When I was 15, I told a girl that she should audition for the elite choir at our school (she was very talented). She said she would audition if I would audition (I had no vocal talent) but I auditioned and being one of the only males I got in. I fell in love with singing, worked my ass off, went to college on a vocal scholarship and now 20 years later I am the vocal coach for the largest theatre in our state. That little moment, which she probably doesn’t even remember, changed my entire life trajectory.
That's beautiful, and to get paid for your passion. Tha'ts the cherry on top. I was going to ask if you ever reconnected, but I guess not. You know, the world's pretty cuckoo nowadays, it's always nice to drop a line to someone who helped you along the way if you've got the time. Kudos either way!
I really doubt that… Why would they go through the cost of producing a plastic version of their product when they could simply use the actual article? I worked in a cheese shop for years, these particular wheels are VERY durable - I legitimately can’t think of any benefit in using a fake cheese wheel, aside from TheTetrapod’s correct comment about these wheels sweating oil (which makes most people’s skin breakout into acne) which can be easily and immediately solved by using a rag.
edit: and again, having worked closely with this exact cheese many many many times, that is exactly what they look like as whole wheels. I have zero reason to believe this is plastic.
I’m Italian, those prop cheese wheels are pretty common, for store displays and such. Google “Forma parmigiano plastica” and you’ll find a lot of them.
While I have to maintain an old Windows 7 box to run some ancient software on it, I do most of my development work on a Linux machine. I use LibreOffice to read and write documents, use Inkscape for drawings in my documntation, but first and foremost, my main IDE is Linux native (although a Windows port does exist).
I have used Rustdesk on Arch and it works fine, it is just that on MacOS is buggy. Granted the Mac is old so it might work on newer ones, works fine on Windows too. Thanks for your recommendation anyway!
I used to eat meat and love it, then I learned about how animals are treated in the meat industry and stopped. I probably would have been totally okay with looking at this picture about 10 years ago. Now looking at it makes me think of the poor sentient being that probably went through a life that was hell just to get cut up into pieces and be sold in a grocery store and it makes me a bit sick. We should really stop and take a step back and think about whether what we do to animals is right. Imagine someone would raise a dog confined in a tiny space, never letting them see the daylight, then after about 2 years cut them into pieces like that. You wouldn’t like that, would you?
I hope we will. Also because it might mean that as a society we’ll have met human needs enough to have capacity to address animals’ needs as well.
I’m putting a lot of hope into synthetic meat. It would come with all the benefits of real meat but without all the downsides like animal suffering, climate and environmental cost, overuse of antibiotics, harmful hormones etc. I guess if synthetic meat gets cheap enough, it will at some point be the norm, and eating real animal flesh will maybe become a weird delicacy for the rich.
Sorry in advance! The morality of meat really interests me.
It seems almost guaranteed that we will look back on factory farming in this fashion. The current system requires significant help from the legal system (banning documentation of the animals’ conditions, excessively prosecuting people who break the rules, looking the other way when farms hire people who will lose their jobs if they rock the boat) just to keep going.
Whether or not meat consumption in general meets the same societal fate seems less certain to me. We don’t view any other animals killing their prey as immoral, and before the industrial agricultural takeover lots of folks lived on farms and raised livestock for slaughter and treated them far better. Groups that lives successfully and sustainably off the land, like the Polynesians who settled Hawaii, raised livestock and fished a renewable amount. That’s been going on for ages and ages. Is it the act of killing a conscious animal we’ll have issue with? Will that sentiment focus on the smart animals like pigs and cows, and leave chickens and fish as acceptable? Will it rule out all animals even though some of them are so dumb that their form of consciousness is unrelatable? What about insect biomass based food? Will it spread to certain plants or fungi as we learn more about their forms of awareness and how they experience the world? Plants sharing knowledge through pheromones and root systems seems quite similar to the level of communication ants and other colony insects have. Where is the line going to be drawn?
From a knowledge standpoint, I simply don’t know enough about nutrition to understand whether or not humans can be ‘maximally healthy’ on a vegetarian or vegan or pescatarian or w/e diet. If we can, sweet! If not, what’s the next move? Lab grown meat seems like it’s just around the corner but then when you listen to a podcast on where they’re at you realize they can’t mimic any of the complex structures that give meat texture; they’re sometimes only 20, 30% meat with the rest being additives; they suck an undetermined but certainly super high amount of energy from the grid just to perform these relatively rudimentary feats. It does make me wonder if having some cows that wander around eating grass and killing one or two of the herd periodically is really worse from a moral standpoint than covering entire ecosystems in solar panels to run the scaled up meat labs. Not to mention how either option seems like there’s no way it can scale to how many people are living on the planet right now!
