On Forcing Beliefs

"Forcing your beliefs" means pressuring and guilting someone to adhere to your standard of morality in this context.

Let me start off with: I'm a vegan.

And yet I know that in 2019, with these resources that we have in the world, some particularly aggressive vegan advocates are completely out of touch with reality. I think most people can agree at least privately that it would be much more morally sound in terms of the environment and animal welfare to not use animals as food stock in any shape or form, but even if we all collectively started thinking that tomorrow, the food industry needs time to accommodate changes towards a more plant-based slant. Guilting individuals who don't have vegan options is shitty and ignorant.

Not everyone has the money and many people do not have the vegan products at their disposal that they can just buy whenever from any grocery store. I don't give a shit what ya'll say about beans and rice being dirt cheap - substituting all animal products with just beans and rice is a great way to get a deficiency in something and it's not enough. A lot of vegans require plant-based alternatives, fortified foods and supplements for iodine, vitamin D, B12, B3, DHA, choline -- many of which are expensive. I've seen a lot of vegans guilt omnis/vegetarians for not doing enough because they don't have the alternative products at their disposal, and that needs to stop immediately. What are they going to do when there's no fortified plant milk available, eat 2kg of chinese cabbage every day to get their calcium? I don't believe in people risking their health just to 100% adhere to a vegan lifestyle. Call me a shitty vegan if you want, but to me it'd be a great tragedy to see an increasing number of hypothyroid, osteoporotic, nerve-damaged vegans with cardiovascular disease.

Vegans telling omnis to "just order it online!", "you could do it if you tried harder" like it's a given it's an option for everyone is just privileged west-centric stupidity. I have a lot of friends who live in remote villages far away from the city. None of us live in the US. These people eat what they a) grow and b) what they can get from the store/gas station 10 miles away. That's what people mean when they say veganism is a privilege. The "beans and rice!!!" vegan advocates have all the comforts of the city and enough self-righteousness to drown themselves in.

Vegans HAVE also been giving shit to indigenous people and families with long-standing traditions of animal agriculture. It's not so easy for them to just go vegan either, even if they want to. It's not gonna happen in a day or a month and it's not going to happen any faster just because vegans keep shitting on them online.

So yes on two accounts: no one is immune to societal pressure, including from vegans, but on the other hand some of the pressuring city-vegans need to stop lumping all omnis together as carnist monsters unless they're ready to provide them with real sustainable options.

/r/DebateAVegan Thread