Does this mean her produce isn’t vegan?
You mean the eggs and goat cheese?
But yes, any veggies shes growing would not be vegan, because not keeping animals as slaves is an important part of veganism. I do believe you would find people who describe themselves as “vegan” that would be ok with this (like vegans that eat honey), but I believe it would not count as vegan under a strict vegan philosophy.
Source: I once subscribed to r/vegan as an observer.
I’ll never understand moral vegan absolutists. There are so many non-dietary ways we cause direct or indirect harm to animals. I understand those who are vegan for dietary or environmental reasons, but moral veganism? I don’t get it.
I think it goes something like: humans used to need to eat meat and animal products to survive, but now we don’t. If humans are really better than animals, then we don’t need to kill or enslave them since we can get everything we need from the food we grow (and in some cases, the lab produced supplements previously only available from animal products, notably B12).
I get that, and it makes sense on the surface. The next part is the bit that muddies the water. Grass grows, nature happens, and generally when you grow one beefie one animal dies to get 200kg of food.
How many animals die to make 200kg of carrots? A best case scenario is 100m2 to grow those 200KG of carrots (based on a quick search showing 20 tonne per hectare, or 2kg per m2). How many insects are killed every time you apply pesticides? More than one I bet. I’d expect on 100m2 of garden it is probably tens of thousands. Sure you can say “organic”, but that just means pesticide that isn’t made from oil. You could say “spray free”, but when you drive the harvester through the field to harvest the carrots you’re still going to kill thousands of insects and small rodents.
Is the life of the cattle worth more than the life of the insect? Because it seems the whole concept of veganism is based around the idea that the life of one animal (e.g. human) is not worth more than the life of another (e.g. pig).
If it’s not, then is it not more moral to eat the cattle?
We can’t ignore that most US vegans are comparing growing an acre of crop to eat vs growing an acre of crop to then feed to cattle and kill that as well, so I can get that their argument might stack up. But here in NZ, most of the beef raising is done from grassy fields that get fertiliser and some roundup on the gorse or ragwort and not much else.
So yeah, my conclusion is much like yours but with a lot more rambling. Dietary vegans are much healthier than you or I, considering the good foods like red meat and bacon are on the “definitely causes cancer” list. Environmental vegans for sure have much lower carbon footprints, most likely even when the food is shipped from the other side of the world. But I’ve never worked out the conundrum of how the life equation works.
