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The other reason there is prejudice towards vegans, is because they talk about consuming meat the same way jehovas witnesses do about sin. Sinners cause Australian fires, floods, earthquakes, there are more wars now and everyone is less happy, than anyone has ever been before. Well, how about you believe what you want, but don’t blame other ways for everything.
There is more than just one reason or simply a million other reasons, why the planet is becoming more dangerous for humans to inhabit, other that consumption of meat by our species. An average women doesn’t earn less than an average man because “sexism!”. There are dozens of factors. Same goes for the climate change not because “omnivores!”

Oh, and a true downside of being a vegan: you fart more. Which is a climate change concern, and I ain’t even joking.

You have a very limited and incomplete understanding of what you are talking about, and I ain't even joking.

I have tried living with a vegan diet for about 3 months and so has my partner. Honestly, it's no big deal. If you are committed, you can get everything you need for a "healthy" vegan diet in most supermarkets nowadays and it's not particularly expensive either if you stick to certain basics like rice, lentils and potatoes. Natto and Miso are also worth mentioning here, even though they are a bit pricy if eaten regularly.

The reason why we did stop is quite simply a matter of quality of live. We don't eat meat very often, but when we do, we don't want to think twice about it. Same goes for things like cheese, fish, eggs and chocolate. Vegans might argue that this is a selfish attitude to have and I'd probably agree, but I can live with that. The ethical concern of contributing to animals being killed is something I do understand, but I am too selfish to go through with it all the way.

Environmental concerns are a different matter altogether. Not eating meat twice a day (as many middle aged people in Germany still do, for example) would be a big step towards correcting this issue. Meat should be a high quality commodity in my view, and priced accordingly. Education is a big factor here, as is our local "cuisine", which consists in large parts of meat dishes. After having eaten an organic steak, there is just no going back.

In any case, this is a change in attitude that will happen eventually in my estimation. However, it will happen much more slowly than contemporary vegan activists are hoping and it will take several generations to come into effect. I also believe this change can not be enforced by outside pressure. Harassing people for eating meat will rather result in resentment and defiance, so this is the wrong approach in my view.

 Da Boss wrote:
You have a very limited and incomplete understanding of what you are talking about, and I ain't even joking.

If you’re talking to me, enlighten me, please.
I’m willing to learn.

The amount that a vegan farts and the amount that a cow farts are different. Cows fart a LOT more, and their farts contain a lot more methane.

Additionally, you have to use about 10 times as much land to farm cattle as you do to farm an equivalent amount of vegetables. This is because the cow does not use all the energy of the grass it eats to convert into biomass. It uses a tiny fraction, around 10%.
Sheep are a little more efficient, pigs a little more efficient again, and the most efficient are chickens, in particular battery chickens because they are unable to waste energy by moving around. Organic farming is actually a lot less efficient in this way and therefore uses more land.

Why is this a problem? Habitat destruction is the main culprit in the mass extinction event we are currently living through. And a huge amount of the habitat destruction is caused by beef farming. The climate stuff is a less important consequence. We are essentially terraforming the earth to allow for the amount of beef, cheese and milk we want to consume. Webcomic, so not an academic source, but this visual outlines why it is an issue:
https://xkcd.com/1338/

A vegan diet is just more ecologically efficient than a meat based diet. Now, that does not mean that everyone has to become a super strict vegan. But trying out some alternatives is a good thing, and this Veganuary event is trying to encourage people to do so.

Big vegan dinner #2 and I've already found something I am absolutely keeping in my recipe book. We made a vegetable chili with pumpkin puree, cauliflower, beans, sweet potatoes, chipotle peppers, and cornbread made with almond milk, which I suspected was going to be and was freaking amazing.

Not super labor intensive because it was basically just thrown in the crockpot on low all day while I worked and the cornbread recipe was just "Put it all in a bowl and stir it a while".

Best tasting chili recipe I've ever had. The sweet ingredients worked incredibly well with the smoky-spicy chipotles. Glad I made enough for a couple of days, basically all I'm going to make tonight is a little side dish and we're gonna eat more of the chili.

the_scotsman wrote:
Big vegan dinner #2 and I've already found something I am absolutely keeping in my recipe book. We made a vegetable chili with pumpkin puree, cauliflower, beans, sweet potatoes, chipotle peppers, and cornbread made with almond milk, which I suspected was going to be and was freaking amazing.

Not super labor intensive because it was basically just thrown in the crockpot on low all day while I worked and the cornbread recipe was just "Put it all in a bowl and stir it a while".

Best tasting chili recipe I've ever had. The sweet ingredients worked incredibly well with the smoky-spicy chipotles. Glad I made enough for a couple of days, basically all I'm going to make tonight is a little side dish and we're gonna eat more of the chili.

Any chance you have a link/could post your recipe?

