You are doing it wrong
The right way to not eat animals correctly is, behold:
don’t eat animals
Whoa, imagine that. I mean, literally, that is all you have to do. But you’re failing at it.
I am tired of articles eliciting this kind of self hatred that supposedly should make people stop eating meat and animal byproducts.
Listen guys and gals, presenting the idea of eating a pork stake as a similar act of cruelty to eating a fresh baby’s face chunks roasted in olive oil and with an intro of toddler foie gras, is a horrible form of hate speech, and you are doing it! It is like you are trying very hard to stop loving meat. Shouting at people who eat animals that they serve corpses, is the nutritional equivalent of homophobic speech from gay clerics: you love the D, but you so wish you didn’t, that you do everything in your power, including ruining folk’s life, so that no one can enjoy the D. How is that for a shitty comparison?
First, decide what you want to talk about. Are you explaining: dietary choices for healthy living or animal rights or spiritual paths or what? Stop confusing things so badly.
If you are a vegetarian because you don’t want to hurt animals, I think you need to meditate more on this idea. This point is a horribly weak point to make. What if humanity will print meat from artificial protein, meat that is 100% identical to cow meat, then your vegetarianism is done?
If you are a vegetarian because you want to remove this bit of karma from your story, you should meditate more on this idea too. How well does your dharma do today about everything else?
If you are a vegetarian because you want to kill the horrible meat industry, you are doing it wrong. The right way is to enroll in organizations that work with regulators and raise funds to sue farms, processors, importers and exporters of animal food which hurt and torture animals. The way we slaughter animals affects the quality of food for everyone, and it is almost always an important figure in the expenses of the food industry.
You should fight the fact that the price of meat is too low. Way too low. But your abstinence and all the vegetarian abstinence in the world will never put a dent in the EBIDTA of the food industry corporations.
Are you a vegetarian who just wants to be healthy? Go for it, but remember that putting a healthy person on a higher moral ground than an unhealthy one is a dogmatic habit which the not so holy church has done for hundreds of years. And, yes, you are momentarily heading towards your death like everyone else. All the veganism in the world will not make you eternal, just maybe healthier than average. Also, the average, contains a lot, a big lot, of unlucky sick people.
Promote responsible consumption. Lobby for hyper complete labeling and mandatory pedigree of animal food ingredients. Pledge money for those who can enforce change, such as taxing cheap meat producers who sell meat for indiscriminate processing. There is so much to do, all better than telling people they “love joyfully gorging on the murdered bodies of children.”
Vegans and vegetarians are no better in any way, than people with omnivore dining habits. But, oh my God, do they cling to that and tout their superiority non stop.
It is OK to preach healthy habits. It is more than welcome to try and push society into a higher perspective, one about how far we go with our hedonism and fever for growth. You are doing a great job in working for making healthy, guilt free food more accessible, by say providing vegan recipes, inventing them, sharing them. You are doing great for yourself by being a vegan or vegetarian or ovo-lacto-vegetarian, or a vegetarian who eats fish, whatever suits you.
But when you step up to the mic and tell omnivore people that they commit murder by eating sentient beings with feelings and family, when you call omnivore people cannibalistic, when you hurt people by generalizing abuse as if it were absolutely everywhere, when you elicit guilt in people by poisoning their plates with shame, regret, doubt and fear, you are being a really, really, bad person. Even to yourself, you’re doing far more damage than eating a cow’s baby or drinking a cow’s milk would do.
If you dare playing the sensationalist card by claiming all milk is filled with pus, by equalizing all omnivore diet with pink slime or any other such gimmicks, you are a Martin Shkreli of nutrition, because you play the one card you’ve got, despite consequences. Stop doing this.
To my surprise the experience as a flexitarian who swings shamelessly from spiritually abstaining from food, to indulging in consuming heavily processed fast food served in dubious conditions, swinging from a million salads a month and no animal traces in my kitchen to weeks of steak and white bread, well, this experience has nothing to do with food.
This experience instead opened my world to the other people concerned with what they eat. And I was horrified. I am talking about SAW one to seven horror level.
Spiritual veganism and vegetarianism flooded my life with homophobic people, racist and intolerant folk who made a new brand of shithead politics: Dietary Nazism. Amazingly, the mixture of religiousness with diet habits created a fanatic human who wants to cleanse the world of all impurity, asap. Dangerous.
Hip vegans were basically deeply existentially hurt people who found meaning in their fucking diet. It is like everything the Earth has to offer to a briefly being spirit, can be found in the stuff you shove down your throat. Delusional.
Warrior veganism are people who want to save the planet, to fix the world, to solve all problems once and for all, and they have found the magic potion of Fix-it-all to be in a fact-poisoned exclusively plant based diet. Demagogic.
People, please, I so hope this gets said by more and more of us:
your diet does not make you a better human!
It is just your diet, stuff you eat.
Action! Creation! Communion! Stuff like that maybe could turn one into a better human. The mere act of choosing what you eat is a smart way to take care of yourself, that is about it.
Stop slut shaming my dinner plate!
All those of your loved ones whom you assassinate with facts about chicks being rolled alive into burritos, they are EATING YOUR HATE SPEECH. You make people more sick by feeding them shame, guilt, regret, fear, anxiety, by pushing against them harder and harder you are doing so much more harm than good.
Maybe, there will be some day when we all eat things that don’t harm any living creature or being, not first hand, not with any secondary effects, not the environment, not the Planet. And I dream this future will enact itself. But this, this is not a path to that future. You are ridiculing, indirectly, the correct path of creating a good and stable framework for re-imagining nutrition, with sensationalist hate filled stories of killed animals.