this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2025
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Leopards Ate My Face
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I don't expect a dairy farmer to know better, but of course he means "plant-based", not "vegan". "Plant-based" is a functional description, while "vegan" is a set of moral values and their ethical consequences. The dairy farmer isn't saying that everyone has to renounce animal abuse. They are simply saying that it won't be economical to commit atrocity for money any longer.
Since the farmer is talking about the outcome as opposed to the justification is there anything functionally different between "plant-based" and "vegan" here? As in would the diet of the vegan and someone eating only "plant based" look different in any way?
Jerkface is making a remark on the character of the farmer. A harsh one based on his profession, more-so than the outcome of the meaning of his words… dairy is not as immaculate as most were led to believe.
Neither of them really describe "a" diet. I don't consume alcohol. Is that a diet? You don't consume antifreeze, even though it tastes really really good. Is that a diet? "Not consuming animal products" is not a diet.
"Plant-based" is a characteristic of an infinite number of diets or other practices; those that exclude animal products. "Vegan" is a characteristic of a person; one that conducts themselves according to a specific moral perspective on interactions with animals. A diet is vegan iff (ie if and only if) there was a moral question in its practice. It describes the justification, and using it to talk about only the outcome is exactly what I am saying is incorrect.
Y'all should be more honest with yourselves and admit that veganism is a religion. Your god is cattle, like you.
A diet is the term used to encompass what someone consumes for food or drink. Its a basic term with a clear definition.
Okay, I got it now. You're not really making any salient point. You're just splitting hairs with wordplay and being intentionally obtuse and apparently being unable to answer a straight question. You're coming off as incredibly smug and arrogant.
Veganism is a moral philosophy that rejects the exploitation and commodification of animals.
Plant-based is a dietary choice defined in terms of high frequency of plants and low frequency of animal food consumption.
Plant-based diets may also be vegan or vegetarian but do not have to be as one may choose to eat plant-based due to personal health concerns and not animal rights ones for example.
With your provided definition of "plant-based" @[email protected] 's response would be wrong then. There's no room in the farmer's assertion for the "plant based" or vegetarian definition, but only vegan. The farmer's statement isn't saying "we'll have to reduce our consumption of animal products" but instead "we will have to reduce our consumption of animal products to zero".
I feel you're intentionally trying to misunderstand the argument.
Veganism is specifically about the moral implications of commodifying animals - plant-based is about consuming plants - so while all vegans are plant-based not all plant-based folk are vegan.
In really simple terms:
Imagine two kids who don't eat ice cream:
The first kid doesn't eat ice cream because they really love cows and don't want them to be used to make milk for ice cream. This kid also won't wear leather shoes or go to the zoo because they don't want any animals to be used by people. This is like being vegan.
The second kid doesn't eat ice cream just because the ice cream store closed down and there's no ice cream to buy anymore. This kid would still eat ice cream if they could get it, and they're fine wearing leather shoes or going to the zoo. This is like being plant-based because of economics (what the farmer was talking about).
So even though both kids end up not eating ice cream, they're doing it for very different reasons. That's what @[email protected] was saying - the farmer was talking about a future where people would eat plant-based food because animal products would be too expensive to make, not because everyone suddenly decided to become vegan and care about animals.
I feel like you and jerkface are answering a question I didn't ask injecting your own morality, and refuse to answer the question I did ask. You can go back up to my post 3 or 4 earlier in the thread. I said the following:
"Since the farmer is talking about the outcome as opposed to the justification is there anything functionally different between 'plant-based' and “vegan” here? As in would the diet of the vegan and someone eating only 'plant based' look different in any way?"
Inside this discussion I don't care why the outcome is the way it is. The farmer doesn't care for this statement in his interview.
I didn't ask for any of that. I asked for this:
Thank you. That was my original point with my original question with my first post to this thread.
I don't care about the reasons why. The farmer doesn't care why (for his statement). Neither of us are saying people are making a political or or moral decision. The farmer is saying that the lack of labor will force the outcome to appear as the same result of a vegan diet.
That's all. All the extra vegan politics/philosophy/morality is irrelevant to this thread.
Idk to me it seemed like @[email protected] was just trying to explain the difference between vegan and plant-based - hence "I don't expect a dairy farmer to know better, but of course he means "plant-based", not "vegan". "Plant-based" is a functional description, while "vegan" is a set of moral values and their ethical consequences."
