One of these cultures has normalised vegan and vegetarianism for centuries, the other is trying to wean a meat-obsessed population.
They are not the same thing, nor do they have the same requirements to reach their end goals
One of these cultures has normalised vegan and vegetarianism for centuries, the other is trying to wean a meat-obsessed population
As someone who works in a grocery store, the worst fucking people are the ones who go up to the deli counter and yell at the clerks, demanding the "bloodiest* roast beef they’ve got. That or the spiciest turkey, or whatever.
Dudes who’s entire sense of self is invested in eating meat. Easily the most annoying kind of guy I encounter in my daily life.
That and the ‘for every animal you don’t eat i’m gonna eat THREE!’ Yay well done so macho you get threatened by what another person eats fucking yay for you sir gold star.
Dudes who’s entire sense of self is invested in eating meat
This might sound silly. But maybe they enjoy the taste of rare roast beef? Before this “make meat seem like it’s not dead animal” trend, the rule used to be anything over medium was overcooked for most meats. For some odd reason (actually, not odd. freaking additives) a lot of roast beef is sold medium-well. Which is tasteless enough to make someone go vegan!
I don’t understand “yell at the clerks”. I’ve never seen that. But I agree it’s rude. Just **not **because they are buying meat.
This is what people don’t get, if you’ve been veggie for years then you don’t need meat substitutes, these products are for normies trying to cut back or give up while they break the cultural training.
I’ve been vegetarian for… more than a decade? I love meat substitutes and generally prefer having the substitute present in meals (either as the main thing, like a burger, or as an inclusion). I do agree that meat substitutes are a fantastic way of reducing meat consumption for meat-eaters, but that doesn’t mean you need to do away with it completely once you’re in ‘full veg’ mode
Maybe. While I do sometime choose the plant-based meat, thinking of it as a substitute was my initial reluctance to try vegetarian food. Back then, I ridiculed the idea of a “veggie burger”, but really liked grilling a “black bean patty”. Did you realize Mac and Cheese can be vegetarian? “Greek veggie dip” is horrible, but I love hummus. I always loved various potatoes, but it was quite a revelation that you could spice them up and use them as a meal. My latest infatuation is Halloumi or Paneer - don’t ever call a nice grilling cheese a substitute for anything.
At least for me, it is easier to choose foods for their own value, rather than suffer with a substitute, r a variation “without”. I’m not a vegetarian and have no interest in it, but I will choose what looks good to me at any given time, on its own merits
How prevalent is veganism in India? Whenever I look at Indian food, it’s butter this and milk that. Sure, there are some very good vegan choices, but it seems to me that Indians love their dairy.
Veganism is actually a fairly new phenomenon in general, a lot of Jains in particular have adopted it. But vegetarianism in India dates back over a thousand years BCE , so yeah, they’ve got a bit of a head start.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarianism_by_country
About 30% are vegetarian in India. Almost 10% are vegan.
So it’s very prevalent, but America likes to pretend we’re the only country in the world and that problems are never solved anywhere else.
Where are the Indian vegans? I have only ever met ONE in my entire life except myself.
Try India.
Lol I actually laughed. Maybe it’s the beer. But thanks!
Maybe it’s a regional difference? I live in South India
Hi 👋
Source: me
Hi!
I don’t mean like, online. I’ve met plenty of online Indian vegans. But still, I find it hard to believe that every 1 in 10 people are vegan. Where?!
I would say about 30% of my Indian coworkers over the years have been vegan.
I think the challenge is that, unlike a lot of Western vegans, they don’t go out of their way to talk about it. My second job, I knew day 1 about the white girl who was vegan. It took me 2 years to learn that 4 of my Indian coworkers were vegan since birth. And I only learned it because they learned I was getting into Indian food so they all started bringing stuff in for me to try. Entire meals. Incredible meals. I miss that job, lol.
My family loves to announce to the world that I don’t drink milk. It’s annoying. Idk they’re probably in shock or something that someone would choose not to abuse cows. (They’re vegetarians, I’m vegan)
Where do you live? I assume outside India? Hmm
no one abuses cows anyway
Tell me you know nothing about it without telling me you know nothing about it
Well yeah, very outside of India. I live in the US, though I try not to make my identity about that.
But one thing I’ve loved about working in Boston is how many cultures I’ve been exposed to in my life.
Exactly, we don’t go about our day preaching veganism.
Yeah I have a lot of vegetarian Indian friends, not as many vegan.
Vegetarian? Yes. Vegan? No.
I am a vegetarian. I eat dairy. I don’t eat meat and eggs.
Just eat eggs bro it’s just a chicken period
Somehow doesn’t sound as tasty.