I certainly don’t envy the next generations. Which is a weird feeling. I don’t think we’re supposed to feel bad for our descendants. I hope they figure out the things that stumped us.
My family is mostly veggie, still eat dairy and some meat on the weekends. No pork because I’m trying to keep pushing the line further towards a place I feel better about. Pigs are just too dang smart for the hellish conditions they’re raised in on U.S. farms. Drawing that line felt hard, pepperoni might be my favorite use case for meat. But I think my kids will grow up just a little further toward the point of outrage we need to be at to save these animals from the madhouse created to feed us.
From a knowledge standpoint, I simply don’t know enough about nutrition to understand whether or not humans can be ‘maximally healthy’ on a vegetarian or vegan or pescatarian or w/e diet.
According to science, a whole-food, plant-based diet is basically the healthiest way to eat. You would need to supplement vitamin B12, but that’s it (and it’s very easy to do that). So from a health perspective, there is really no point against a vegan diet.
If you are interested in the morality of meat / veganism I highly recommend the debate videos by Ed Winters on Youtube where he talks to people about why they’re not vegan and it’s very respectful and also insightful. Like this one: www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdqAyFhWL2s (some are way more controversial though, this guy is already quite “vegan-positive”, still an interesting discussion)
He goes to elite universities and interviews people his age. Where the hell do you think he should go to find more equal debate partners? Maybe he just has the better arguments?
I disagree. Everyone who eats meat should be able to reflect on that fact and if you can’t defend your behavior in a debate, maybe you should change it.
if you can’t defend your behavior in a debate, maybe you should change it.
abushed adolescents who have not developed a debate around a topic may not be capable of defending their behavior in a debate at the drop of a hat, but they have not prepared for such a circumstance. on the otherhand, this charlatan shows up with a pocketful of cheap rhetorical tricks and makes them look foolish for money.
That is true, but there are statistical trends that you can observe in scientific studies. How else would you rate how healthy something is? Just because some person is allergic to nuts doesn’t mean they’re not generally a healthy snack.
This was long and I have to say, you got a lot of things wrong. I don’t blame you because our society really aims for us to get those things wrong.
Is it the act of killing a conscious animal we’ll have issue with? Will that sentiment focus on the smart animals like pigs and cows, and leave chickens and fish as acceptable? Will it rule out all animals even though some of them are so dumb that their form of consciousness is unrelatable? What about insect biomass based food?
Firstly, fish and chicken and other animals that communicate in ways that are more foreign to us have been shown to be very intelligent. I can tell you that my family had pet chickens and they are very intelligent. Once you learn their behaviors you find out that they are very similar in their intelligence to cats and dogs. There are even papers that show a significant reason to believe that even small insects like ants and bees do feel and in fact have some form of consciousness. Another important thing to remember is that intelligence does not equate with the ability to suffer. For example, you can take a baby. A human baby is very, very dumb, barely has any intelligence, but can suffer greatly, just like an adult human.
Will it spread to certain plants or fungi as we learn more about their forms of awareness and how they experience the world?
As for plants suffering, there are two arguments against it. Argument number one is that growing animals costs us more plants than growing plants for ourselves. Meaning that even if we wanted to assume that plants have feelings and can feel pain, the best way to make sure the least amount of plants and animals feel pain is to eat plants ourselves. The second argument is that as far as we can tell right now (and I agree, it could change) Plants do not have a consciousness and don’t seem to feel pain but rather react in predictable and consistent ways. Unlike animals that we know can feel pain and suffering.
Where is the line going to be drawn?
Maybe we don’t need a line. Maybe it’s just about doing the best we can. If we suspect that someone can suffer, we don’t make them suffer. And it’s pretty easy when it comes to our diets, because all you have to do is be vegan. And that’s the best you can do for the animals, the plants, our health, and our planet. As a vegan, I don’t advocate for absolute terms. I advocate for everyone to do the best they possibly can in their situation. I don’t expect that some tribe in Africa would suddenly develop some amazing morals of only eating plants, because they don’t reasonably have the option to do so.
