this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2025
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Eh. Factory farming is a significant contributor to greenhouse gases, particularly through methane released by large livestock herds.
But the industry is so saturated with subsidies and shielded from liabilities and exempted from taxes and so comically wasteful in its surplus production that there hasn't been any material benefit to veganism as a social movement. You can take a moral position (and you should, eating meat is awful for a variety of reasons). But there's no actual correlation between an increase in vegan eating habits and a decrease in agricultural emissions. All we ever get is more meat shipped abroad or thrown in the trash.
The real curb to agricultural production has been raw materials constraints - limits on arable land, potable water, and slaughterhouse workers - that have (directly or indirectly) emerged from a changed climate. Outside these limits, all we've really achieved is "Grapes of Wrath" style surplus destruction to keep retail prices up.
If a factory farm can produce another dead cow, it does, even if it can't reliably bring the carcass to market. The profit margins are set so artificially high that they'd be fools not to do so. Only herd die-offs resulting from heat waves, water shortages, and a lack of below-market migrant labor seem to dissuade them from trying to expand.
So just the "Appeal to futility" logical fallacy? I'm convinced!
Every change starts somewhere. Yes, 0.001% of the population can be vegan and it most likely won't save a single slaughterhouse animal. But 1%? That's already significant enough to make at least some change, and 10%? That's already setting market trends and modifying industries, 50%?
You get my point. You joining the current vegan population is significant! The vegan population is estimated to be 9% in india and mexico, 5% in Israel, 2% in the UK, 1.5% in the US, and estimated to be a total of 1%-3% of the global population. This is a movement that has probably saved more lives and more gas emissions than many others have.
At some point, you have to recognize factory farming as a public policy decision rather than a retail choice. And the response has to be organized and political, not individualistic and consumerist.
It's significant for popular politics, sure. But a vegan community that satisfies itself with attaching blinders when they pass through the Bad Foods aisle at the grocery store is going to end up in the same place as the climate activist who only owns a bike.
The difference between the US and India is that if you go around trying to butcher cows in particularly devote areas of India, you're subject to serious political reprisals. In the US, it's practically a sacrament to eat burger.
It is both, and both affect each other. False dichotomy?
Strawmaning what being a vegan is. It is far from just turning a blind eye.
You know that they eat plenty of other animals right? If you go there, meat and animal products are a very big part of the local food.
I can't take these arguments seriously.
It's induced demand. Increased capacity invited consumption.
Per capita they're heavily constrained. They have three times the population and one third the land area. They can't slaughter animals to match US consumption patterns even if they try.
That's incentivized a culture of veganism as normal and virtuous, as a consequence. And it has allowed the population to expand to 1.3B without experiencing rates of malnutrition common to more rural countries (Kenya, Argentina, and Haiti, for instance) where enormous stretches of land have been dedicated to feedstock.