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.

Just goes to show how little you care about others suffering. Social justice for me but not for others (those who I consider interior).

Inflammatory prejudices are only bad when others have them. They’re definitely the hateful ones, so lets spread some hate about them.

You just compared your eating preferences which are 100% a choice to someone being born homosexual and not wanting to be killed for it

All the animals on factory farms didn’t choose to be born there and don’t want to be killed either.

It’s not about the sensitivities of humans, but the insane suffering of animals in this system of oppression.

Haha, that’s the best troll comment I’ve seen in a while. Thank you for that.

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.

https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/appeal-to-nature

To me that’s more ethical than killing of billions of animals, and the latter is considered ethical.

I think most people would actually consider factory farming unethical, they just put the blame on the producers for treating animals like shit. And the producers are locked into a race to the bottom for competitive prices, so they’d blame the customers/market conditions.

It’s kind of funny, having the calves slaughtered to get the milk that is naturally meant for them is considered vegetarian (as long as you personally don’t eat the veal).

If they’re kept on abusive factory farms, that’s still vegetarian.

When the dairy cows gets their throats slit because milk production drops below profitablity after ~5 years, the milk is still seen as vegetarian (as long as someone else buys the meat).

No matter how much death and suffering takes place at the farm, the milk is seen as vegetarian. But at rennet, that’s where they draw the line.

For things like steak, I agree. Unfortunately it will take many years to become affordable for the average person, but when it happens, it will be awesome.

For many other categories, plant-based alternatives are already close enough for me. I recently tried the store brand plant based Schnitzel from Lidl (a supermarket/discounter chain here in Germany) and it was surprisingly tasty, given that it doesn’t even cost more than factory farmed meat by now.

There are decent burgers, nuggets, kebab, chicken and salami alternatives around as well. It’s crazy how much the taste, price and availability of these products have improved in the last 10 years alone. I don’t miss real meat by now.

I heard about studies that successfully used algae to inhibit methane-producing microbes in the short term, but I couldn’t find any studies that prove its long term efficacy yet. It’ll be interesting to see whether the microbes can adapt to the algae in the long term or not.

The issue with using byproducts as animal fodder is that ruminants produce a lot of methane while digesting them. This enteric fermentation in their stomachs accounts for around 6% of global greenhouse gas emissions, while the entire aviation industry sits at just 2-3%. If we give them more food that is harder to digest, they’ll emit even more methane per animal.

Biofuels make a lot of sense though. After extracting the fuel, the remaining digestate can be used to produce biochar or be put directly on fields as fertilizer, which is nice because synthetic fertilizers account for 1-2% of greenhouse gas emissions.

Another option is to burn the byproducts for heat or electricity in winter during short periods when there’s not enough wind and solar power to cover energy demand.

1. The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. They have greatly increased the life-expectancy of those of us who live in “advanced” countries, but they have destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjected human beings to indignities, have led to widespread psychological suffering

I don’t know, life before the industrial revolution was pretty shit for regular people too.

I’d rather not have to worry about my family (and friends) starving to death during the next famine. 40-60% of children in medival europe died before adulthood. I can’t even imagine the psychological suffering caused by this alone. Then there was frequent war and disease outbreaks, basically no healthcare, and so on…

I’m not saying that everything’s great nowadays, we urgently need to fix many issues. But many things were way, way worse before modern civilization.

Now, your claim is that Russia started the civil war as a pretext to invade and that the separatists are just Russian proxies. On the other hand, the Russian narrative would claim the same thing about the Euromaidan coup.

I guess most the 400.000 - 800.000 Euromaidan protestors were CIA agents in Russias view then?

It’s well known that many people in Eastern European countries don’t trust Russia one bit after their experiences in the USSR. Of course there’s enormous pushback when politicians in power try to strengthen ties with Putin (and cut ties to EU countries), it would be really weird if there weren’t. The same would happen in Poland and many other Eastern European countries who were staunchly anti Putin long before the invasion, even though they don’t have an immediate threat from a shared border with Russia.

In my opinion, if people really cared so much about the Ukrainian people, then we should’ve been providing them with foreign aid for domestic development, long before any of this started.

Before the war, people weren’t really aware of the situation in Ukraine and there were 100 other problems that seemed more urgent, so there just wasn’t any political pressure to do something.

As far as I can see, it’s just about US/Ukrainian state interests vs Russian state interests

Western countries just stood by in the first days and did nothing, as they had no hopes for Ukraine surviving for more than a few days. If the Ukrainian public weren’t willing to push back, they would’ve had no chance to stop the Russian advances and their government would’ve collapsed in days, just as both Russia and the West predicted.

It would be a better use of funds to accept territorial concessions

Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians fled from the occupied territories, and accepting that they will never get their relatives and homes back will be unthinkable for a large part of them, especially after the reports of forced relocations from occupied regions into Russia (including thousands of children) and all the suffering that Putin has brought upon Ukrainians. Maybe they will reach the point of making concessions if they see no hope of retaking the territory. Ultimately this has to be decided by the Ukrainian people.

You said that they are a reactionary government, but you also implied that their reactionary justification to invade is legitimate.

You said you “don’t fully agree” with Russia intervening in the civil war (by shelling kyiv I guess, because theres definitely civil war there). As if they didn’t provoke it in the first place to justify their invasion.

I also wouldn’t expect people who are criticial of war to say that they “don’t fully agree” with Russia waging a war of aggression and commiting mass murder and war crimes in Ukraine, I would expect some actual condemnation of such atrocities.

Yeah, I don’t fully agree with their decision to intervene in the Ukrainian civil war

Of course Russia had nothing to do with the war. They would never fund and support the separatists, or spread anti Ukrainian propaganda amongst the Russian speaking population, because Putin loves democracy and just wants the best for everyone, of course. /s

But the majority of us loves our animals

And when the milk production drops, the vast majority of dairy cows get their throat slit and their bodies sold for profit. I surely wouldn’t treat those that I love that way, but I guess animal farmers just have a very different concept of “loving animals” compared to people who have pets, for example.