Soy cake can be used to produce textured vegetable protein (meat alternatives), tofu, tempeh, soy milk, protein powder, biofuels and bioplastics, for example.
Calling that industrial waste is just a complete joke.
The land could also be used to grow other crops for human consumption.
You’re not the animals.
I literally wrote that this isn't about me/humans, so yes, obviously.
There are many groups that are suffering and that I'm not part of, and I still care about what's happening to them and want the suffering to end. It seems like most lemmy users share that sentiment when it comes to oppressed humans, so I really don't get what's so hard to understand about that when I extend it to animals.
You might have the opinion that factory farming isn't a social justice issue, fine. Me having a different opinion doesn't negatively affect you in any way. Why are you so pissed at me just because I see it differently?
Don't you also draw a line when you choose to eat plants?
I think there's a reasonable distinction here. You would presumably also draw a line between a conscious human and a brain dead human that won't ever be conscious again. As far as we can reasonably tell, consciousness requires a brain. Dogs and pigs have brains, so maybe we shouldn't torture and kill them on factory farms. We can also see them suffering and measure their physical reaction to it.
Of course there's a possibility that plants have some kind of consciousness too, but 1. that's speculation and 2. there's no way around farming them, as you have said yourself:
Untill humans develop the ability to photosynthesize, we are going to have to eat other species, there's no way around it.
Farming animals will always require far more plant deaths than growing plants for human consumption. These animals have to grow for months before being slaughtered and literally eat tons of animal feed in that time.
Therefore, plant-based food minimizes both animal suffering and deaths as well as plant deaths.
I'm not convinced that plant deaths are an ethical issue in of themselves, but farming has environmental implications so it makes sense to minimize the food that needs to be grown and make the farming as environmentally friendly as reasonably possible.
I'm sorry to hear that. The thing is, you mainly hear from those who are the most vocal, and those tend to be the most angry and therefore unreasonable. And those probably had their fair share of verbal (and/or physical) abuse from meat eaters, as vegans are hated on by a much, much larger part of society than the other way around. (That doesn't justify their hate, of course)
It's all a self reinforcing dynamic of groups riling each other up, unfortunately.
Inflammatory prejudices are only bad when others have them. They're definitely the hateful ones, so lets spread some hate about them.
Haha, that's the best troll comment I've seen in a while. Thank you for that.
We gotta spread the word. It still seems very achievable if enough people become aware of it.
What makes you think that processing food through an animal is healthier than through a factory?
You have to compare the actual nutrients contained in the product to draw any conclusion about health effects, and the macros are fairly similar for the plant-based versions compared to a given meat product.
The average person (in developed countries) eats significantly more meat than the recommended upper limit by nutrition organizations.
If you just go by the naturalistic argument, you'd conclude that processed drinking water is worse than untreated water, and that vaccines are worse than "perfectly natural" diseases. It's a common logical fallacy.
It's so despicable that society punishes kindness whilst rewarding greed. Common sense tells us that it should obviously be the other way around, yet it isn't.
The problem is that commercial sheep farms compete for the lowest price, which means that those who actually care for the welfare of their animals are at an disadvantage to those who keep sheep in very bad conditions, and will be forced out of the market sooner or later. Customers and distributors usually have no clue how the animals were actually treated, they just see the price and choose the lowest, of course.
And while you might not need to kill the sheep to get the wool, they're killed when their "productiveness" drops below profitablity anyways. In the wool industry that's after about 5-7 years.
Just because such animal products could theoretically be produced in a humane way, that's not what happens in practice under capitalism. The vulnerable are always exploited as much as possible for financial interests and animals have no voice, no lobby and no lawyers.