this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2025
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Couldn't this character be considerably more effective at hating plants by say, breeding swarms of locusts?
... Would they consider eating locusts... to be eating meat?
No, hey, actually serious:
Vegans, does a locust, a cricket, an ant... does eating a bug count as eating a sentient, emotionally feeling, living being?
So, yes, bugs count as meat and eating them outright is avoided by most vegans, but it's impossible to not eat remnants of dead bugs in produce. The agricultural process inherently involves the death of bugs, and that's literally unavoidable.
Some vegans try to avoid the kinds of figs that require wasps to die, but most of the figs in grocery stores are artificially pollinated and don't have wasps in them.
Personally, I'm not going out of my way to avoid produce that has marginally higher bug death. Being vegan is already a pain in the ass without putting further restrictions on "is eating X plant really vegan because it requires Y?" It's still a way better environmental impact than meat, and I hate the purity tests a lot of online vegan spaces turn into. Most other vegans I've met IRL are chill and we can have reasonable discussions around that sort of thing without people getting into a fit over it.
I appreciate the answer, I expanded on my own... non vegan status and thoughts about this a bit more under another replier.
Could I ask you?:
How common is it among the vegans you know to apply the kind of, do as little ecological harm as possible mindset...
How many of them apply that to... other kinds of economic activity?
Like, how many vegans do you know who say, own and drive a car, that may be powered by oil from say, a fracking field?
I'd imagine most who are serious enough to be as ethically vegan as possible are also very much anti-capitalist as possible...
But at the same time, I've personally known a good deal of self described vegans who... regularly drive their own car to work, despite living near a transit line that would totally get them to work... and also, their work is for the corporate office of a highly exploitative (in many ways, of many things) corporation... like Amazon, or MSFT... and then get very aggreived when I just... work remotely, and tell them they should probably take the lightrail/bus.
(I'm from Seattle if you can't tell lol)
For many of us, reducing ecological harm is one of the big motivators, and many vegans apply this mindset elsewhere. I'm also in the US, and it's pretty hard to avoid needing a car outside of major cities which I can't fault any vegans for. Many of the vegans I know are activists for public transit and one in particular has worked to improve it immensely in their city.
Anticapitalist sentiment is pretty huge in vegan spaces. There's a leftist to vegan pipeline and vice versa. Ironically being vegan is pretty big in punk spaces now too.
I won't pretend there aren't plenty of people who are vegan more for the aesthetics rather than the principles because for some reason it caught on as a trend among the remnants of the "upper middle class" for whatever that means with the ever growing wealth disparity. There's a huge supply of overpriced vegan options, but you can also eat vegan super cheap too without shelling out for the pricey fake meat options. I can make a ton of seitan or black beans burgers at home for almost nothing, but it's $$$ at the grocery store.
Ok, that makes sense and generally tracks with my own experiences.
Particularly:
The handful of folks I knew who were actual punks, in actual punk bands, played at local bars, were among the most genuinely kind people I'd ever met, and were the most dedicated, and also non-sanctimonious vegans I knew.
Unfortunately, I was more often around corpo yuppie types... bleck.
If you could link me to some kind of seitan or blackbean uh... patty making guide? I have no idea how that works, but I'd love to learn, love to switch over to something less meat intensive as I slowly recover and can handle more involved cooking procedures.
Sure thing! Here's a few recipes.
Pretty standard black bean burger recipe. It uses a "flax egg" which is flaxseed meal and water and is used a lot in vegan baking. You can omit the sauce and just use whatever you like on a burger. You can also make it cheaper by using dried beans instead of canned.
https://www.ambitiouskitchen.com/ultimate-black-bean-burgers-with-tahini-garlic-cream/
Seitan if you have vital wheat gluten (makes it easier): https://theveganatlas.com/homemade-seitan-recipe/#mv-creation-193-jtr
Seitan if you don't have or want to buy vital wheat gluten and just have flour:
https://thevietvegan.com/washed-flour-seitan-method/#recipe
For other dishes and creators I use recipes from a ton: https://rainbowplantlife.com/ https://thecheaplazyvegan.com/blog/
Learning to cook vegan is a bit of a different mindset from meat, and teaches you to use seasonings way more. My general advice for trying to put together vegan meals is always have a protein (tofu, seitan, edamame, any bean/lentil, quinoa, or oats), some veg, and a seasoning mix or a sauce. That and balance out the oil, acid (vinegar, citrus juice, etc), and spiciness is most of how I do my cooking when I just want to throw together some food and don't have a recipe in mind or want to tweak a recipe to fit my tastes.
Thank you!
Starring this and saving the links to my bookmarks!
I am no stranger to seasoning, but uh, mostly with eggs and potatoes and meat and various baked bready things.
My only real experience with vegan cooking... beyond learning how to make a few interesting salads... is utterly, totally failing at attempting to make tofu into something edible.
Failed quite badly at that lol.
But I will definitely see if I can orient more of my next grocery run (delivery, really, yay disabled) around any of this, see if my arm and wrist can handle the prep.
Thanks!
I'm not a vegan, but it's probably worth remembering that different people might be vegan for different reasons. I can think of three main ones: animal welfare, environmental impact, and health. There's an overlap between the first two, but it's possible to be any one of those without being others. (Though I know a lot of particularly those who do it for animal welfare reasons like to claim that theirs is the One True Veganism and others are false.) Someone who's only into it for animal welfare but doesn't have a larger care for environmental impact would have no particular reason to not drive a car.
