And you thought clothing was bad

[nuduke]

I agree with you, Peter and Ric.  It's not really true to the vegan lifestyle if you feel the need to eat things that resemble meat even though they are vegetable to the core.  It is the equivalent of, say, a nun using a dildo.  She gets the thrill  but still stays celibate.  That's not the point of the celibacy is it!
Blue Train is on the mark too - this recent explosion of vegetarian and vegan options in pre-prepared and processed food is obviously a marketing ploy to sell more stuff to everyone not just veggies.  We all feel good if we have had a meatless meal, hence the ridiculous popularity of Greggs Vegan Sausage rolls as a lunchtime food for busy workers to feel a tiny bit better (i.e. self righteous) in their lunch break
John

[BlueTrain]

Okay, what's the difference between vegetarian and "vegan"? That is, according you all here; not according to Wikipedia. There seem to be variations no end.

Now, here's another twist on the subject. I read a lot of old stuff, meaning things from a thousand years ago, presumably translated correctly. It's all monastic material. They had rules or at least strong suggestions about what to eat and drink. A pound of bread a day, a couple of dishes of cooked food, fish once in a great while but no flesh of four-legged beasts, as they put it. Curiously, the writers say monks cannot do without wine, regrettably, the ration being about a cup a day. No mention of water.

So, how does alcohol fit into the ideal diet? Just wine, of course. And by the way, it's Lent.

[Peter S]

The vegetarians I know will eat dairy products such as cheese, cream, milk, but the vegans won’t touch anything that has come from animals. You get the odd one who’s a “bacon vegetarian” - vegetarian but can’t resist that sizzle ...

[ric]

by the way its (the wine?)  lent how do you get it back?

[BlueTrain]

by the way its (the wine?)  lent how do you get it back?

For good behavior.

[jbeegoode]

FAke meat is faked meat. It isn't from an animal, so its vegn. My old vegan girldfriend had me eating that garbage. Found out that it came out to the same old "way too processed food" the faked food, the lack of balance, nutrition, etc. It had protien, soy protean. Soy isn't so good a crop for the invironmnet. It kils rainforest to feed cattle. Limited, over processed.

Some of the faked flavor looks like poision to me when I read the label.

We eat some veggie burgers. There is no pretense about being fakedmeat. It is cobvenient and taste good, but it is still processed, cooked, less nutritious food.

The fake stuff comes from teh same manufacturers that sell meat and processed food. It is very profitable and has a longer shelf life, ie. ripoff.
Jbee

[John P]

My vegan step-daughter-in-law is pretty disdainful about anything that's made to resemble meat. She'd say "I don't regret anything about meat and I don't need to be reminded about it. Vegetables should look like vegetables!" When she comes to our house, we try to find something interesting to serve (and we all eat it). We do our best to avoid soy products as a main dish because it's so boring and predictable. I recall eggplant stuffed with beans, tomato, onion and walnut was pretty popular.

But Thanksgiving demands turkey, so then she'll bring a vegan dish for herself, while we try to make all the other vegetables animal-free as well. I'm the pie specialist, and these days there are all kinds of butter substitutes for making pie crust, so that's easy. Vegan step-daughter-in-law loves apple pie, and we make sure she gets a good piece to take home. She has to pass on the pumpkin pie though, because you really can't make that without eggs.

One thing I was surprised to hear about was honey. That's not acceptable because "It passes through the body of the bees". And anyway, she'd say even insects shouldn't be exploited by humans. But she doesn't preach to anyone else; if the menu includes animal products, she'll sit at the same table while other people (and that includes her husband, my wife's son) eat them.

[BlueTrain]

I gather that the basis of the vegan point of view is that we're exploiting animals if we eat them or their products. That certainly is true, I suppose, but the farm workers on an organic farm are just as exploited as a cow might be and an organic farm is no better place to work than any other farm. So it might be something of a modern luxury to be vegan. If we ourselves do next to no manual labor with our hands, we're living the lives of cattle anyway.

[jbeegoode]

My vegan obsessed ex-girlfriend was a purist,but I think her main driver was the factory farm exploitation. Those animal rights expose' vids getting into a secret pig factory, chicken torture chamber,and cattle feed lots speak for themselves for miles around. The destruction to the environment is astronomical and unnecessary, if you cut back on eating that crappy factory meat. So, it was a heartfelt moral thing, having nothing to do with human labors.

Honestly, I still recoil at that kind of meat and behavior. I don't participate after viewing the vids,which have now become illegal as a terrorist act because of the power of these exploitative corporations.

Family farm, local farms that we grew up with are about completely gone, or completely different. It is an ugly exploitative destructive situation. For me participating in that kind of abuse, is the same as supporting the Nazi German regime. It helps me to understand how the NAzis got away with genocide.

No thank-you, I don't have to eat that product and I'm better off for it. Still, I'm not opposed to eating animals here and there, eggs, most fish. It isn't the same. It is an intellectual a moral argument compared to a horrid abomination in human greed. Just not at all the same thing to me.
Jbee

[ric]

if eating animals was wrong there wouldnt be any meat eating animals.....

the animal welfare/cruelty argument is a whole different ball game. im from an english livestock farming background and know that the vast majority of small farmers in this country  genuinely want to keep happy livestock , but the bottom line is the bottom line... money makes the world go round .

chickens are one of the most numerous animals on the planet because humans exploit them... if we didnt eat both chickens and eggs there wouldnt be as many hens in existance.   personally we pay the extra for free range eggs in the belief that the chickens that produce them have as good a lifestyle as is compatible with us getting breakfast.

 you cant make omelets without cracking eggs...