We don’t view any other animals killing their prey as immoral
Simply put, one must know of morality, and have a choice, to be able to be moral or immoral. What I mean is that a person who does not have a choice but has to eat meat. Let’s say a deserted island and they can’t find other sources of food. That person would not be immoral to do what he needs to survive. For animals, the issue is that they are not aware of the concept of morality and cannot place themselves in the position of the prey. So they cannot actually think about morals. They can’t do it. The other thing is that they don’t have a choice. A lion has to eat meat as they cannot sustain themselves on plants since they are carnivores. A modern person is both an omnivore and lives in a society where they have all the choices in the world. When you go to the grocery store, you can choose to buy meat or you can choose to buy plant-based food. And, as been shown by other commenters and generally in science, it is agreed that plant-based diets are statistically the healthiest for humans.
they [meat growing labs] suck an undetermined but certainly super high amount of energy from the grid just to perform these relatively rudimentary feats.
Though that may be true, the question is do they do worse or better than regular meat and do we need them? Because technically we don’t need any meat, lab grown or natural grown. As far as I know, and I have to say that I did not research this deeply, meat-growing labs are not actually that power hungry while animal agriculture very much is (not to mention the environmental impacts of animal agriculture)
I understand where you’re coming from. And honestly, it sucks that our society pushes the whole meat industry so hard. But seriously, it’s just one big lie. And it’s crazy that our society has not caught on it. I seriously hope that in the future society would understand these issues and would show compassion even where nobody forces them to.
Argument number one is that growing animals costs us more plants than growing plants for ourselves. Meaning that even if we wanted to assume that plants have feelings and can feel pain, the best way to make sure the least amount of plants and animals feel pain is to eat plants ourselves.
if we believe plants suffer, then how can we quantify their suffering against another things suffering? and should we? it seems, if we could establish that plants do suffer, then we must resign ourselves to the fact that some suffering is necessary to eat, and there is no reason, in my mind, to make a million stalks of wheat suffer, but not make a cow suffer for food.
The decision is not between killing a million stalks of wheat or a cow, but between a million stalks of wheat or a cow AND a million stalks of wheat, it’s just that in the latter case the wheat was fed to the cow instead.
there are other differences, like vitamin a, b12, cholesterol, and macro ratios. and why should we disregard the (in this hypothetical) known suffering of the wheat but spare the cow? that’s speciesism.
edit: i think it’s important to point out that most ethical systems don’t attempt to simply weigh suffering, and i don’t personally subscribe to one that does, so i’m arguing at the edge of my personal belief here.
If we suspect that someone can suffer, we don’t make them suffer. And it’s pretty easy when it comes to our diets, because all you have to do is be vegan. And that’s the best you can do for the animals, the plants, our health, and our planet
i disagree that changing your diet does any good for the planet or the animals or the plants. it may benefit your health, but i don’t believe that’s universal, either.
There are plenty of papers and meta papers that show that plant-based diets have a much, much lower impact on our environment than non-plant-based diets. And you have to remember that cows eat more plants than you do, therefore eating cows ends up using more plants, on top of the environmental impact of the animal itself.
There are also papers that already show that as far as personal lifestyle changes go, going vegan is the best thing you can do for the environment, for the average person.
There are plenty of papers and meta papers that show that plant-based diets have a much, much lower impact on our environment than non-plant-based diets.
they do not show that choosing to eat non-animal products has actualy improved the environment, and they can’t, since the environment continues to be degraded.
And you have to remember that cows eat more plants than you do, therefore eating cows ends up using more plants, on top of the environmental impact of the animal itself.
livestock are mostly fed plants or parts of plants that people can’t or won’t eat. this is in addition to grazing, which i am not convinced can’t be done responsibly, even if some farmers have not been grazing responsibly.
There are also papers that already show that as far as personal lifestyle changes go, going vegan is the best thing you can do for the environment, for the average person.
no paper i’ve seen establishes this. the closest i’ve seen this claim is joseph poore discussing his 2018 metastudy, but the study itself does not contain this language and no other methods of helping the environment were studied as a part of that paper.
I don’t agree. Morality is in its own context. There is no objective morality and no action is always good or always bad. At the end of the day, killing someone for your own gain is immoral, but only if you have that choice. If you do not have a choice, there is no morality to argue with. You can argue about whether you truly have a choice or not.
For animals, the issue is that they are not aware of the concept of morality and cannot place themselves in the position of the prey. So they cannot actually think about morals. They can’t do it.
this is speciesist: you are making a categorical judgement about another’s abilities due to their membership in a group, rather than addressing each of them as an individual. personally, i’m fine with this, but since it’s an accusation often brought against people who are not vegan, i thought you might be interested to see speciesism in your own system, and think of ways to eliminate it.
edit: i started that paragraph “first,” but like… there was no second, lol.
