“The goal shouldn’t be perfection but rather a healthy and sensible dietary pattern that allows room for enjoyment,” Kuhnle said.

Right. Because attempts at perfection typically fail. Especially when it comes to diet. Quick and drastic dietary changes often lead to relapses and rebounds - yo yo dieting is a thing, after all - while gradually changing food habits is more likely to result in long-lasting dietary and health improvements.

It’s not about a “magical middle ground”. It’s about understanding how humans act.

I think Disney is to American culture what McDonald’s is to American food. A corporate juggernaut that markets product not through quality but through advertising and name recognition, and starves out genuine American culture in the process.

I mean, what does it say that one of the most recognizable symbols of the United States, worldwide, is a cartoon mouse whose job is to sell toys to kids?

What message does that cartoon mouse send to the world about American values and American beliefs?

The idea that giving money to a corporation has become a rite of fucking passage in American society - the number of people who think their kids need to watch Disney movies so they can fit in with other kids, who think their kids will miss out on a fundamental part of American culture if they don’t take them to Disneyland at least once - absolutely horrifies me. Especially since the only political and moral message kids learn from Disney is “uphold the status quo and buy more Disney merch”.

Also, Disney is known for racism and sexism and cultural appropriation and union busting and copyright trolling and all sorts of general corporate bullshittery, and is currently shoving its feminist and LGBT representation back into the closet to appease Trump and avoid offending big conservative audiences in India and China and the Middle East, and there are plenty of smaller more specific reasons to hate them, but for me the whole “cultural vanguard of capitalism” thing outweighs the rest.

I’ve always found it funny that the right invented the term “virtue signaling”, in order to accuse liberals of spouting empty words to make themselves look good.

With conservatives, every accusation is a confession.

Toronto has restricted development in the ravines and other low-lying areas since 1954, when a freak hurricane caused severe flooding that killed dozens of people and washed away homes and bridges.

Today, the ravines include restored and artificial wetlands that soak up rainfall and mitigate flood risk.

There’s the most important part of the article, I think. It’s a lot easier to get buy-in for urban green spaces when the land involved is “useless” (from a capitalist standpoint) for development.

Fuck Midjourney, and also, fuck Disney. I hope they spend years in court blowing millions on high priced lawyers and making each other look bad.

On an individual level, doing the right thing for the environment generally saves you money.

On a collective level, policies that are good for the environment generally save everyone money.

This should have been a no brainer for Democrat pols, but they couldn’t resist the temptation to give green-colored pork giveaways to big business and the 1% instead.

Yeah, raising cattle produces a ton of greenhouse gases from the usual industrial agriculture sources - growing feed for livestock, transporting animals, processing animals, etc.

And above that, cows specifically produce a lot of methane, and feeding them grain in feed lots produces even more methane than normal, because it’s not the diet they evolved to eat, and methane is such a powerful greenhouse gas it doubles the overall impact of cattle production.

If you eat an average Western diet, cutting beef from your diet would benefit the environment more than cutting any other single food, by far.

Tldr cow farts.

How would you feel about purely secular “mumbo jumbo” ceremonies meant to encourage care for the environment? Like, for example, an organized moment of silence before or after a cleanup (to stop and think about the natural area you’re cleaning up, listen to the birds/bugs/water, whatever)?

How can you say “be careful what you wish for, violent revolution never ends well for anarchists no matter who wins.” ? What about the outcome of the american revolutionary war ? What was it’s outcome. Was the outcome not good ?

The Revolutionary War is an excellent example of the winners of a violent revolution turning around and wielding state power against their former supporters - look up Shays’ Rebellion.

More generally, the outcome of the Revolutionary War was good for America’s landowning oligarchy. Not so good for ordinary white Americans. Definitely not good for slaves, nonwhites, and the Native Americans of the continent - particularly since one of the biggest reasons for revolution was that the colonists wanted to break their treaties with Native American tribes, kill them all and steal their land, and Britain wouldn’t let them.

Which just makes it even more important that people with the privilege to change their diet for the better - people with access to fresh food and home kitchens and time to cook - take advantage of that and change their diet.

And that people fight, through collective action, for policies that make it easier for more people to change their diet, such as community groceries and farmers’ markets in food deserts, higher minimum wages and better worker protections to give people more time and energy to cook, and so forth.

Recognizing that eating healthy is a privilege shouldn’t discourage you from eating healthy. It should encourage you to fight to get more people that privilege.

Green roofs do need more support. But think of it by percentages. A one-story house is going to need significantly more structural stability than a normal house if it wants to support a green roof. If your building is already built to support 10-20 stories, the additional weight (and cost) of the green roof and the reinforcement underneath is not as big a concern.

Personally, I would prefer solar panels on roofs and green spaces on the ground where the public can enjoy their benefits. But more green is better than less.

Pain - especially chronic pain - can shorten one’s life significantly, never mind one’s quality of life. And people die from giving birth. It’s possible to refuse those meds but I wouldn’t call it exactly practical.