 DrGiggles wrote:

the_scotsman wrote:
Big vegan dinner #2 and I've already found something I am absolutely keeping in my recipe book. We made a vegetable chili with pumpkin puree, cauliflower, beans, sweet potatoes, chipotle peppers, and cornbread made with almond milk, which I suspected was going to be and was freaking amazing.

Not super labor intensive because it was basically just thrown in the crockpot on low all day while I worked and the cornbread recipe was just "Put it all in a bowl and stir it a while".

Best tasting chili recipe I've ever had. The sweet ingredients worked incredibly well with the smoky-spicy chipotles. Glad I made enough for a couple of days, basically all I'm going to make tonight is a little side dish and we're gonna eat more of the chili.

Any chance you have a link/could post your recipe?

2 tablespoon olive oil
1 tablespoon minced garlic
1 large sweet onion, diced
2 large carrots, diced
2 large sweet potatoes, peeled and diced
2 cans of black beans, rinsed and drained
1 bag of frozen or fresh cauliflower diced
1 pack of cooked lentils
1 cup of red quinoa
1 can diced tomatoes
1 mini can tomato paste
1 can pumpkin puree
1/4 cup diced de-seeded chipotle peppers (they come in a small can with adobo sauce, I take them out of the can, slice them, scoop the seeds out, then chop them up and add them back in to the can and put it in)
3 cups vegetable broth
lime juice
2 teaspoons chili powder
1 teaspoon cinnamon
½ teaspoon of nutmeg
2 teaspoons oregano
1 teaspoon smoked paprika

Saute your onions, carrots, and garlic for 5-10min with the oil before adding them to your big crock pot. Everything else just goes in to the pot. I did all the prep chopping the night before and had it all in a big bowl, and when I got up to go to work I sauted the onions and carrots and put it all in the pot, and set it to cook on low while I was at work. This made enough food for two people to eat for two days comfortably.

Keep in mind we are spicy food fiends so you may want to not use the whole mini-can of chipotles if you want it less spicy and more like, soupy.

I used this recipe for the cornbread: https://www.noracooks.com/the-best-vegan-cornbread/

the_scotsman wrote:

 DrGiggles wrote:

the_scotsman wrote:
Big vegan dinner #2 and I've already found something I am absolutely keeping in my recipe book. We made a vegetable chili with pumpkin puree, cauliflower, beans, sweet potatoes, chipotle peppers, and cornbread made with almond milk, which I suspected was going to be and was freaking amazing.

Not super labor intensive because it was basically just thrown in the crockpot on low all day while I worked and the cornbread recipe was just "Put it all in a bowl and stir it a while".

Best tasting chili recipe I've ever had. The sweet ingredients worked incredibly well with the smoky-spicy chipotles. Glad I made enough for a couple of days, basically all I'm going to make tonight is a little side dish and we're gonna eat more of the chili.

Any chance you have a link/could post your recipe?

2 tablespoon olive oil
1 tablespoon minced garlic
1 large sweet onion, diced
2 large carrots, diced
2 large sweet potatoes, peeled and diced
2 cans of black beans, rinsed and drained
1 bag of frozen or fresh cauliflower diced
1 pack of cooked lentils
1 cup of red quinoa
1 can diced tomatoes
1 mini can tomato paste
1 can pumpkin puree
1/4 cup diced de-seeded chipotle peppers (they come in a small can with adobo sauce, I take them out of the can, slice them, scoop the seeds out, then chop them up and add them back in to the can and put it in)
3 cups vegetable broth
lime juice
2 teaspoons chili powder
1 teaspoon cinnamon
½ teaspoon of nutmeg
2 teaspoons oregano
1 teaspoon smoked paprika

Saute your onions, carrots, and garlic for 5-10min with the oil before adding them to your big crock pot. Everything else just goes in to the pot. I did all the prep chopping the night before and had it all in a big bowl, and when I got up to go to work I sauted the onions and carrots and put it all in the pot, and set it to cook on low while I was at work. This made enough food for two people to eat for two days comfortably.

Keep in mind we are spicy food fiends so you may want to not use the whole mini-can of chipotles if you want it less spicy and more like, soupy.

I used this recipe for the cornbread: https://www.noracooks.com/the-best-vegan-cornbread/

Thanks, I'll give it a shot the next time the wife wants to make some chili.

That does look good. Might give that one a try when I get back home.

Making a thread saying try a vegan diet for a month = harassment.

Uffda.

Making people consider whether their choices are ethical is basically an attack on them, even if they end up deciding that they are behaving completely ethically. (I should note: I am being sarcastic here)

Proper veganuary day 4! Butternut squash, raisins, sweet potatoes, onions and carrots roasted with olive oil cinnamon nutmeg and maple syrup.

Slightly cheating, since this was one of my favorite fall/winter things anyway. I always cook it when it snows because for dessert you take a bowl of snow and scoop the syrup from the bottom of the pot onto it.

