The question is how feasible it is? Is it a trivial change in lifestyle? Is it more expensive or cheaper? Can you make it work with the basic fare that you find everywhere, or do you need to shop around for plant products that are more exotic?
I’ve been vegan for 5 years. I was raised vegetarian, but I also cooked a chicken the night before I went vegan. It is feasible and as time goes on it gets easier and easier.
Only recently have I started spending more than $200 a month on groceries and that’s because I’ve started weightlifting. I can get by on much less.
Is any change in lifestyle trivial?
I’m able to go to my local grocery store for everything I need. I go to my local Asian market because I like the noodles and spices though, but that isn’t necessary at all.
Food deserts exist but that is a bigger problem with general accessibility to food, and is not a good argument to a plant-based diet, imo.
a poster addressed that, and now you have 4 more questions, none related to nutrition - and, hilariously, prefaced by the common but ridiculous "the question is" (implying there's one) rhetorical device.
All the questions are related. I am aware that some people can make it work, but if you remove cheap meat, who do you affect? Poor people. My question is, can poor people also eat a plant based diet with minimal malnutrition risk? All the questions are in reference to that.
All I see about plant based diets say the same shit without answering the though questions. They always say, "it's possible to be a health vegan if you watch your nutrition". Well that says precisely nothing. It is a carefully crafted message to not upset militant vegans.
The impression I get from that message is that it is far easier to be healthy if you don't avoid meat. You don't have to watch your nutrition much. You just have to use common sense.
It’s very easy to eat healthily and cheaply on a vegetarian or vegan diet. In the UK I used Quorn or lentils as a major protein in a lot of my cooking, now I’m in Berlin I’m alternating between soy chunks, seitan (both of which I have to flavour myself), lentils, tofu, four types of preprepared tinned beans, soy milk, and cheese.
Most of these options have cheap subtypes. The most expensive part of my cooking is the fancy stuff that isn’t strictly necessary, like fresh basil or pre-made pastry, and even those are not hugely expensive.
> The impression I get from that message is that it is far easier to be healthy if you don't avoid meat. You don't have to watch your nutrition much.
The obesity crisis in the developed world, combined with the low rate of no-meat diets, rather contradicts that.
> You just have to use common sense.
How do you define “common sense” such that this sentence differentiates between the effectiveness of meat and non-meat diets?
The idea that meat needs to eaten in the quantity and frequency that it’s currently eaten in the west to maintain a healthy diet is a recent idea. For my grandparents growing up most meat, especially things like chicken was a luxury reserved for special occasions. It’s also always interesting to me that when this argument comes up people are suddenly very interested in standing up for “the poor”, there are a whole host of other, more important ways inequality can be addressed at it’s root.
Historical diets were nothing like modern vegetarianism. They also were not super heathy, oftentimes missing nutricients and causing diseases from the lack of them.
In my experience (omnivore -> vegetarian -> vegan), going vegetarian is not too difficult. Going something like pescatarian, or even just eliminating red meat -- that's downright easy. I am not a particularly great cook, but my grocery bill dropped noticeably when I went vegetarian because I was buying more vegetables for the first time in my life. Even when eating out I had to make very few adjustments. Most restaurants around me have great vegetarian menus. I feel like it's not a particularly difficult transition to make.
On the other hand, going vegan was harder. Part of this is how good you are at cooking. Part of it is that you have to research a bit more. I take supplements (D3, K2, B12) as a vegan. I never worried for a second about my nutritional input when I went vegetarian. And again, if you're going pescetarian and still eating a fair bit of cheese/eggs, I just really doubt nutrition is a concern for most people. But after going vegan, suddenly I had to actually think about some of these nutritional questions that I was able to ignore before because I just ate a lot of eggs and cheese.
You can make veganism a lot cheaper (and plenty of people do), but I'm lazy and bad at cooking, so I buy more specialty vegan products, which are expensive. I put up with it, it's fine, it's doable, but being vegan is annoying sometimes, and it requires more work.
Again, it's doable. It's fine, lots of people make it work, I make it work. You can be vegan and healthy. But in terms of effort/work to be healthy and to keep costs down, I think that veganism and vegetarianism are in separate categories.
But importantly, you don't need to go vegan to see improvements here. If you're talking about "meat-avoiding" in general, just getting rid of red meat from your diet will have a positive environmental impact, and will probably be both healthier and cheaper as long as you put at least a tiny bit of effort into not just eating only Impossible burgers and mac&cheese. You can already in many places get raw tofu significantly cheaper than red meat, and after that it's really just learning how to make stir fries and figuring out 'new' foods like mushrooms and beans.
Part of the benefits here are that in general, most people who aren't following a specific diet probably shouldn't eat as much meat as they do anyway. So if the end result is that you eat one serving of plant-based meat alongside some eggs/veggies/beans, instead of three servings of steak, that's very likely to be both healthier and cheaper.
