this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2023
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Bravery has nothing to do with it. It tastes good, and there's no harm to any animals. So why not eat it? Denial for the sake of denial is not a virtue.
That's like saying that if you enjoy shooting people in video games, then you're one step away from shooting people in real life. I've been eating fake meats for almost a decade now, and I've never been tempted to eat real meat.
I know how horrible and senseless factory farming is, and I have images of the slaughtered seared into my memory from vegan documentaries. Why would I go back to that when I can have substitutes that are just as good, if not better?
Good job but not everyone has the mental fortitude you have displayed. I know plenty of people who tried going vegan, ate the fake meat and egg stuff, and just went back to the real stuff for the taste
Anyways it's not about the individual level, it's more the social ie the social ingraining to have the form and experience of meat contributes to the "culture" and demand of meat
The fake stuff (and cultivated meat for that matter) are getting closer to parity every year. You don't go back to something "for the taste", if the alternative you switched to offers a near identical experience.
Okay but we aren't there yet and the vegans who I know who have broken their mental attachment to this meat "culture" have not even been tempted to go back once compared to those others
Do you think that you could've gotten those people converted to an Indian diet, and they would've remained vegan? Getting people to go vegan in the first place is extremely difficult. Try getting them to go vegan and replace their diet with Indian food.
Yeah, if they were Indian. The culture around meat is different than in the West eg. some people only eat meat on a certain day or weekend. Even then, the approach is that meat is disgusting and needs to be cooked and spiced thoroughly before consuming anyhow. And there is already a long and popular tradition of simple alternatives to meat dishes like using potatoes or paneer (or "soy paneer" aka tofu to make it vegan)
Again, my point is that it is not about the individual but the social ingraining and pressure around meat as a category in itself for individuals
Meat is generally spiced more heavily in warm climates because it spoils faster and hot spices both preserves meat by killing bacteria and disguise a certain degree of spoilage.
I would be surprised if the trend towards hot spices in a country that is generally both warm and humid is because of a difference in palette rather than the reasons above.
I can't really answer the question of why, but the sample set of people I know who switch to vegetarianism and veganism bears out that the ones who rely in fake meats much more frequently switch back than those who focus on learning to cook foods that don't imitate meat.
On the counterargument, I did miss cheese quite a bit, and learning to culture my own vegan cheeses hasn't led to buying animal milk cheeses again, so ymmv
Your anecdote is meaningless as your sample size is not statistically significant.
It wasn't meaningless, and I went out of my way to make clear the sample size wasn't statistically significant.
The point was that the parent comment implied there was no reason to start eating meat again after making a moral choice not to. My anecdote shows that some people do anyway, therefore there must be a reason.
That in my experience they tended to be the people who relied on meat substitutes was presented as an observation of interest, not as hard evidence of universal truth.