You could reduce meat intake and buy higher quality meat whenever financially feasible. Then you help fight the problem but can still look down on vegans
Small incremental changes are easier to make than big ones. It is also better to have many people reducing meat than just a few full vegans.
The word easier here is a choice. What is more comfortable is easier, but eating a plant based diet is very easy. It’s cheaper and widely available in most countries. What you mean by easier really refers to more comfortable, not really to there being less physical obstacles
You will get more people to join your cause with a positive message: i.g. “Do these small steps to start” than a negative one, I.g. “If you don’t go fully vegan, you are still part of the problem.”
“Perfect is the enemy of good.”
So it is easier to convince people to reduce meat consumption, which than makes it more likely that people will go vegetarian or vegan later
And i actually feel like vegans on the internet can be too aggressive, alienating people they could get on their side
best is the enemy of better.
why are you giving vegans advice on how to market veganism? if the facts won’t change your mind then it’s not the fault of the vegans.
It’s kind of hard to approach this in a tactful way. I think a lot of why vegans don’t appreciate this approach is because it often doesn’t work in actual practice. I’ll give a personal example as an analogy - I used to be a smoker. I tried quitting at least 50 times over the time period I was addicted to nicotine. One of the tricks I would use was to reduce the amount I would smoke each day. It would help briefly, but what would always happen is that I would get to a point where it was too hard to reduce any further, and then after plateauing for a few days, I would rebound and smoke even more than I used to.
Reduction still played a role in my effort to quit, but there were a lot of other tricks I had to employ to make it stick, and the overarching point is that reduction as a goal went nowhere, but reduction combined with the intent to stop all together did eventually work.
And that’s what also happens with dietary changes. Reduction starts with halfway good intentions, but when it’s the goal it becomes a temporary self-soothe that simply ends up rebounding in the end. In fact the people who run wfpb health coaching clinics have stated in interviews that people are most successful when they go all in with the dietary changes - because it turns out that people often feel dramatic positive changes to their health within only days of going plant-based, and those positive changes reinforce their motivation to keep going.
And as this article points out, reducitarianism can never achieve justice. It’s like when suits-wearers promise to reduce their carbon emissions by 10% by 2035 or something. It’s better than nothing, but will never solve the problems that need to be solved.
Or vegans can just mind their own business and leave the rest alone. Claiming abuse and murder and yet still buy smartphones whose materials are sourced by abuse of the poor, drive around on liquefied animals and use plastics.
Vegans don’t see themselves as perfect. It’s all about doing the best you can, where you can
Or animal abusers can just mind their own business and stop abusing and murdering innocent animals?
Just because they do one good thing doesn’t mean they have to live the perfect life. It’s pretty hard to live in the modern world without a smartphone, while its realy not that hard to not eat animal products.
If your goal when choosing what to eat is “look down on vegans”, then you have a really shitty way of choosing what to eat.
Put simply, promoting veganism won’t stop people from reducing, but promoting reducetarianism will stop people from going vegan
This is either brain rot written by someone who doesn’t understand propaganda or a psy-op and I can’t tell which. So if it is a psy-op, congratulations on making an effective one.
Every doctor I’ve ever seen talk about diet, says that we should reduce our meat intake. They never suggest nor imply that people should go vegan as an alternative.
At least, from my limited experience.
I would argue that if someone has no intention of giving up meat, of which, there are plenty of people who are in that situation, then reduction can help improve the situation.
If someone is considering, or at least would consider going vegan, then veganism is the right choice, reduction may make the transition more difficult in the long term.
Thoughts? I’m happy to discuss. I just don’t have the time right this second to do a ton of reading/watching content about the other side of this discussion, so I’d like to know what you have to say.
