I don't think convincing average people to go 100% full vegan is a good strategy. What I would focus on is convincing people to eat less meat, eggs, dairy, etc. It can be a gradual process to even further reduction, or even just a permanent flat reduction is still an improvement.
Convincing two people to reduce their animal consumption by 50% is as good as convincing one person to go full vegan.
i think ed winters has changed his focus from moralizing and guilt-tripping and is now actively trying to make vegan foods more available/accessible. so i don't even think you need to talk about meat at all: just offer people food that happens to be vegan. and i don't mean trick them into eating a soyburger: just make food that is naturally vegan and tastey and then that's the meal someone has eaten instead of a meaty one.
I think a solution is going to be less about changing minds, and more about changing incentives.
Meat-free food should be cheaper and easier. Walking into a supermarket or convenience store, one should be greeted with affordable, tasty, plant-based meals. The more affordable and accessible we make plant-based meals, the more people are going to eat them. And showing people that they can taste just as good as meat-based meals, will mean people won't immediately steer clear of them.
It’d also be great if they were nutritionally equivalent.
Plant based meats aren’t equivalent to animal meat on that front.
That's encouraging
Again, factory farming seems so, totally, horrific it's obvious that it should be consigned to history.
But feeling that way is something that only a tiny minority of people seem to share. Most people just don't care.
People love meat and are willing to totally ignore the suffering behind it. Never mind environmental impacts. .
That would be nice, but in a democracy, no one is going to vote to inconvenience to themselves. We have to find motivation by other means than being forced, or we will create a society where nothing good happens without being forced to.
No individual average person can do anything of significance to fight climate change or have a meaningful impact on the global environment. Only governments or massive organizations can.
If you could do an alternate reality type thing, where one version of you lives a perfect life, environmentally speaking, and the other version lives the worst, the world would be the same at the end of both.
Its not about one person preventing climate change alone, first step is not supporting climate change. Then people around you see that it's not black magic and that they can do it too. We are now at 2%, 3%? vegans. A change in society needs 10% to have a critical mass. If you decide to go vegan, for the animals, for the climate, for your health, and make others think about and maybe even change one other persons view you did better than most.
If you don't you are not passive, you are actively supporting it and showing others that its OK.
Eating meat is actively supporting the industry and everything that comes with it.
Silently not supporting it with a plant based diet is the passive position.
Actively fighting against it is the real fight against the industry.
Governments will not act against the will of the voters alone. They have to have some support to even consider making change. Massive organizations live from the participation from people, from you.
But let's be honest, you probably dont care, no one seems to care. People who do care are unusual and caring and taking action is unusual and might even earn you derision.
That’s not really true is it? There have never been more, better and more popular vegan food options. And while the number of actual vegans is (still?) low, the “less meat” contingent is growing every second.
We have definitely rounded a corner here.
And I haven’t seen any outright derision of vegetarians of vegans since I left college. And that was a long time ago.
If you think I'm going without the odd sausage roll, pizza, spagbol or chippy tea when we've got near-billionaire cunts like Sunak whizzing about the place in private jets, allowing companies to extract more gas from the North Sea, and going on mad rants about anti-car policies, you can think again.
The world is miserable enough without having to eat vegan food.
Yeah I totally get your point. And if everyone thinks like you we're all definitely fucked
I'm not vegan or even vegetarian, but vegan food is for the most part absolutely awesome and not "miserable" in the slightest. I've had to seriously cut back on meat for health reasons, and I've discovered...I just don't miss meat. Vegan/vegetarian food is often just better.
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It's an article about environmental impact
"The impacts of vegans were a quarter of those of high meat eaters for greenhouse gas emissions, and land use, just 27% of the impacts for water pollution, 46% for water use and 34% for biodiversity. "
But let's be honest, you probably dont care, no one seems to care. People who do care are unusual and caring and taking action is unusual and might even earn you derision.
Personally I'm still trying to figure out whether there's any point in trying to change anyone's mind. I have a feeling it's a hopeless waste of energy, which is terrible. If the people do do care lose all will to try to encourage others to see what seems obvious then nothing will get better, it will probably get worse.
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