Look, saying you’re a horrible person because you’re black is racist, saying you’re dark-skinned because you’re black is a fact. Animals are not as intelligent as us for the most part. Some of them may be pretty intelligent, some of them may be a lot less intelligent, but considering that moral points of view are hard even for adult humans, it’s not that crazy to say that most animals cannot understand morality.
it is agreed that plant-based diets are statistically the healthiest for humans.
this simply isn’t universally true. you’re not a dietitician, or, if you are, you aren’t my dietician and you’re not (likely to be) the dietician of the person with whom you are speaking.
Scientific papers have shown time and time again, that is statistically the healthiest diet. I say statistically because every person is different and some people won’t align. Kind of like how statistically it’s healthy to eat nuts, but some people are allergic to nuts.
Look, if I told you that 1+1 is 2 and you said “prove it” I would say, go learn because I don’t have the time or willingness to teach someone who nitpicks every word I type.
If you want, check out the youtuber Earthling Ed, he shows plenty of sources for these claims and you can find it there and verify it yourself
you’re not postulating simple arithmetic. you’re claiming studies support your position, but you have provided no evidence. by contrast, I cited a study which was well known to support your position, but which is debunked.
As far as I know a lot of vegans for example draw the line at a specific set of complexity of the being. Usually the property “has a central nervous system” is sufficient, which is why some vegans even eat oysters. The wording “sentience” is also used often.
The argumentation is also that emotions are tied to higher processing capabilities. A lot of animals fear joy, pain can get sad etc… Plants don’t. Reactions of plants to external stimuli are rather very primitive reflexes than the result of active processing and reflection about stimuli, i.e. thinking, which is something only observed in animals with brains.
Don’t pin me down on that, I’m not a vegan. That’s just something I picked up through discussions with them.
I simply don’t know enough about nutrition to understand whether or not humans can be ‘maximally healthy’ on a vegetarian or vegan or pescatarian or w/e diet
Idk what a “w/e diet” is, nor can I speak about pescetarians. But from what I’ve read it is perfectly possible to live a long and healthy life on a purely plant-based diet (respectively non-animal-based, bc mushrooms are not plants).
I can point you towards scientific literature on that topic if you would like to have some assistance.
It makes sense if you think about it that way:
What do we get from eating meat for example? What is it, that makes it somehow valuable for our bodies? What stuff is inside food in general which makes us need to eat?
It’s a bunch of specific chemicals, which we have come to name “nutrients”. You don’t need the flesh of the animal per se, you need the iron, the fats, the proteins, vitamins, minerals et cetera. We humans need a specific set of those nutrients in a specific amount in order to maintain a healthy and functioning body (also influenced by individual factors like whether someone has iron resorbtion issues or if someone is a child or old or pregnant or an athlete or whatever). Other animals require different amounts and possibly also different sets of nutrients.
The question for us is now whether we can get those nutrients from purely non-animal sources. And the answer is: yes, we can. That doesn’t mean eating only vegs will be healthy in the long run, as you probably need to supplement vitamin B12 and possibly more. But those supplements can be made from purely non-animal sources.
It does make me wonder if having some cows that wander around eating grass and killing one or two of the herd periodically is really worse from a moral standpoint than covering entire ecosystems in solar panels to run the scaled up meat labs.
If you are concerned about ecosystems, you know that the animal industry is one of the major contributors to climate change, right? And the fact that we use a huge chunk of agricultural land to grow animal food? In the EU alone about 71 % of agriculture is dedicated to feed animals. Source for the latter.
Furthermore, solar panels are not the only means of energy production. (And those are and should be regulated according to approrpiate environmental laws such that sensitive ecosystems are sufficiently protected.) There are also plenty of other renewables and concepts to meet demands such as rooftops covered in solar panels, wind turbines etc…
From an ecological perspective it would be best if we completely stopped producing animal based products.
In the EU alone about 71 % of agriculture is dedicated to feed animals. Source for the latter.
but the vast majority of that is grazing land. some of that may not agriculturally viable for any other purpose, and having it as grazing land is better than many of the uses we could develop there, like concrete jungles.
From an ecological perspective it would be best if we completely stopped producing animal based products.
from an ecological perspective, it would be best if we completely stopped producing products. why single out livestock when we could be focusing on petrochemicals or mined metals?
