If I had a nickel for every LotR Vegan/Vegetarian meme I’ve seen I’d have two nickels. Which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice.
Transcipt
Uruk-Hai Orc labelled “vegans”, holding chickens: “They are not for eating!”
Mordor Orc labelled “vegetarians”: “What about their eggs? They don’t need those!”
I must be genetically predisposed to veganism because I genuinely don’t like cheese or bacon very much.
Still really like lamb and chicken though, so 🤷
When I first saw this meme, I was a vegan… Now I’m a vegetarian
Listen, I’m going to cast it into the fire, sure.
But then it’s going to get all goopy and crispy and I’m going to pull it back out again to eat it.
Dairy is the most challenging thing to give up. There are good alternatives - particularly when they’re made of nuts and seeds that have been fermented traditionally - but they’re good in their own way, don’t expect them to be the same.
The stuff made out of almost pure coconut oil is universally disappointing, and coconut is arguably not vegan given the environmental footprint and resulting animal endangerment.
I’m lactose intolerant and even for lil old vegan me is difficult to avoid the seductive siren song of cheese.
From my experience, there is no good Vegan cheese. Daiyo cheese is awful.
I mean, Daiyo is an example of the artificial-basically-mostly-coconut-oil cheeze I mentioned previously. Most stuff that you can find in the average grocery store is going to suck. Have you tried anything along the lines of, say, this almost award-winning plant-based cheese? Stuff like that is way better, but again, unique. Don’t expect it to be the same, although things may be changing soon since people have figured out how to get one of the key dairy proteins from non-animal sources.
There’s also homemade stuff, which varies. It’s pretty easy to make super creamy mac and cheese with plant-based sources only, for instance.
One of my close friends went vegan right around the pandemic beginning, when everything first started shutting down. Our local bar shut down the day of St Patrick’s day so we invited him over to our place instead for shitty beer with green food dye (it was 3 of us total and we worked in close proximity daily, AND we were very pro-mask)
He used it as an opportunity to introduce us to a vegan version of the cheesy spinach and artichoke dip from like Applebees/Chilis/insert old people restaurant here, but it was made with cashews.
It took him an hour but OH MY LAWD my husband and I still talk about that dip to this day as non-vegans. Better than anything we’ve ordered at a restaurant. We tell everyone about that shit.
Damn that sounds tasty. People hate plant-based food, until they try good plant-based food.
I’ve had some good vegan cheese, and I’ve had bad real cheese, but only one of them cost 3.50 for a pound
Something is better than nothing. “I could never be a vegetarian/vegan because of bacon” “Ok, then eat vegetarian AND also eat bacon then?”
flexitarian is the way to go first: my understanding is thats its more controlled, not everyday (maybe even only to special occations) eating of meat
my understanding is thats its more controlled, not everyday (maybe even only to special occations) eating of meat
IS IT???
I thought flexitarian was someone who can perform very flexible oral sex. 🤯
Flexual intercourse?
🎵 When I get that feeling, I need flexual healing🎵
No, I think that is a yoga cunnilingist or a pilates fellator.
just because you don’t always eat meat, doesn’t mean you need to pick a label for it
flexitarian is a ridiculous term, essentially everyone eats vegetarian or vegan foods sometimes
Someone who cuts most meat out of their diet is closer to a vegetarian than they are to the average diet. But saying they are vegetarian most of the time is going to upset a lot of people.
they’re still just an omnivore…
See, this is why the label exists, so we can say “I decided to cut my meat eating down to ecologically sustainable levels and support animal cruelty as little as possible while acknowledging that it’s a hard, nearly impossible thing to do on a budget to go even fully vegetarian, much less the reality that there’s so many many things going wrong in the world and not everyone can care about everything,” only with one word because the vegan dorks will cry about you being vegetarian too anyways.
if I dont have a label and a flag how can I tell everyone all aspects of myself as the main character in life?
Right? Anything is better then nothing
I’ve never tried to convince anyone to take up veganism. Instead I avoid bringing it up at all cost because people get weird about it.
Cast it into the fire! Grill it!
Great, now I want halloumi…
I actually went about it the other way. After seeing how bad dairy cows have it in the daily (I have in-laws who are dairy farmers) compared to cows raised for their flesh, I tried giving up just cheese, because it’s the one thing I told myself I could never do. I remember specifically saying to a lactose intolerant person that I would kill myself if I couldn’t eat cheese lol.
I can’t imagine eating cheese now, just the smell grossed me out. Like I was cleaning a plastic case that held cheddar (my partner’s) and I swear I couldn’t get the stink out of my fingers for hours. Even cow milk which I used to think was neural and creamy smells and tastes funky and cheesy.
Anyway, that’s all to illustrates how malleable tastes are. I think it must have been so hard to quit, because I remember what I said and did, but not how I felt. It’s like the urge just faded away. Like it was a temptation one moment, and then the next I forgot what I ever liked about it.
Anyway from there reducing and eliminating other products was easy, since I’d already fought the animal product boss battle.
*(GASGÛL) They were once men; healthy men. Then Tongue the Deceiver gave to them nine rounds of Cheese. Blinded by their hunger, they took them without question, one by one falling into gassness. Now they are slaves to his will. They are the Gasgûl: Fartwraiths, neither living nor dead. At all times they feel the presence of the Cheese, drawn to the power of the lactose. They will never stop farting. *
One Whey to rule them all, One Curd to find them, One Stink to bring them all, and in Aroma blind them
I mean: being vegan in anything but cheese is also already something.
