…aggressive veganism?..

Trophic levels being a thing mean that raising cattle, which get eaten by wolves, and you eating wolf meat causes you to kill 100 times the biomass of vegetables of what you eat in wolf biomass–which would be much more focused on killing plants.

on every step you lose about 90%. That’s the reason why being vegetarian by default uses less land for agriculture than eating meat.

Raise cattle and still be vegetarian for maximum efficiency!

Vegetarianism and veganism are not the same

Couldn’t this character be considerably more effective at hating plants by say, breeding swarms of locusts?

… Would they consider eating locusts… to be eating meat?

No, hey, actually serious:

Vegans, does a locust, a cricket, an ant… does eating a bug count as eating a sentient, emotionally feeling, living being?

well if you want to cherish the fact that every bite you take equals onehundred bites of veggies then eating wolf is better - you eating vegetables would then only increase the amount by 1%.

What about eating the humans that eat wolves that eat cattle that eat the plants?

think big! imagine eating cannibals who eat human that eat wolves that eat cattle that eat plants! Alternatively we could put some polar bear into the chain to keep it fresh

Don’t eat the liver tho. Polar bear liver contains so much vitamin A that it is toxic for humans.

It is a meme

Depends on the vegan. Some stay away from avocados and such because their cultivation requires mass transport of pollinators, so insects definitely can fall into the off limits category for some.

Thank you, I appreciate the answer!

So, yes, bugs count as meat and eating them outright is avoided by most vegans, but it’s impossible to not eat remnants of dead bugs in produce. The agricultural process inherently involves the death of bugs, and that’s literally unavoidable.

Some vegans try to avoid the kinds of figs that require wasps to die, but most of the figs in grocery stores are artificially pollinated and don’t have wasps in them.

Personally, I’m not going out of my way to avoid produce that has marginally higher bug death. Being vegan is already a pain in the ass without putting further restrictions on “is eating X plant really vegan because it requires Y?” It’s still a way better environmental impact than meat, and I hate the purity tests a lot of online vegan spaces turn into. Most other vegans I’ve met IRL are chill and we can have reasonable discussions around that sort of thing without people getting into a fit over it.

It does also need to be said, though, that lots of vegans arrive at that same conclusion of just not eating animals and animal products, because we cannot be fucked to figure out to what degree an ant is sentient and how it’s treated and whether we’re okay with that. In particular, I have no interest in eating ants in the first place.

I appreciate the answer, I expanded on my own… non vegan status and thoughts about this a bit more under another replier.

Could I ask you?:

How common is it among the vegans you know to apply the kind of, do as little ecological harm as possible mindset…

How many of them apply that to… other kinds of economic activity?

Like, how many vegans do you know who say, own and drive a car, that may be powered by oil from say, a fracking field?

I’d imagine most who are serious enough to be as ethically vegan as possible are also very much anti-capitalist as possible…

But at the same time, I’ve personally known a good deal of self described vegans who… regularly drive their own car to work, despite living near a transit line that would totally get them to work… and also, their work is for the corporate office of a highly exploitative (in many ways, of many things) corporation… like Amazon, or MSFT… and then get very aggreived when I just… work remotely, and tell them they should probably take the lightrail/bus.

(I’m from Seattle if you can’t tell lol)

*vegetarianism

For many of us, reducing ecological harm is one of the big motivators, and many vegans apply this mindset elsewhere. I’m also in the US, and it’s pretty hard to avoid needing a car outside of major cities which I can’t fault any vegans for. Many of the vegans I know are activists for public transit and one in particular has worked to improve it immensely in their city.

Anticapitalist sentiment is pretty huge in vegan spaces. There’s a leftist to vegan pipeline and vice versa. Ironically being vegan is pretty big in punk spaces now too.

I won’t pretend there aren’t plenty of people who are vegan more for the aesthetics rather than the principles because for some reason it caught on as a trend among the remnants of the “upper middle class” for whatever that means with the ever growing wealth disparity. There’s a huge supply of overpriced vegan options, but you can also eat vegan super cheap too without shelling out for the pricey fake meat options. I can make a ton of seitan or black beans burgers at home for almost nothing, but it’s $$$ at the grocery store.

I knew a guy in college who wouldn’t eat fish because he thought they were a stupid animal and it was beneath him to consume them.

Memes and veganism are not the same