Is the immigrant working in the fields with no healthcare and fleeing ICE living a happy, healthy life? Is the slave worker in Myanmar making the trowel you use in your home garden living a happy, healthy life?
It’s impossible to exist without benefiting from suffering somewhere. At a certain point, you just have to try and do what you can to make it better. In my case, that involves supporting legislation to make the world better, because that will have more impact than a fringe group of people deciding not to wear wool socks.
I don’t understand this line of reasoning, especially as applied to the original context of “vegetarians are right, but vegans go too far”. Nobody here is pretending they avoid any part in any suffering. Indeed, we all determine for ourselves how much we can live with. For many of us, that line shifts with our needs, wants, knowledge and understanding. I just pointed out that the example of a happy cow, living life and providing milk is a fiction, masking the same realities that leads many people to vegetarianism.
If you care about those things, and if you consider those necessary to produce crops, then they are also 30-80% necessary to produce a corresponding amount of milk protein.
10-20% of cattle diets are soybeans, corn, or another industrial crop. 25-35% of their protein intake gets converted to milk protein.
Factor in the additional slave labor and worker exploitation involved in all of the other dairy ranching workflows, and it likely makes up the rest of the difference.
Is the immigrant working in the fields with no healthcare and fleeing ICE living a happy, healthy life? Is the slave worker in Myanmar making the trowel you use in your home garden living a happy, healthy life?
It’s impossible to exist without benefiting from suffering somewhere. At a certain point, you just have to try and do what you can to make it better. In my case, that involves supporting legislation to make the world better, because that will have more impact than a fringe group of people deciding not to wear wool socks.
I don’t understand this line of reasoning, especially as applied to the original context of “vegetarians are right, but vegans go too far”. Nobody here is pretending they avoid any part in any suffering. Indeed, we all determine for ourselves how much we can live with. For many of us, that line shifts with our needs, wants, knowledge and understanding. I just pointed out that the example of a happy cow, living life and providing milk is a fiction, masking the same realities that leads many people to vegetarianism.
If you care about those things, and if you consider those necessary to produce crops, then they are also 30-80% necessary to produce a corresponding amount of milk protein.
10-20% of cattle diets are soybeans, corn, or another industrial crop. 25-35% of their protein intake gets converted to milk protein.
Factor in the additional slave labor and worker exploitation involved in all of the other dairy ranching workflows, and it likely makes up the rest of the difference.
Again, if you care about those things.