So by your logic if he was a pig farmer instead and said "In the future everybody would be Muslim because we wouldn't be able to grow pigs" - you'd say that's splitting hairs since the outcome is functionally the same?
The farmer was communicating in a single sentence that labor shortages would cause us to adopt a vegan diet. The farmer wasn't writing a treatise on supply chains, different economic modalities, or the realities of modern agribusinesses with regard to impacts on nature. He as summarizing the state of the food supply, as consumers are aware, in terms that consumers have an understanding of, and he was successful.
Here's why I don't buy your viewing of jerkface's post. Jerkface wasn't trying to be helpful. He was, first, insulting the farmer's intelligence. Second, jerkface was using this insult to inject his own moral philosophy into a conversation where it wasn't relevant and which didn't invite it. So now jerkface is establishing that not only is the farmer an uneducated idiot, but that jerkface is the one bringing the knowledge to the masses from on high correcting the mistakes of the innocent simply minded farmer. Jerkface was manufacturing a game of pedantry to create an opportunity to stand on his soapbox about veganism. If jerkface is a vegan himself, he certainly lived up to the stereotype of a vegan.
If that wasn't enough, by your definition @zeezee , jerkface was wrong with his correction to use "plant-based" instead of "vegan". You yourself said that "plant-based" could mean vegetarianism. By most definitions of vegetarianism I'm aware of, that includes ovo-lacto. Since we're talking about a dairy farm here, the "plant-based" definition is too broad because it would include dairy, which is exactly what the farmer is saying will be unavailable with the labor shortage. So jerkface's game of pedantry is wrong because of pedantry, by your own supplied definition.
Veganism, as far as I'm aware, is concerned exclusively with what we put in our mouths for food and drink, the sources of those, and the welfare/impact of which they were obtained. The vegan term itself is, by its definition, inexorably linked with eating. You could say the phrase "make the choices in what to eat resulting in the equivalent of a vegan diet", but there's fundamental redundancy in there because the audience already knows that veganism is a way of eating. So the shorthand of "go vegan" communicates the same idea to the audience in shorthand summary. This is what the farmer did and did so successfully.
Islam is far more than diet choices. The diet choices is not even the top of the list of a Muslim attributes for me. My "top of the list" things would things like: devotion, ritual, prayer multiple times per day, Ramadan/Eid, minarets, Quron, call to worship, Arabic, pilgrimage, Mecca, Abrahamic. Sure, eventually the pork dietary choice is in there, but it would be a confusing summary statement from the pig farmer. I'd get there eventually.
Even if the pig farmer had framed it first as his Islam was just about the aspect of the faith surrounding eating if he said “In the future everybody would be Muslim because we wouldn’t be able to grow pigs”, I'd also be confused for a moment why the lack of pigs would mean all of us would have to start ritually fasting, because that is another component of eating that surrounds Islam.
In short, veganism is all about eating, while Islam is many other things that has a few items surrounding eating choices/restrictions. So I would be a bit confused initially by the pig farmer's statements where no one was confused what the dairy farmer meant when he made his vegan comment.
Sure maybe they came off a bit snobby but I still don't necessarily agree with your stance either - veganism isn't "all about eating" - it's a moral framework that rejects animal commodification - like my earlier example of not wearing leather or going to the zoo.
This extends to all sort of stuff - having pets, keeping bees, sheering sheep, testing on animals, etc.
Just as Islam is "more than diet choices," veganism is far more than just a diet. The dairy farmer's use of "vegan" would be like the pig farmer's use of "Muslim" - both incorrectly reduce comprehensive philosophical/ethical frameworks to just their dietary components.
But yeah w/e sometimes it's easier to use the wrong term to convey an idea - which is why I still appreciate @[email protected]'s effort to clarify that here so other people can learn as well.
Tho I see we can continue this argument forever so I'm gonna dip out as I've got other stuff to get on with.
That's fair. I concede that point that there is more to veganism than eating.
I still see that jerkface's injection here was an insulting way (to the farmer) to try to shoehorn in the vegan philosophy into a conversation that didn't contain it and does more of a disservice to the movement and give vegans a bad name.
I respect that too. Thank you for conversing up to this point. I hope you have a great day!
Thank you as well, have a nice day :)