[BlueTrain]

I wonder if there were any purists when horsepower had to do with an actual horse. Even then, a horse's lot was nothing but work, relatively short and it didn't end in pastures full of clover. But some recognized that, for what it was worth.

I'm from southern West Virginia and I lived in a small town, then out in the country. There were still people who made their living as farmers, or at least part of it. Horses were still being used. Nobody had a tractor. Even in town, a few people still kept horses or chickens and one person even kept a cow. But that all faded away by the 1960s. There were also peddlers who came around selling produce from the back of a pickup truck, rather like farmers' markets today. And if you live in certain parts of the country, there might even be an Amish farmers' market, too. All the farmers' markets I've been to, including one Amish farmers' market in Maryland, also sold prepared food. Were animals exploited? Were children exploited? Were vast tracts of wilderness denuded of trees to create bean fields? If you consider everything, you cannot be a purist. Being a purist can mean giving up a lot of things for various reasons. Thoreau was somewhat like that. It's a pity he died so young.

[jbeegoode]

This is a mess, not humane, wrong.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEKpyzyn6N8
 I noticed that chicken processing propaganda follows this film. The video is a free range outfit. Chickens don't have room to move in the usual processing, the smaller farmer contractor who has them before the processing.
Peta has some films out that are effective.

The animals are simply treated as meat from birth, a commodity. It is cruel, it is wrong. These are live being and they feel and have needs, to start out, they need to walk to move. Let's be real here.
Jbee

[John P]

if eating animals was wrong there wouldnt be any meat eating animals.....

I believe I've had that conversation with vegan step-daughter-in-law, and she says she doesn't have a problem with what animals do to each other. She said "It's natural for them, and you can't expect animals to have a conscience. But we're able to know that we're exploiting animals, and we shouldn't be doing it."

By the way, she has two cats, and I pointed out that she has to feed them meat products if they're going to survive, and she said that's natural too. I could have said that she doesn't need to sponsor their existence, but it didn't seem to be worth pushing the topic to that extent. At least her cats stay indoors and don't go out to kill anything.

I wonder if there were any purists when horsepower had to do with an actual horse. Even then, a horse's lot was nothing but work, relatively short and it didn't end in pastures full of clover. But some recognized that, for what it was worth.

Here in Massachusetts we have the intellectual heritage of all the noble thinkers. Bronson Alcott (while Louisa May was a child) tried to establish a commune ("Fruitlands") where they'd be vegetarians and also avoid taking advantage of any person or creature. So they wouldn't wear cotton, because it was grown by slaves, nor wool because it was stolen from sheep, and they couldn't afford silk (or they didn't want silkworms to die) so they only wore linen, and we get some cold weather around here, so they did plenty of shivering. And they weren't any good at farming anyway. I'm not sure if they had animals to do any of the work, or if that was making slaves of the horses.

There is one little factoid that I recall from Fruitlands that makes it relevant here. While it lasted, the commune attracted a few misfits and visionaries, and one of them was an "Adamite" named Samuel Bower, who was what we'd call a nudist. Unfortunately he's only a footnote to the story, but he apparently came from England. Where he ended up, nobody seems to know.

[BlueTrain]

There were a remarkable number of idealistic and hopeful utopian communities from that period, some of which survive. Most had a religious origin, although they did not all originate in New England. Some were earlier and some brought their community from Europe. They're all interesting to me to some extent. The idea lives on in some ways. Some churches, particularly Roman Catholic, style themselves as "communities" and there are of course monastic and similar intentional communities in both R.C. and a few other Christian denominations. I'm on the mailing list of a small Episcopal monastery in Michigan and have been getting their newsletters for at least 30 years. I don't know of any permanent nudist communities, although some clubs have full-time residents.

It may be possible that because so many of us live in crowded communities (or what we think are crowded), we think we'd rather live somewhere with few neighbors, some place with more 'elbow room.' But rural areas sometimes have a stronger sense of community than a typical suburban community. Or at least, that's what I think, based on my own experiences. But things change. I do know that the contributors here like to think of this as a community but it is no more than a virtual community. But it suggests that we really need community.

[ric]

i honestly dont see how a vegan (oranyone else) can justify keeping a pet cat in the unnatural surroundings of a house.  they might not be eating the thing but theyre subjecting the animal to a totally unnatural lifestyle to satisfy some  need of their own.
i have a close neighbour that has a cat and a labrador both of which rarely go outside, the dog atleast gets shoved through the door so it can crap on the lawn, the cat has a litter tray under the stairs, which the dog has a snuffle through every now and again.
ive always had a pet cat,  its purpose is to chase off the mice, rats ,rabbits and flying pests from my veggy garden. cat is free to come indoors during the day, if its in when i go to bed its shown the door ,  we feed it and it supplements with whatever it can catch.   mice dissapeer completely, rats we just find the tail on the doormat, rabbits he usually leaves skin and guts.
current cat is about 14 years old , still climbs in through the window if the door aint open and hasnt seen a vet since his bits were chopped off.