There are a million problems in the world, you have to focus on them one by one. It is true, petrochemicals are bad and mined metals are also a problem and we should not ignore those issues but we are allowed to talk about one specific issue at a time.
Also, some issues are more accessible on a personal level and some are not. I cannot make all the world wars stop, but I can stop eating meat and eggs and dairy and therefore stop participating in that suffering.
True, it’s impossible to prove a negative. But we can all very easily see that if you kick a dog, it hurts, it gets scared, it learns to avoid you. If you kick a tree, it doesn’t. Does it mean it doesn’t suffer? I can’t prove it, but does it definitely mean that the dog is suffering? Yes, I can prove that.
… it doesn’t behave in a way that you interpret as being scared or hurt, and of course trees can’t avoid you. but you don’t know the experience of being a tree.
Sentient beings are dying in sweatshops to make your clothes and smartphones, why are you so tied up about a pig.
Extreme comparisons aside, consumers support business practices with their purchases, and one of the largest factors for a consumer is price. I would like to see an animal health/welfare rating that is mandatory and highly visible on all products that are made from animals. Consumers can make better decisions but only if they have better info.
Not extreme. We don’t get to see the torture of the people in sweatshops. That’s why sweatshops failed in the US, too easy to see. But animals, you gotta see the meat before buying. That’s why one should be repulsed by this. I come from a place where you could go buy a pig from the neighbors and hear the pig screaming as they murdered him so you could eat it’s legs and ears. But I eventually learned all the torture they go through now and I don’t eat meat anymore. It’s to the point that just smelling meat I think of the death rather than how delicious it might be to others. It’s death. It makes me want to 🤮 puke.
I’m with you about the meat industry and mass-production. If we all cut down on meat consumption significantly, we’d be more healthy and it would be possible to raise lifestock in a species-appropriate manner.
I’m not with you about humanizing animals. Eating animals is natural. Our species has evolved doing so (far more rarely than nowadays of course). And animals in nature are eaten far more brutally and painfully than even our mass-produced lifestock.
I’m not humanizing animals. I just acknowledge the fact that they are sentient beings that are capable of feeling pain, physically and emotionally. That enjoy certain things and dislike other things. Is it okay to torture a dog because wild dogs get into fights where they get hurt terribly?
Of course animals in nature are killed brutally, but so are humans. It’s totally natural for bears to kill humans. Does that mean we can also kill humans? See how this doesn’t mean anything for the question whether it’s immoral to kill animals or not? I wouldn’t even necessarily disagree that it can be morally okay to kill an animal, given certain circumstances. The argument “in nature, animals are killed brutally” just has absolutely no implications for human ethics. Animals and “nature” have no concept of morality. Humans do.
How about accepting that your argument was wrong? Your first paragraph had nothing to do with it. I agree with your first paragraph, but we must still ask the question whether it is moral or not to kill animals for food even if they didn’t suffer. It’s not clear and people have different opinions on it and that’s okay. In any way, a lot would have to change compared to the status quo.
If we would base that on the nature of animals, we would have to let them roam freely and not actively breed or kill them. Consider for example how short the lifespan of cattle has become. In nature about 20 years iirc and now 5 years tops.
Doing so would collide with an efficient meat industry and in the end raise prices. Nobody would want that who isn’t a vegan, vegetarian or someone who has other reasons not to eat meat or consume animal products in general.
I wonder how far more advanced aliens would decide to raise us in a species-appropriate manner if they would visit us and came to the conclusion that there is no reason to respect our free will.
We are basically doing the same with animals and I find it curious how we as humans come to decide what the best way to captivate, breed and kill animals is.
Eating animals is natural
And if something is natural, does that always create virtue?
It is also natural not to brush one’s teeth, or to have sexual needs or not to wear pants. Does that imply that it’s okay to go around and rape people or flash them?
It’s also only natural to have the urge to kill someone sometimes if one is especially angry. Why are we stopping them?
We as humans are at the capacity to derive ethical values and decide whether something natural is also “good”.
And animals in nature are eaten far more brutally and painfully than even our mass-produced lifestock.
How is this relevant?
Yes they die in nature and get killed by predators who need them to survive, which can help to stabilise ecosystems (see for example how the reintroduction of wolves has helped in some problematic regions).
But:
Do we need them to survive? Are we stabilsing eco systems by breeding and killing animals? Are we living in the wild nature like those predators or do we have gained a lot of control over it and have the privilege to live in an established society?
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