Hah, that sounds amazing!

We are not doing the Vegan/Plant-based thing, but we are going to increase our focus on eating more ethically and eco-conscious. We have a share in a community farm and get many of our vegetables from there, so we are able to eat food that is fresh and in season and that hasn’t been driven halfway across the country and say in giant warehouses. We also got a new butcher, so we can get more of our meat that has been raised locally and has been processed more humanely. We are trying to decrease our processed food and eat more food that we prepare ourselves and decrease some meat and increase other sources of protein.

I think Vegans can go off on quite the deep end sometimes, as can any kind of belief and/or lifestyle, but I also think that there is nothing wrong with being more conscious about where your food comes from and how it has been treated.

I am vegetarian most of the time at home, but sometimes eat a bit of meat especially if I am out, or someone else cooks for me. I am not a strict vegan in my vegetarian meals either. As I said earlier in the thread, I am mostly concerned with land use and sustainability rather than the ethics of animal welfare, though i do salute the vegans for their dedication to that ethical standpoint. I think it is a really respectable thing to do.

 Da Boss wrote:
I am vegetarian most of the time at home, but sometimes eat a bit of meat especially if I am out, or someone else cooks for me. I am not a strict vegan in my vegetarian meals either. As I said earlier in the thread, I am mostly concerned with land use and sustainability rather than the ethics of animal welfare, though i do salute the vegans for their dedication to that ethical standpoint. I think it is a really respectable thing to do.

Land use and sustainability aren't really an issue if you're buying locally. If you're talking factory farms in Brazil or Texas, its one thing, but farm cattle in Germany or the northeastern US aren't causing habitat destruction. The limit of the number of cattle you can keep on different types of land is well known and easy to keep in check. You'll fall foul on animal health and safety regulations long before you overgraze, barring severe droughts and fires you aren't likely to get in either region (because your tag says Germany and I'm in the NE US... and have experience raising cattle here, and am somewhat familiar with farm operations there. Small scale farming is the landscape here, much as it is where I lived in northern (West) Germany back in the late 80s. It is the primary green space between towns, at least until you get up into the woods in some of smaller mountainous areas (and even then...) Its been the primary habitat for a century and a half here, and longer there.

'Organic farming' gets pretty fuzzy depending on how you mean the term. Some of it is sensible, like not burning out the soil with pesticides and synthetic fertilizers, bu the 'no antibiotics/vaccine angle' is a crazy outgrowth of the antivax movement being applied to food. Here you can't legally not give the animals their shots if you're moving them across state lines for a sale or show, which raises a lot of questions. Mostly 'Organic' is just a marketing tag to raise prices in store, regardless of what the farmers are getting paid for their products.

I get what you are saying but my perspective is fairly radical with regard to land use. I think we should be rewilding large amounts of farmland, and to do that we need to use less of it for pasture and crop production. The only realistic way to do that is to have people eat less meat.

The US and Europe are bad examples because we have already destroyed a huge amount of habitat. Places like Ireland (where I am from originally) used to have nearly full forest cover, now it is down to 6%. We live on a terraformed planet, we just don't recognise this fact.

 Da Boss wrote:
I get what you are saying but my perspective is fairly radical with regard to land use. I think we should be rewilding large amounts of farmland, and to do that we need to use less of it for pasture and crop production. The only realistic way to do that is to have people eat less meat.

The US and Europe are bad examples because we have already destroyed a huge amount of habitat. Places like Ireland (where I am from originally) used to have nearly full forest cover, now it is down to 6%. We live on a terraformed planet, we just don't recognise this fact.

Correction, nearly all of europe has destroyed their lands, especially woods, in the industrialisation, exception, funnily enough the cultural heavy meat eaters over here.

How much meat do you guys eat ? Like another dude in this topic, I eat at least twice a day, sometimes three time a day.
What about you ?

Once a week to once every two weeks.

 godardc wrote:
How much meat do you guys eat ? Like another dude in this topic, I eat at least twice a day, sometimes three time a day.
What about you ?

2 or 3 times a day (usually chicken or turkey). Definitely 3 times a day if you count eggs as meat. It's just too hard to get enough protein in my diet unless I start eating 3x the amount of chicken I would eat with red kidney beans (38g of protien per 140g of chicken vs 12.18g of protein per 140g of red kidney beans).

I usually only have beef once a week and try to buy local when I can.

Yesterday's meal was a bit of a reminder to myself where I started from as I closed out the week. I made seared brussels sprouts with seitan bacon with some rice pilaf on the side.

Growing up brussels sprouts were disgusting soggy grey-green lumps with the life boiled out of them on the side of a plate of frozen chicken nuggets.

