this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2023
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How prevalent is veganism in India? Whenever I look at Indian food, it's butter this and milk that. Sure, there are some very good vegan choices, but it seems to me that Indians love their dairy.
Veganism is actually a fairly new phenomenon in general, a lot of Jains in particular have adopted it. But vegetarianism in India dates back over a thousand years BCE , so yeah, they've got a bit of a head start.
Vegetarian? Yes. Vegan? No.
I am a vegetarian. I eat dairy. I don't eat meat and eggs.
Just eat eggs bro it's just a chicken period
Except for the part where they're kept in small cages or "free range" in dirty cramped pens. Luckily it's easier to get eggs from chickens raised ethically than meats. You just gotta fork over a few extra bucks or get the hookup at a farmer's market
We drive 10mph around here because the damn chickens like to "free range" in the road. Those are pretty large pens, the size of a damn town.
The USDA needs to get their pockets out of big ag's hands. Free Range should be Free-Fucking-Range. I get to know the chicken I eat got to run wild 16 hours every day, but many people do not.
Yeah the fuckery that they pull when they list things as grass fed and free range is vile. Then they make a profit on top of it because they barely change anything but charge premium prices for the fancy label.
I'm lucky to have a beef farm in my state that ships locally and actually follows the spirit of grass fed up to grass finished in sprawling pastures. They also do individual slaughter. For eggs we've got a few locals that bring them to the farmers markets on Sundays. Beef is like a once a week thing for us these days and it's usually just ground beef. Chicken and fish are our biggest sources of protein now. I don't really do pork anymore. Can't find any that's remotely close to ethically sourced which is abysmal considering how intelligent pigs are. So I just stopped buying it.
Also, and I'm fully aware this could just be some kinda subconscious bias, but I swear the meat and eggs taste SO much better than the stuff from the grocery. Eggs especially. The yolks are so vibrant and hardly break when being fried. Even the shells seem stronger and less likely to shatter into tiny annoying bits.
Here's my reason for trying to eat a little more beef than that. If I'm giving "lives lost" any value, you can't beat cows for calories per animal death. It beats a lot of plant-based foods. And I do have local beef, though it is not fully sustained like local chicken is... which is why I eat more chicken and seafood as well. Not to mention, even though beef around me can be ecologically sustainable, it will not remain that way if too many people eat it because it needs to be supplemented by import. So some beef = good. More beef = less good.
We actually have some ethically sourced local pork, too. I guess it's nice living in a farming area of my state, despite not living in a farming-state. The butcher's pork section is always small, but he's got some.
Not really a subconscious bias. They are fresher, and preservation techniques often have not been started on them. If you eat an egg that has never been refrigerated, of course it's fresher. (or the opposite, lol)
The seafood my family fishes is right off a boat, generally only a couple hours harvested. After the fishermens' cut, the best stuff goes to a couple local restaurants and seafood markets, and the rest are frozen and shipped. Yes, you can taste the difference. I never liked scallops until I tasted "the real thing" off a boat.
Same, got this one road where I always need to be careful about the hens.
Effing dinosaurs, with 6,000 years of eating cave men, deserve all the incarceration they get. /s
More seriously, depending on your priorities, factory farmed chicken is less bad for the overall environment than pretty much any beef
Somehow doesn't sound as tasty.
Delicious chicken period that chickens cannibalize if not fed properly, fun fact!
Hell they'll cannibalize it even if they are, you can't compare an animal to a person!
And which won't turn into a chicken eventually anyway unless a rooster was involved.
chickens don't have periods
Yeah I have a lot of vegetarian Indian friends, not as many vegan.
Yeah, we're not giving up our dairy any time soon lol.
No one is keen on experimenting with Basundi or Rasmalai without milk.
They have made dairy using a bacteria recently, so animal free dairy may be a thing soon.
If they can make animal-free cheddar and animal-free yogurt that tastes exactly like the real thing, sign me up. Right now, vegan alternatives are... not good.
I've tried a few types of coconut-based yogurts that were tasty. I'm not a fan of almond milk, so didn't like those varieties as much. On the cheeses though, completely agree! I had one that was tolerable, but definitely falls in the "not good" category.
Were the coconut-based yogurts sweet? Because I don't want sweet yogurt. I want yogurt I can put chives in and put on my falafel (for example).
The vanilla flavored one was a bit sweet, but that's how I generally prefer it. I usually am throwing berries and granola in there too so admittedly can't give you an unbiased recommendation! I think there are plain flavored ones either almond or coconut milk based, which might be more of what you're looking for.
Yes, this is why I think we take the wrong approach considering things as animal free substitutes. That’s a high bar.
Meanwhile I’m perfectly happy dipping my veggies in hummus instead of cheese dip. Not as a substitute but as a different choice that is good on its own merit
I can live without cheddar cheese. Maybe. But I need my yogurt.
Brave Robot! I tried it recently, it was good!
I saw a milk that claims to be just that on the shelves. Incredibly expensive and (from what I hear) nowhere near the same taste.
The problem is that animals and plants do "what they do" with incredible efficiency. If you want to do exactly what some evolved thing does best, you probably cannot come close to matching it with technology. A century of aircraft design and planes are not in the same league as birds regarding flight efficiency.
If animal-free milk goes the path that animal-free meat is, they may well be reaching the upper bounds of efficiency already, nowhere near close enough to replace natural animal and dairy.
Which is a bit of a shame (as a meat-eater). I think having outside competition that could truly stand on its own would help reduce the corruption of big ag.
Not necessarily true - evolution (and simulating evolution) is great at finding local maxima/minima, but not as great at moving out of those in the case where the local min/max is not the global min/max. So, for example, birds might not be the optimal way to do flight efficiency, but between birds and optimal flight efficiency if there's a region of worse flight efficiency of any real size (more than you could vault in a couple generations of lucky mutations) then evolution will never find it because the intermediate steps to get there will be selected against too heavily to jump the gap.
I don't think I entirely disagree with you. I was generalizing the real phenomenon that we are unable to engineer competing mechanisms to those found in the wild.
That said, "region of worse efficiency" tends to happen all the time. The accurate argument would be a "region of untenable inefficiency". A legless bird that evolved the ability to fly its entire life from hatching to death is an unlikely evolution. Not coincidentally, finding ways to keep something up in the air longer-term than birds do is something our engineering is capable of.
Man I haven't tried Basundi, is it available in Haryana by any chance?
I don't know man, I'm from Mumbai. Check on swiggy for restaurants in your area.
Or you can make it on you own. The recipe is simple, it just takes long time to make because you need to boil milk to make it thicker.
They're more vegetarian than vegan.
The idea that India is like the veganism world capital, is misinformation that spawned from reddit
I feel like trying to be vegan in a culture that has long promoted vegetarianism would be easier than trying to be vegan in a meat-centric culture like the US has.
It's not vegan so much as veggie. They definitely respect those cows they get the milk from though.
Quite popular, in my city it's quite hard to find meat in the popular restaurants. And these places are quite old and we'll know.
Most foods don't have any form or trace of meat or eggs, although milk and related items are very widely consumed.
It's vegetarian and not vegan.