@sonjak - Thanks for the recommendations - I looked at Straight Up Food - the scallop potatoes look amazing. I'll need to try that soon.
It sounds like you and I had similar journeys and time-lines. Yeah - once you stop eating animals you see the insanity of it. Not the insanity that people would eat animals on occasion. That in and of itself is its own issue that I can mentally think about from lots of viewpoints, because I've held many of those viewpoints at one time or another.
But then you add on the factory farming, the environment, the health... and well ... you know how it goes. But ...
For me, the thing that gets me, is the sheer SCALE of animal agriculture. We're 7 billion people and we keep hundreds of billions of animals in captivity - these are environmentally and ethically devastating numbers - just scroll through the bloomberg map
@Nola584 posted - and the scale is apparent. All this- so we can eat in a way that is literally killing us. It's madness. The conditioning, the indoctrination, the hidden ideology that people don't know they subscribe to, don't know they argue from, and aren't even aware it exists - carnism is everywhere.
Our predicament is both dire and urgent. How nice would it be to 'just make my personal choices'. But you can't. For one thing, voting with your dollars isn't going to have much effect beyond supporting new brands. With subsidies, the old products still get produced*. Besides, there's no time for such incremental change based on individual change. We've got to wake people up. But as you and I are well aware now, human cognition doesn't work like that. And when we talk about the change in our own mindsets, it's often received as 'well isn't that nice that you, M41, have a new belief that seems to give you purpose. You do you, I'll do me.' As if I've made a personal choice to work out more or something. Besides, it's not about ME. It's about US. A very few of us are trying to save humanity here so wake the fuck up because if you don't - we all dead. We are leaving to our children a destroyed, spent world. But we don't have to! OMG stop with the cheese and the beef already! There are other things in life like ... hummus!
*about that, 'voting with our dollars' thing. In the US and EU today, your dollar votes don't count for squat as long as we continue these farm bills that subsidize animal agriculture. That's why I started a crowdfund campaign to end subsidies to animal ag, and redirect some of that $ to help farmers transition to growing crops for human consumption. We are about 1/4 way funded, and $500 is coming in next week from the platform organizer. This is my shameless plug. You can donate here:
https://www.lobbyists4good.org/animal-ag-subsidiesThe other indoctrination - esp in America today - that unfettered capitalism is the one true way. Here's a fun experiment: read this WSJ article, and keep in mind the existential threat that animal agriculture poses to humanity (it's the leading cause of GHG emissions). How does it strike you?
https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/growing-appetites-fuel-record-u-s-meat-production-1515782021Some key phrases:
"The U.S. beef-cattle herd has expanded by 12% over the past four years."
“We have a world that has a growing middle class that’s demanding protein,”
as if meat == protein. Bitch, you can get protein from plants. Where do you think the animals get their protein?
"Right now, pretty much everybody except for the turkey people [is] making money,” said Tom Elam, president of agricultural consultancy FarmEcon LLC. “Until that changes, they’ll just keep expanding.”
That part bolded - why is everyone making money? I would wager that $38B a year in animal ag subsidies has A LOT to do with it.
Free markets where full externalities are accounted for, and innovators compete on an even playing field would be awesome. But that's not what we've got, especially so in the animal agriculture industries. The ideal of free markets - the ideal free markets we were taught in school that capitalism should bring - ain't reality. I do not want my tax dollars subsidizing this destructive force, this threat to my children. Seriously, call your reps, and if you agree with what I'm saying here, help me hire a lobbyist.
https://www.lobbyists4good.org/animal-ag-subsidiesI am mostly oil-free too. I sometimes buy takeout that uses it though. I do not miss cooking with it and I love how much less soap I need to use, how clean my kitchen is (especially the cover of the exhaust vent), etc.
We've cut out lots of oil, but, er, not tonight! Home-made falafel, hummus, and soy-yogurt aioli.
Damn it, this was going to be a post about my falafel and it turned into another rage against the machine sesh. Ah, well, we've got a massive machine to rage against.