There's also the simple fact that it's impossible for most people to care about everything. It's draining. Like I said, I'm not vegan. I'm very bad in the kitchen, and it would just be far, far too much of an imposition for me to change that. But I do try in other areas to advocate for things to reduce harm to the environment, and I try to reduce my own energy usage, for example by cycling or catching public transport. Transport and urbanism are the angle towards a better environment that I've chosen to focus my energy towards, and as long as someone is not actively going out of their way to cause additional harm (e.g. advocating against policy improvements in those areas) I think it's reasonable to allow other people to focus their energy elsewhere.
Yes, it counts to the point there are vegans not eating figs because of the insect pollinator dies inside the fruit. I eat figs because that's just the natural life cycle for that species.
From time to time I see a debate about animals like clams, which have no central nervous system and therefore lack the capability to suffer. Usually the approach to this is "if it tries to hide/run from me, I won't eat it" and a little less "I won't eat them because of the ecological impact".
I appreciate the answer!
I myself am not a vegan at all, in practice, though I am familiar with ... many of the frames that you can look at meat consumption through, and, correctly, imo, conclude that it is a wasteful, destructive, and morally dubious practice... and I do try to minimize my meat intake, but its fairly difficult when I am disabled, don't have a car, can't do significant meal prep due to injuries, live off of disability pay alone, can barely afford to get groceries delivered to me, because no local food banks or charities that I qualify for do actual home delivery.
I've been moving toward a lot more shelf stable, basic type stuff lately, rice and beans... but also crockpot soups with meat, spam is fairly simple to cook..., so, yeah, I am not a vegan.
But uh, the 'if it tries to run away' metric seems to be roughly where I would land on this as well... I guess I would just the line a bit higher than ... a clam... I personally would think that... basically most insects (ararchnids are another story)... from what I understand of their neurology... they do not really seem to be capable of suffering...
https://www.sciencealert.com/insects-probably-do-feel-pain-similar-to-how-we-do-scientists-argue
Well fuck, I am generally apparently wrong about that.
Thank you, and again the other replier, for spurring me to give this subject more consideration.
I know it can be difficult, specially depending on where you live. I live in what could be considered a privileged country regarding access to food, specially fresh produce an vegan options; since what now are called walkable cities are the common thing in Europe distance is no issue either.
If you can, and I know is a big "if" (price and availability where you live), I would recommend you to try and add textured soy protein to your diet. It's dry, so it's light and you can store it for a long time, and it's really versatile and easy to use.
Your situation is what it is because the system is what it is and individually we can do practically nothing to change it, you do what you can do and you shouldn't feel bad for not being able to do more. First you have to take care of yourself. /hug
Yeah, I am not only currently in a very, very unwalkable city...
I also literally cannot walk, not much further than uh... half a kilometer, without extreme pain, and that is using a cane and braces.
Fortunately my physical therapy is yielding good results in terms of regaining range of motion and stamina, but it is slow and painful.
That being said, a year ago, I was in a wheel chair.
So the improvements are real.
Hopefully by either the autumn or winter I'll be mostly back to my previous level of mobility, and able to rent a car or moving truck or something and move to a less shitty area.
What makes me really sad about this is that there are so many people who advocate against walkability, claiming that it's because of people like you who would, in their warped view, be inconvenienced by walkability. Even though reading your own comments it's pretty clear you know that's a load of bullshit. It's not as though wheelchairs, adaptive bikes/trikes, and mobility scooters don't become a hell of a lot easier to use when you can use a safe, separated bike lane to travel 5 km, than they are if the trip is 15 km along wide stroads with no footpath. 🙄
Oh yeah, absolutely, it is ludicrous when people do that.
If you have decent sidewalks, intetsections that are not a 1/2 mile apart, and god forbid, regular low grade inclines at crossings and other places, so that a wheel chair bound person could actually get around?
Well then blamo, throw a back pack on the frame of your chair/scooter, now you can actually go to a local bodega and buy some groceries!
Makes it easier for people who use a cane or crutches, or have a non obvious outwardly presenting neurological or muscular condition of some kind, etc.
But, US infrastructure broadly isn't ADA compliant in the poorer areas seriously disabled people most commonly live... and we literally can't, or struggle much more seriously in physically getting to an actual town hall.
Fucking... after a two months of aquatherapy, well now all I have the option to do is show up for basically the night swim at the therapy pool.
My problem is not that I need directed care ... I was taught the excercizes/stretches, learned them, remembered them. I do the ones I can at home, out of a pool, every damned day.
The problem is it costs 5 dollars, in cash only, to attend.
I can't fucking get to an ATM!
I told them this and they just said uh well you'll figure it out.
Nope, never did.
There are no ATMs within over a mile of a walking roundtrip from me.
And the sidewalks don't even exist near where I live, and/or they are cratering into sinkholes or erupting out of the ground. No joke, there's one spot where the ground expanded and the sidewalk is entirely snapped in half, at about 40 degree angles.
But at this point, I am extremely used to falling through the cracks in systems, that are designed based on assumptions... that make no sense to hold, because ostensibly the entire point of these systems is that they are to help those who do not have those basic societal assumptions.
You tell people in these systems this, and every fucking time, no one has ever told them this before, this thought had never occured to them, or they get angry at you.
It is astounding.
Depends on the vegan. Some stay away from avocados and such because their cultivation requires mass transport of pollinators, so insects definitely can fall into the off limits category for some.
It does also need to be said, though, that lots of vegans arrive at that same conclusion of just not eating animals and animal products, because we cannot be fucked to figure out to what degree an ant is sentient and how it's treated and whether we're okay with that. In particular, I have no interest in eating ants in the first place.
Thank you, I appreciate the answer!