I think it's not too controversial to say that Broccoli is kind of not great no matter what you do to it and spinach not as an ingredient in or on something is kind of mouth-coaty and not great even steamed, but Brussels Sprouts are the most tragic casualty of the miserable 1950s "domestic science" cooking trend.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 DrGiggles wrote:

 godardc wrote:
How much meat do you guys eat ? Like another dude in this topic, I eat at least twice a day, sometimes three time a day.
What about you ?

2 or 3 times a day (usually chicken or turkey). Definitely 3 times a day if you count eggs as meat. It's just too hard to get enough protein in my diet unless I start eating 3x the amount of chicken I would eat with red kidney beans (38g of protien per 140g of chicken vs 12.18g of protein per 140g of red kidney beans).

I usually only have beef once a week and try to buy local when I can.

This was a concern for me too - turns out the seitan bacon I like anyway has an unreal amount of protein in it. 7g per ounce. If I want to get 56g of protein from chicken that's 500 calories, from the seitan it's 350.

Course, that's mostly wheat gluten, so doesn't help you much if you're trying to do keto or you're gluten intolerant.

the_scotsman wrote:


This was a concern for me too - turns out the seitan bacon I like anyway has an unreal amount of protein in it. 7g per ounce. If I want to get 56g of protein from chicken that's 500 calories, from the seitan it's 350.

Course, that's mostly wheat gluten, so doesn't help you much if you're trying to do keto or you're gluten intolerant.

The main problem with seitan for me is it doesn't contain any lysine, so if you are trying to gain muscle mass you still need another source of protein (supplement, animal meat, or a good amount of beans) that contains lysine.

godardc wrote:How much meat do you guys eat ? Like another dude in this topic, I eat at least twice a day, sometimes three time a day.
What about you ?

None at all. Unlike you, I'm not edgy enough to slice it.

the_scotsman wrote:
Yesterday's meal was a bit of a reminder to myself where I started from as I closed out the week. I made seared brussels sprouts with seitan bacon with some rice pilaf on the side.

Growing up brussels sprouts were disgusting soggy grey-green lumps with the life boiled out of them on the side of a plate of frozen chicken nuggets.

I think it's not too controversial to say that Broccoli is kind of not great no matter what you do to it and spinach not as an ingredient in or on something is kind of mouth-coaty and not great even steamed, but Brussels Sprouts are the most tragic casualty of the miserable 1950s "domestic science" cooking trend.

Tossing Brussels with some salt, pepper, and oil then roasting in the oven, @200 degrees C or 400 F for 25-30 minutes makes an amazing side. You can do the same with Broccoli and cauliflower. for added flavor mix in some garlic, onion, or citrus. Roasted veggies have more plate appeal than boiled or steamed, and almost all of them can be roasted. Just google the veggie and "Oven roasted.

 godardc wrote:
How much meat do you guys eat ? Like another dude in this topic, I eat at least twice a day, sometimes three time a day.
What about you ?

Just happened to be reading about the planed Mars missions coming up in 2030 ish and the astronauts will be eating a strict vegan diet . No room for farting cows apparently.

 darkness screamer wrote:

 godardc wrote:
How much meat do you guys eat ? Like another dude in this topic, I eat at least twice a day, sometimes three time a day.
What about you ?

Just happened to be reading about the planed Mars missions coming up in 2030 ish and the astronauts will be eating a strict vegan diet . No room for farting cows apparently.

Yeah, but a 2030 Mars Mission isn't happening. Planning's great, but who's actually gonna pay for it? Maybe once we've got fusion power and industry in orbit.

the_scotsman wrote:
Yesterday's meal was a bit of a reminder to myself where I started from as I closed out the week. I made seared brussels sprouts with seitan bacon with some rice pilaf on the side.

Growing up brussels sprouts were disgusting soggy grey-green lumps with the life boiled out of them on the side of a plate of frozen chicken nuggets.

I think it's not too controversial to say that Broccoli is kind of not great no matter what you do to it and spinach not as an ingredient in or on something is kind of mouth-coaty and not great even steamed, but Brussels Sprouts are the most tragic casualty of the miserable 1950s "domestic science" cooking trend.

Brussel sprouts taste great just by themselves, but Spinach and Broccoli need to be spiced up a bit, I feel. A nice trick with broccoli is to mince the whole thing, stem and all, and then let it sit for about half an hour, so the sulphoraphane can build up inside. Then just sear it lightly and serve as a side dish or eat it raw as part of a salad - I've really come to enjoy broccoli prepared this way. Spinach works best for me when steamed and served with a good amount of garlic and olive oil.

Sprouts make me urge. Literally can't take so much as a mouthful without wanting to vomit. Mum will eat cold ones out of the fridge.

Turns out they contain a chemical people can be genetically predisposed to be sensitive to, so if you're one of those people there's probably very little you can do to make them edible.

https://www.sciencefocus.com/the-human-body/why-do-some-people-hate-brussels-sprouts/