• Jay Baker (he/they)
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    42 years ago

    A lot of people eat meat because they want to, not because they need to (and thus we get distracted by debates about us being omnivorous rather than herbivorous), but obviously fundamentally we can thrive pretty well as total herbivores hence many of us being “vegan for the animals” which leads us to these questions around animal products as food. I went vegetarian in 1988, then went vegan in 2006 - one of the questions I then faced from other vegetarians was “why vegan, when eggs etc don’t have to inherently harm the animal” and this led to good discussions around human interests interfering with animal interests: if we want more eggs, we want the hen to produce more, and so on; there becomes a resource or monetary motive that disregards the animal. As a longtime vegan who does sometimes eat meat substitutes like veggie burgers and tofu dogs, lab meat fascinates me because it suggests all these other alternatives aren’t good enough, and we have to have some sort of biological link to flesh for our food. And that brings us back to being herbivores playing carnivore - and all for what? Because when the upper classes ate meat, the rest of the population wanted to emulate them; meat was a status symbol for a long time. Today it’s cultural: companies and supermarkets and farmers markets sell us meat because it’s normalised but as an anarchist myself I reject hierarchies and I reject hierarchies over nature in this way. We don’t need to kill animals and we don’t fucking need lab meat. What the fuck is wrong with us? Lol.

      • Jay Baker (he/they)
        link
        22 years ago

        You mean paragraphs and such? Sorry about that…I started out typing while multitasking and thinking “this will just be a little point, no need to use paragraphs and extend the post…” Oops!

        Bad habit ends now! 😁