Memes of Production

The 83% was because 30m food insecure/ 330m Americans ~=83%. 17% is maybe not a "small" minority, but I think it's heavily implied that's not who they're talking about. The person they responded to said "food is deeply personal" and "if we moralize food, we will lose people." Veganism isn't going to "lose people " who have the options of "eat meat or starve" because those people have essentially no choice anyway. Personal implies it's part of their personality/culture/important to them in a way that isn't just about survival. Neither person mentioned extreme circumstances, and it is exceedingly rare for someone to use "personal choice" when referring to something that is at or close to life or death. I would never say "I cut off my leg as a personal choice since there was a risk I could die from infection." That is however the exact language I would use for things I really don't want to give up, like "eating dinner with my friends is deeply personal." I wouldn't say "not starving is deeply personal," it just doesn't really make sense.

I do think for 95% of people on lemmy it is a personal choice whether they are vegan or not, 99% was maybe an exaggeration but I wouldn't doubt that either. I'm specifically talking about the generally tech literate, educated people that figured out how to get and use lemmy with that 99%, not the average American or the average person.

Their implication was that "you live in a first world country and realistically are not impoverished (inferred from you using lemmy), as are most people making this argument, therefore you have a grocery store you can access and can choose to not eat meat." I was using America's poverty numbers because that's where I and most people using lemmy live, but many other countries have better social safety nets so there would be even less of a reason to not be vegan.

The meat industry has massive subsidies, at least in the US, which is why it is so incredibly competitive fiscally with plant based diets. I think also to mention these are staple foods like rice lentils etc, fruits and vegetables still might end up being more expensive, meaning it would still be harder/more effort to do a nutritionally complete vegan diet.

Here's an example for a 30 second instant pot recipe, it's basically how fast can you dump the cans and spices into the cooker (and coarsely chop a tomato). Just replace the chicken broth with anything else, like vegetable broth. If someone's worried about second hand some of the cheaper ones are $60, or just put it in another room and let the pressure naturally escape overnight, which is what my brothers all do when they use one. The pressure is high but it's not going to do anything crazy to your house.