Just skipping a meal with meat where you would usually have one is already a big step for the individual.
Käsespatzel 🤤🤤🤤
As a non-German living in Germany. Abendbrot goes hard. Like I didn’t expect it to be so enjoyable, but it’s tasty, easy, and cheap. I know it’s traditional to include cold cuts, but I usually just use cheeses and veggies. Fucking tasty
And the veggies pastes, Aufstrich
Your comment made me (a non-German who lived in Germany for a while this year) feel sad for not giving Abendbrot a chance
Kann man Speck rein machen!
Could always source ethical human milk…and other cheeses.
My Hu-cow sub consents.
ethical human milk
Imagining this overlayed on a man with a big smile on his face.
Fun fact, cheese is not always vegetarian. It can (quite often) contain animal rennet (from the inside of a young cow stomage, the cow needs to die for this)
Unless, of course, we’re talking about the German Leberkäse (liver cheese), which, naturally, isn’t cheese and doesn’t contain liver.
Usage of animal rennet requires disclosure on the packaging, in my country, thanks to a majority of religions being against meat and stuff.
I would really like to be the case more often. I’m a cheese eating vegetarian and I have to look on the ingredients every time I buy cheese. Some brands will even switch from animal to microbial rennet and viceversa within the same product without warning.
i think most of the industry uses synthetic remnet.
As a person who check all cheese in the supermarket for this. The current state (EU/NL) is almost 60%, 60% of the cheese in our supermarket is without murdering baby cows. Which I up from last year, and it has been trending up for a while.
I have no clue how other countries are doing, my guess us worse. Some france people still label ‘Fish’ as ‘Vegan’
That number moves much closer to 0% if you start counting the baby cows killed in order to keep their mothers perpetually lactating, rather than just those whose bodies were used as a direct ingredient.
A cow will be impregnated 6-8 times during her life on a typical dairy farm, before she is killed af half her natural lifespan to be replaced by a younger cow. One of those baby cows will be raised as that replacement cow, the rest will be killed shortly after birth.
Killing baby cows is an inherent part of cow-milk production.
most dairy calves are brought to full weight before slaughter.
It’s highly market-senstive what happens to them, but I have previously worked on dairy farms in NZ and AU, and in both countries, calves(except replacement heifers) that get raised at all are a rounding error, maybe a handful per farm that are kept for personal slaughter and consumption.
If the bobby-calf (aka veal) market is paying well enough, then they are shipped off for slaughter at ~4 days old. If the market doesnt pay well enough to justify 4 days of rearing costs, then they are killed immediately and sold for their skins.
i present the math below
a man who has never eaten veal.
hardly any dairy calves end up as veal.
the math
https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/DataFiles/48685/milkcowsandprod.xlsx?v=1413.4
thousands_of_head_of_cows = 9448.0 actual_cows = 1000 * thousands_of_head_of_cows annual_male_calves = .5 * actual_cows veal_weight_of_calves_in_pounds = 260 annual_veal_production_in_millions_of_pounds = 58 annual_percentage_of_bobby_calves_that_become_veal = ((annual_veal_production_in_millions_of_pounds * 1000000) / (veal_weight_of_calves_in_pounds * annual_male_calves))*100 print(annual_percentage_of_bobby_calves_that_become_veal)4.722204129486094
a dairy cows life span is like 5 years
A cows natural life span is 20ish years. They’re kept perpetually pregnant for years until their bodies give out, then they’re slaughtered at around 5 years old.
cows don’t naturally live to 20 years. they can live that long if they are well fed and watered and protected from disease, predators, and the environment. that’s an artificial life span.
ours were closer to twelve but go off the documentary you watched once
you are correct all of our cattle were born seven years old
I think many French protected cheeses are not allowed to, but I’m not sure about that
That would be huge news if true but it doesn’t sound like you have a source
I’m not bringing any moral value, just the note that synthetic remnet is cheaper then real one, another commenter said that about 60% of cheeses use it,i thought it would be much more.
What fresh hell is this?
I cut way back on cheese because of the salt, also it’s expensive and high in calories. I could easily go through a large block (or even two--8000 calories!) of sharp cheddar in a week, and that was too much.
This is why I gave up red meat, and processed meat:
https://health.clevelandclinic.org/is-red-meat-bad-for-you
Here’s something you may not realize: The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) classifies red meat as a Group 2A carcinogen, which is described as “probably carcinogenic to humans.” Carcinogens are substances with cancer-causing potential.
A review of studies on the relationship between red meat and cancer found that eating high levels of red meat is associated with a higher risk of:
Breast cancer
Colorectal cancer
Uterine cancer
Hepatocellular carcinoma
Lung cancerThat’s not all: Processed meats are categorized as level 1 carcinogens. This puts them in the same category as cigarettes and asbestos and means they’re known to increase your risk of cancer.
Especially funny because while there are other things vegetarians will eat that vegans won’t (Other dairy, eggs), cheese is actually physically addictive because the same protein that makes it curdle breaks down through digestion into a substance that acts like dopamine. It really is the “one ring” of veganism and often the last / hardest thing to give up when one goes vegan.
wait so when i go to the fridge at 3am for cheese im basically literally eating happiness?
Literally a mild opiate. The hypothesis is that it’s an evolutionary adaptation to ensure babies will reliably crave their mother’s milk.
makes sense, thank you!
You’re taking a hit!