But really, what possible and practicable mean differs from vegan to vegan, the same way “thou shalt not kill” differs among different Christians. And it’s the same with lab grown meat. There is a possible ethical consideration based on the sourcing of cell lines; some vegans may oppose lab grown meat based on that, other vegans might decide it’s perfectly fine, still others would personally refuse to eat it but encourage its development for the sake of harm mitigation. Who knows. Put five vegans in a room and you’ll have six different opinions.

The definition of veganism, from the Vegan Society:

Veganism is a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose; and by extension, promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of animals, humans and the environment.

Please note the italics.

Living without modern medicine fits squarely within “not possible or practicable” because you can literally die without it. If you refuse vaccines or treatment for contagious diseases, it’s even more compelling, because you’re not only risking your life but the lives of others.

On the other hand, it is completely possible and practicable to live without lab-grown meat, so “were animals exploited to create this product” is a much more relevant consideration.

but I’ve got some hangups about our ability to make objective decisions about what is “in something/one’s best interests.”

Yeah, me too :/ It’s like every human (or animal) right - it has to be enforced by people, and people are pretty shitty. I don’t think that means we reject the principle, it means we put guardrails around it to try and prevent errors and abuses.

And I certainly agree: lab grown meat is far less heinous and morally offensive than factory farming. It involves a moral compromise for vegans, but, well, so does almost everything else. We can recognize both aspects.

I have another tip!

Michael Pollan has a dictum for health: eat “real food”. And by “real food” he means food containing only ingredients your great-grandmother would recognize.

(Or someone else’s great-grandmother in some other region/culture, if you’re eating food from somewhere else. Food you’d see on a farm or in a market before the rise of industrial food processing, is the point.)

A way to do that in a modern supermarket is “shop the edges” - do most of your shopping in the produce section, the bakery, for non-vegans the meat and deli sections, the fresh unprocessed food sections that are located on the edges of the building in a typical American grocery. Then duck into the middle of the store for staples like rice and beans and oil and stay far away from the frozen food section.

And when you do that - when you avoid pre-processed food, buy fresh ingredients, and make your own food - it’s easier to eat vegan because you control every ingredient that goes into your food. Your food will not have mysterious chemicals that may or may not be animal derived. Your food will just be food.

And not only will you be eating more ethically, you’ll end up a lot healthier.

Vegan meat substitutes are still fairly healthy compared to actual meat.

I agree, although that’s more a function of how unhealthy meat is than how healthy meat substitutes are.

And I think there’s a significant difference between traditional meat substitutes, like tofu and wheat gluten, and modern meat substitutes like impossible burgers, with high levels of sodium and saturated fat and chemical binders and industrial processing and so on.

I think of it this way: in what situations can we act on a human’s body without that human’s informed consent?

And one of those times is when an action needs to be taken for that human’s own good, and the human is unable to comprehend the situation enough to give informed consent. When a young child or an unconscious person needs medical treatment, for instance.

I think tracking or relocating wildlife would fall under that category. Does a bear understand why it’s not safe for it to break into people’s cars and eat their McDonald’s wrappers? No. Does the bear want to leave its territory and be shipped somewhere without cars full of delicious McDonald’s wrappers? Certainly not. But we can’t convince the bear to leave those delicious McDonald’s wrappers alone, so instead we relocate the bear, to protect both it and us.

On the other hand, harvesting a human’s cells for medical experiments? Does require informed consent, even if, as the history of Henrietta Lacks painfully shows, that requirement has often been ignored.

And harvesting cells to clone for food falls more on the medical experiments side of things than the “for their own good” side.

Congratulations!

My two best tips are:

If you remove non-vegan ingredients from non-vegan recipes without adding anything else, or substitute vegan meat/cheese/dairy for the real thing, you’ll always think something’s off because it’s never going to be exactly the same. And meat substitutes that are highly processed to try and match the texture and flavor of meat are as bad for you as highly processed anything else.

So my recommendation is: practice cooking recipes that are naturally vegan. There are a lot of vegan dishes in Indian and Chinese cuisine, for instance. There are old recipes from before factory farming when meat was for special occasions instead of every day.

Pizza is flatbread with sauce and toppings, and there are a ton of naturally vegan flatbread recipes. Experiment. Go wild. I’m not telling you not to try vegan cheese, but also try pizza dough with (eg) pesto, shallots, and four different kinds of mushrooms, and see how that goes 🍕 🍕

My second tip is: forgive yourself if you slip.

Food is an addiction. And I mean this quite literally. Fat is psychologically addictive, sugar is psychologically addictive, meat is psychologically addictive. Millions of people in the West don’t feel a meal is complete without a meat dish - by which I mean they literally don’t feel full unless they know they ate meat. I was one of them. It took months before I could finish a vegan meal and not still feel hungry after.

Doing the right thing is hard when the world wants you to do the wrong thing and your body agrees with it.

So if you have cravings you can’t beat and go buy a pizza - forgive yourself and promise yourself to do better tomorrow.

Joke’s on them, I already talked like that 😆

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