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"No worries, I don't feel insulted. :) I can imagine it seems really extreme to you to radically change one's eating habits like that. If you would've talked to me about veganism five years ago, I would've said the same thing I guess! Turns out that once you're convinced on an ethical level, this change comes pretty naturally, at least that's how it was for me. I don't feel deprived of anything, I don't feel like my eating pattern has become boring, I think I probably enjoy cooking and eating even more than I used to before I was vegan. I get your idea about food being part of a culture, but then again culture and food habits do change a great deal. When we think about "typical Dutch food", it's generally not the food that used to be eaten here centuries ago. Potatoes come from America, a lot of fruit and veggies that we consider normal everyday food don't naturally grow in our climate, and the habit of eating meat every day is fairly recent too, a century ago only rich folks could afford daily meat, for others it was a luxury product. We might think that, say, a plate of boiled potatoes with some steak and a tomato salad is a normal Dutch dish, but it's not as normal and as Dutch as you'd think. Even more recent changes in our eating habits are things like lasagna, nasi and shoarma. These dishes are normal enough for us, but even a few decennia ago they were considered really exotic food. I'm just saying that cultures and food habits are way more fluid than we tend tot think, they change all the time and get influenced by many different cultures, so why not by vegan/vegetarian cooking? :) (By the way, vegan sushi does exist, and not just as some weirdo vegan invention you can only get in crazy hippie restaurants, most sushi restaurants serve rolls with cucumber or advocado or some other vegetable in them, I personally find them really tasty! ^^) Hmmm, I just noticed it's getting pretty late and I've got loads of work to do so I should probably cut my tendency to write ridiculously long posts about veganism right here and get to work. ;) Might come back to some things you said later though. Bye! :)"June 12 2012 on If not already; go Vegan! Or encourage others to do so. For animal...
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Turn on, tune in, drop out! June 12 2012
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"Dear Maarten, I respect that veganism might not be part of your top priorities, we're all different and we all focus on other ways to make the world a better place and I think you're doing a wonderful job. However, being a vegan myself, I hope you do at least seriously consider this idea. Your post didn't seem very well informed. For starters, animals sadly aren't harmed just "for a minute", they are generally treated in ways that cause a lot of suffering and distress for the animal. The same goes for animals that aren't bred for meat, but for other products. An example is the "production" of eggs: the male chicks get killed right away because they aren't useful for the egg industry and sadly the cheapest way of killing them isn't always the least harmful way. The female chicks usually get locked up in cages that are, despite labels stating better conditions, still much smaller than chickens naturally need. Their beaks are cut off to prevent them from hurting each other and themselves, a natural reaction to the stress caused by their overcrowded living conditions. Chickens often suffer diseases and/or get hurt, making them suffer a great deal before they, too, eventually get slaughtered when they're no longer considered productive, which means they get killed at a pretty young age, whereas chickens can became way older than that. This is just one example, sadly there's stories like this about just about any animal product you could think of. If you would like to know more about this, you could consider watching the documentary "earthlings", which you can legally stream online for free. However, this film is not for everyone, it contains very graphic images of animal cruelty, you need to decide whether that's something you want to see or not. The second part of your argument doesn't make as much sense as you'd think either. The animals you eat, aren't wild animals that need to provide for their own food (assuming you're not one of the very few people in this country who live on hunting wild animals.) They are animals bred especially for the meat, egg and dairy industry in way bigger quantities than what's sustainable. Big-scale farming poses health and environmental risks and the lives of the animals are hardly natural. If more and more people stop consuming animal products, and eat more plant-based products in stead, that doesn't mean that loads of animals will starve, it just means that, over time, less animals will be bred, which would solve several problems related to big-scale factory farming. You might think that there simply aren't enough plants to supply everyone with plant-based food. However, as you mentioned as well, animals need food too, and there's a lot of animals being bred to supply our meat. Much land is used to grow plants that are meant for animal consumption, if that land would be used to grow plants directly for human consumption, a lot more people could be fed. As an example, most people tend to associate soy with vegan and vegetarian products like tofu and soy milk. However, most soy (I believe it was about 90 percent even, but I have to admit that I'm not entirely sure of that - it's definitely most soy though) isn't used for human consumption. A lot more soy is used to feed factory-farmed animals. Imagine how much soy has been used to feed the pig your bacon is made from! And imagine how many people we could feed if we would directly use all that soy for human consumption. For me personally, and for most vegans that I know, my decision to not eat animal products is an ethical decision based on the principle that causing suffering to a living being merely for the sake of eating things that I like the taste of (because, nutrition-wise, you can live healthily off plant-based foods) is simply not okay. I do, however, realise that not everyone feels that way and I often hear from people that they don't think killing animals for meat or other products is necessarily a bad thing. If that's your conviction, I would still urge you to significantly lower your intake of animal products out of environmental and health concerns, and if you care about animal welfare, I would urge you to buy any animal products you do decide to eat as much as you can from local and organic sources. Even though for me a world without slaughterhouses is the ideal, I much prefer people eating a reasonable portion of organic meat every now and then to people not changing anything at all about their eating habits because total veganism or vegetarianism seems like too big of a step. If you do at some point decide to take up the idea, feel free to e-mail me (I assume that, being the site admin, you can see my e-mailadress, right?) to ask more information and practical tips about what you can eat, where to find good vegan ingredients, etcetera. Verena gave some links already, I don't have the time to look at them right now but I hope they're helpful. If you would like some more resources, a good site in Dutch is www.vegetarisme.be, you can find loads of information and recipes. Have a great day and good luck with your next challenge, whatever it's going to be! :)"June 11 2012 on If not already; go Vegan! Or encourage others to do so. For animal...
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Live 1 Month Without Spending Money. June 11 2012
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Remove yourself from the global gene pool. June 11 2012