The 'instant-vegan' quote ...

[Clueless Git]

So just to see if I understand the disagreement here, if there is one. CG, you thing vegetarianism is fundamentally wrong.

For clarity:

I hold that the captivity, breeding, exploitation and slaughtering of animals is fundamentaly wrong.

The disagreement here, from my PoV, appears to be over where is, and where isn't, appropriate for opposition against fundamental wrongs to be voiced.

 

[ledboots]

I'm interested ...

(Genuinely. I hold fruitarianism to be a higher ethic than veganism but have never explored the practicalities in any detail.)

Facts, figures, sources?

I'd be interested, too.

 

[FortyTwo]

What I want to see is a l/o vegetarian chime in here, I think I've pretty much said everything I need to say about my stance on it.

 

[Moll Flanders]

I have been reading this thread and have a few random thoughts buzzing around my head.

I haven't ever met a raw vegan although I have known vegan people who have tried to eat more raw food for health reasons, as I did for a while. I did 'feel' better when I ate more raw vegan food but I don't know if that was just due to the fact that I was just eating more fresh produce. I felt better when I was eating organic cooked fruit and veg too so I'm not sure it is due to the raw element. I'm not sure if a fruitarian diet would be practical if the whole world became vegan but obviously a typical omni diet is doing a lot of environmental damage and feeding crops to animals and then killing the animals for food seems a very wasteful way of producing food.

From an environmental standpoint I think being a freegan, foraging for wild food or eating roadkill might be better than a lot of diets but obviously vegetarians and vegans wouldn't want to eat animals under those circumstances.

How about we all just accept that there's literally no way to eliminate every bit of suffering from our lives? This world is dynamic and violent and cruel by nature. We can make the best of it but we can't improve every single facet. There are going to be different degrees of practicality that people can pull off, and it's going to vary enormously from person to person.

I agree with this.

I actually have known some vegans who seem like they are not bothered by the environmental or wider ethical concerns of their lifestyle and I know vegans who have three cars and go on long haul flights regularly but then my own lifestyle could be criticised too. The main issue with my lifestyle as I see it as that I have eight companion animals living with me and what I feed them contributes to a lot of animal deaths. I'm sure there are other things people could point out like buying too much stuff/ not being careful about the ethics of companies I buy from.

 

[Mischief]

I'm interested ...

(Genuinely. I hold fruitarianism to be a higher ethic than veganism but have never explored the practicalities in any detail.)

Facts, figures, sources?

Roughly six decades of life in an agricultural family. It still sometimes surprises me how little most veg*ns know about what it takes to produce enough food to feed a human being. I understand the average joe being ignorant about what it takes to get all that nice prepackaged and processed stuff onto grocery store shelves, but I keep expecting veg*ns to be more informed, especially since you just need a very basic understanding of human history or a very basic understanding of math.

Grains and legumes are high caloric crops. It was the development of grain and legume agriculture that supported the great growth in human population, because one acre of those types of crops produce so many more food calories than other crops.

Corn is one of the highest calories per acre crops, if not the highest. (See this analysis of how many humans could be fed if corn were the only crop: http://fatknowledge.blogspot.com/2008/11/how-many-people-can-earth-support.html ) If you grow crops that have a lower calorie value per acre, more acres are needed to produce the same number of calories. Very, very basic math.

I guess it depends what subset of fruitarianism one belongs to, whether one will eat grains. So, if one is a fruitarian who is O.K. with eating corn, soybeans and other legumes, wheat and other grains, you would be O.K., as long as you don't object to the plant being "killed" as part of the harvesting process, since it's an annual anyway. (Large scale harvesting of grains, legumes, etc. is simply not feasible without taking out the plant in its entirety.)

I think it would be educational for veg*ns to grow gardens and learn firsthand what it takes to produce their own food.

 

[Mischief]

82 calories per pound of tomatoes
average yield of tomatoes per acre in the Midwest is 16,000 pounds
= 1,312,000 calories

1,642 calories per pound of grain corn
average yield of corn per acre in the Midwest is 160 bushels, which is 8,960 pounds
= 14,712,329 calories

Wheat produces 3-4 million calories per acre, potatoes 6-8 million calories.

Apples have a good calorie yield per acre, in prime areas, better than wheat or potatoes, but not anywhere close to corn. The problem is that apples are a predictable crop only in areas not susceptible to late frosts. For example, apple trees here have born fruit in only two of the last five years.

And of course, the annual plants that produce fruit (such as tomatoes) aren't actually allowed to "live" out their natural life expectancy. Once they have born the major part of their crop, they're tilled under for the next crop in the rotation. I don't know how fruitarians feel about that. It's similar to what happens to egg laying chickens and dairy cows.

 

[ledboots]

We eat a lot of fruit, but are lucky to live in a subtropical zone so have lots of local fresh produce year-round. People commonly bring bags of tangerines or mangoes or what-have-you to work from their yard trees to share. So I guess eating lots of fruit seems normal to me.

 

[Mischief]

We eat a lot of fruit, but are lucky to live in a subtropical zone so have lots of local fresh produce year-round. People commonly bring bags of tangerines or mangoes or what-have-you to work from their yard trees to share. So I guess eating lots of fruit seems normal to me.

Yes, that's the other thing that people who aren't in agriculture or don't at least grow a lot of their own food don't generally seem to think about - what can be grown efficiently in a given area depends on the climate and soil conditions, and some crops are a lot hardier than others. There isn't that much land that can be counted on producing "fruit" on a consistent basis.

The apricot trees here haven't yielded a single fruit since 2008. There was a very nice crop of apricots that year, but that was unusual.

Last year, there was a shortage of apples on a national basis; prices were way up. A year or two before that, pumpkins were in very short supply. There was no canned pumpkin on the grocery store shelves after Thanksgiving, and it wasn't available again until the following fall. (I keep canned pumpkin in my pantry year round because of its usefulness in helping with digestive issues in various animals. Since that year, I've kept a year's worth of canned pumpkin in store.)

Fruits and nuts will also be heaviest hit by what is happening to the bees.