素食

indy

Alex Honnord

Rant of the day: diet. For some reason there are tons of folks who get mortally offended every time I post about how vegetarianism or veganism are better for the planet. And yet it’s a fact that eating less meat and dairy is the simplest way for the average individual to lower their impact. There are countless reputable sources on this subject, though it’s maybe easier to just watch a few films like @gamechangersmovie or @cowspiracy (both of which I had slight issues with, but the overall arguments are sound).
The most vocal critics of my diet posts fall into a few categories:
1) People who don’t want to think about it one way or another, they just want to eat how they’ve always eaten. In some ways this category annoys me the most - it’s intellectual laziness. I grew up eating steak and drinking milk; my family was as middle class American as it gets. And then I read a ton of books and started worrying more about performance and my carbon footprint. So I stopped eating meat (or at least seriously limited it). We have to change as we learn new things.
2) Folks who argue that meat can be sustainably raised (or they hunt their own food). I agree that in some cases this can be “sustainable”, but there’s no version of sustainable meat that feeds 7.8 billion people. We have to start by just eating less meat.
3) People (almost always overly macho young men) who think that I must be seriously light duty to eat mostly plants. I don’t even know what to say to them, but I’ll just leave then with this @jimmychin pic of me soloing the Excellent Adventure, 5.13a (7c+). I think the plants did me well that day, as they have for the last 7 years or so.
For anyone interested, read Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer. It had a big impact on me.
Oh, and my last mini rant is reserved for vegans who are all up on their high horse and poo poo other folks’ good efforts - it’s better for someone to eat meat once a week than to eat it every day. It shouldn’t be a test of ideological purity. Diet is a spectrum and it’s better to do less harm than more.

indy