Vegan ≠ Vegetarian.
Veganism starts and ends with “no animal exploitation”. And due to some weird ingroup/outgroup dynamics Extremely Online Vegans will get batshit insane radical with it and refuse to feed meat to their cats or insist that eating honey is fundamentally unethical.
I eat very little meat, mostly for environmental and partly for ethical reasons, but bringing up the environmentalist side of vegetarianism to defend veganism (a radical dogma based on a specific ethical stance) is missing the mark entirely.
With all that said, everyone should eat less meat, and way less red meat.
I do agree the zeal of the recently converted veg*ns are not very helpful in messaging. Wagging your finger at people as individuals for a lifestyle and notions about nutrition (“but where do you get your protein from”) they were likely born into/just accepted as a truth is not too helpful. Yelling at people for a dab of honey or egg or butter in something served to them…not really helping. Who has ever had their mind changed by such behaviors? If anything, this will make people double down in their delusions about how the SAD is good for them.
Yes, most animal proteins are probably setting you up for diabetes, cancer, heart disease. And it’s not really hard to discern this from looking at the evidence. Honest actors in the medical profession are already saying this, if they aren’t compromised by the SAD industry complex. They are, IMHO, not saying it nearly enough. Far too many people still think they need “protein” (in their minds, meaning dead flesh which also happens to have lots and lots of fat, too, but they don’t call this “a fat”, they call it “a protein”, lol) to live.
In my opinion, if you compare the crazy levels of animal protein consumption in America with the arc of Big Tobacco and the levels of denialism also associated with it, we are maybe in the 1980s phase - when everyone but the most reactionary knew that using tobacco AND secondary smoke were life-threatening, but just before much was being done about it - the bans on indoor smoking only started in the late 1980s.
Many people are starting to wake up from the Big Tobacco-esque levels of carnist propaganda…we’ll see what action is going to be taken by governments, institutions, etc…
We’re like 1960s tobacco industry at best. I don’t see the subsidies on red meat going away in the next 10 years, and probably not the next 20 if I’m honest, short of a catastrophic food crisis that would cause us to re-evaluate the number of human calories produced per hectare of agricultural land.
I’d like to be wrong, and change does come in waves so maybe 10 years from now I’ll change my mind. Maybe. But right now the idea of not subsidizing red meat production is fringe even within the left of the left – and the left hasn’t exactly been making electoral strides in most countries recently.
