are all safe, the questions society now has to consider are: (1) ethically, do animals have intrinsic value, or are they things we can just exploit without care? And (2) what are the non-personal consequences, e.g. pollution, land and water use, habitat destruction, and crop diversity to avoid all the issues that monocultures bring. These two are independent, any given thing (not just meat and non-meat human products, also the food which feeds livestock) can be good or bad on each and either the same or different on the other. And it’s a spectrum for each sub-part of those two big bullet-points, not a Boolean. I’m vegetarian (and try to reduce milk consumption) because I want to err on the side of assuming too many minds might be sentient than too few, but note that despite this belief my comments do not denounce “meat is murder” or similar slogans, because that’s not something other people find relevant, rather they find it annoying. Likewise, I am not arguing against meat (and leather) by saying it is disgusting and therefore nobody would eat (wear) it, because while I find it disgusting even on a conceptual level, I can clearly see that most people don’t. Meat is popular, meat is successful. The only way to replace meat is to make something more popular. That is success. If I was working in that sector, that would literally be my metric for success. But you aren’t discussing on that level, you’re going “ewww pea protein, nobody can possibly want to eat that” like your body wouldn’t do a similar chemical reaction if you ate peas.