#tiktok isn't destroying my life but I don't like how much I rely on it for stimulus

[sillimancer]

my superpower is I can see some stupid dumb dumb shit online and I can just be like "okay" and scroll past it, forgetting it happened almost immediately

[cripplepunk-sylveon]

Why would you need to feel guilty if you don't eat animals? i'm confused 😮 wouldn't it be a good thing if possible? I mean, since growing food for livestock is destroying the rainforest and isn't adopting a plant based diet one of the biggest things an individual can do to combat climate change?

As gently as I can manage: no, it's not that simple, and a plant-based diet as most folks think of it is not inherently better for the environment. Nothing any group of individuals from the general public can do will counteract the damage being done by big corporations.

tl;dr: A PBD is not inherently better for the environment, it highly depends on where you live and what you can/should buy, and many folks don't understand nor want to understand that. The history of food is a history of colonialism and violence and we need to address that, especially when it comes to veganism in North America and the importing of non-native foods to support it.

Full essay under the cut that I never meant to write but it sure did happen

Is it possible to go on a plant-based diet (a PBD, for future use of the term, because it will be popping up plenty here) within a localized area because it's more affordable/better for you/better for your environment? Yes. But it takes work to do so. As in, research, a willingness to buy and grow local, and an acute awareness of what the invasive species of your region are.

The unfortunate truth is that many people are unwilling or flat-out incapable of doing said research and work. They just want quick and easy access to plant-based food because they've heard somewhere that it's better and more humane than raising animals for meat/dairy/eggs. This is only possible because we live on colonized land, where we've created a massive distance between us and the origins of what we eat- and brought in non-native animal and plant species to reproduce what our colonizers eat, regardless of the impact on the land and the people. In fact, this was done very much on purpose. Native people reliant on colonial food systems are less likely to cause a ruckus, because they can just be starved out.

For an example, let's look at the Canadian North. The Inuit have hunted whales, seals, caribou, polar bear, and arctic char during the cold months in a sustainable fashion for thousands of years. Inuk people will hunt a single whale and feed their family for a year- never mind the uses for whale oil, baleen, and whale hide. They would use every part of the whale that they could find a use for, nothing was wasted. Nowadays, though... their traditional foods are called "barbaric" and "cruel", and hunting traditionally is frowned upon, while we ship fruit and vegetables that cannot be grown in permafrosted soil up to them and charge them as consumers for the cost to us. Here's a video from 2013 talking about the issue. From 2013! It's still happening now!! I would never recommend a PBD to someone living in such a situation because of both the expense and the destruction of the traditional hunting culture of the Inuit.

Before anyone tries to say I'm shitting on folks who can't eat meat- I'm really not. I get it, the lone star tick is an asshole of epic proportions, and allergies are a fuck you from the universe- I myself can't eat eggs! And they are in EVERYTHING! If we can accommodate allergies and dietary restrictions we absolutely should. I like to think there's a particularly shitty corner of the universe for people who think allergies are a joke or just someone being picky. But those are not choices. Those are required restrictions to keep the person alive and healthy.

Going vegan to "go green", on the other hand, is 100% a personal choice. Unfortunately it's also one frequently shaped by misinformation and propaganda. Vegans never really consider where their food comes from, and because the vast majority of them are city-dwellers who have access to a grocery store, they don't feel like they need to. It's not affecting them personally, so they don't care.

They should though. Many of the plants they rely on for food cause massive ecological damage, way more than growing feed for cattle, chickens, or pigs. Quinoa is farmed using child labour, and the sharp spike in price as white diners demand it- combined with the fact it's a thirsty crop that uses a lot of water that the locals also used as drinking water- kind of destroys any good it's doing by being a "superfood" (It was not a staple crop, however, and has done a little bit of good. Emphasis on a LITTLE BIT). Avocado is facing a similar situation- it was a staple food for the people growing it, now they can't afford it and they're resorting to inhumane measures to grow enough of it to meet white settler demand. (Also, if they fail to pay their cartel fees, they're very likely to have their farm burnt to the ground or worse. El Narco has their fingers in EVERYTHING, even in fruit production.) Cashews are mainly grown and processed in India, where workers suffer low pay and sweatshop conditions and caustic burns to ensure we have them to snack on. Soy products were once the main destructive force facing the Amazon rainforest, and now it's threatening the Cerrado and the millions of species that call the region home while filling local water supplies with silt and grime. There's also hundreds of reports detailing the slavery afoot at soy plantations, AND it's causing topsoil to erode faster.

No, meat and dairy as industries are not without fault. I never claimed they were. It's not hard to find things wrong with beef and dairy, and you can thank militant preachy vegans for that. You can also thank them for those horrifying ads everyone with a certain app spent their first two weeks blocking and reporting with a fervor like no other to make sure they stopped seeing them. (Or, maybe that was just me, idk what tiktok's deal is with giving me PETA and vegan propaganda videos but I'd like it to stop.) HOWEVER. The actual people producing my food, working the land to raise animals for meat and whatnot? They know what they're doing. Many of them have been studying husbandry and animal welfare since they were in middle school at the latest. I trust them to provide a good quality of life for a cow, chicken, pig, or bison that will end up on my plate one day.

Besides, they don't see me eating jerky instead of something I'm deathly allergic to and tell me a horror story about how the cow who provided it was flayed alive (yes, this has happened, more than once- it wasn't even beef jerky, it was bison from a local ranch). They just let me snack in peace and we go about both our days.