Except for the part where they’re kept in small cages or “free range” in dirty cramped pens. Luckily it’s easier to get eggs from chickens raised ethically than meats. You just gotta fork over a few extra bucks or get the hookup at a farmer’s market
or “free range” in dirty cramped pens.
We drive 10mph around here because the damn chickens like to “free range” in the road. Those are pretty large pens, the size of a damn town.
The USDA needs to get their pockets out of big ag’s hands. Free Range should be Free-Fucking-Range. I get to know the chicken I eat got to run wild 16 hours every day, but many people do not.
Yeah the fuckery that they pull when they list things as grass fed and free range is vile. Then they make a profit on top of it because they barely change anything but charge premium prices for the fancy label.
I’m lucky to have a beef farm in my state that ships locally and actually follows the spirit of grass fed up to grass finished in sprawling pastures. They also do individual slaughter. For eggs we’ve got a few locals that bring them to the farmers markets on Sundays. Beef is like a once a week thing for us these days and it’s usually just ground beef. Chicken and fish are our biggest sources of protein now. I don’t really do pork anymore. Can’t find any that’s remotely close to ethically sourced which is abysmal considering how intelligent pigs are. So I just stopped buying it.
Also, and I’m fully aware this could just be some kinda subconscious bias, but I swear the meat and eggs taste SO much better than the stuff from the grocery. Eggs especially. The yolks are so vibrant and hardly break when being fried. Even the shells seem stronger and less likely to shatter into tiny annoying bits.
Here’s my reason for trying to eat a little more beef than that. If I’m giving “lives lost” any value, you can’t beat cows for calories per animal death. It beats a lot of plant-based foods. And I do have local beef, though it is not fully sustained like local chicken is… which is why I eat more chicken and seafood as well. Not to mention, even though beef around me can be ecologically sustainable, it will not remain that way if too many people eat it because it needs to be supplemented by import. So some beef = good. More beef = less good.
We actually have some ethically sourced local pork, too. I guess it’s nice living in a farming area of my state, despite not living in a farming-state. The butcher’s pork section is always small, but he’s got some.
Also, and I’m fully aware this could just be some kinda subconscious bias, but I swear the meat and eggs taste SO much better than the stuff from the grocery
Not really a subconscious bias. They are fresher, and preservation techniques often have not been started on them. If you eat an egg that has never been refrigerated, of course it’s fresher. (or the opposite, lol)
The seafood my family fishes is right off a boat, generally only a couple hours harvested. After the fishermens’ cut, the best stuff goes to a couple local restaurants and seafood markets, and the rest are frozen and shipped. Yes, you can taste the difference. I never liked scallops until I tasted “the real thing” off a boat.
Same, got this one road where I always need to be careful about the hens.
Effing dinosaurs, with 6,000 years of eating cave men, deserve all the incarceration they get. /s
More seriously, depending on your priorities, factory farmed chicken is less bad for the overall environment than pretty much any beef
Chickens are not people
To a vegan, that doesn’t matter because it’d be speciesism.
Yeah, Vitamin B12 defiencies make you act erratic
I never said they were? I’m not even a vegetarian stop being so sensitive. I don’t care for making anything suffer when I can still have eggs without the suffering. It’s that simple. If you’ve based too much of your personality on macho meathead bullshit then do you boo. I’m sure that’s a great replacement for an actual personality.
Based response
Quite popular, in my city it’s quite hard to find meat in the popular restaurants. And these places are quite old and we’ll know.
Most foods don’t have any form or trace of meat or eggs, although milk and related items are very widely consumed.
It’s vegetarian and not vegan.
It’s not vegan so much as veggie. They definitely respect those cows they get the milk from though.
Yeah, we’re not giving up our dairy any time soon lol.
No one is keen on experimenting with Basundi or Rasmalai without milk.
They have made dairy using a bacteria recently, so animal free dairy may be a thing soon.
Brave Robot! I tried it recently, it was good!
If they can make animal-free cheddar and animal-free yogurt that tastes exactly like the real thing, sign me up. Right now, vegan alternatives are… not good.
I’ve tried a few types of coconut-based yogurts that were tasty. I’m not a fan of almond milk, so didn’t like those varieties as much. On the cheeses though, completely agree! I had one that was tolerable, but definitely falls in the “not good” category.
Were the coconut-based yogurts sweet? Because I don’t want sweet yogurt. I want yogurt I can put chives in and put on my falafel (for example).
The vanilla flavored one was a bit sweet, but that’s how I generally prefer it. I usually am throwing berries and granola in there too so admittedly can’t give you an unbiased recommendation! I think there are plain flavored ones either almond or coconut milk based, which might be more of what you’re looking for.
Yes, this is why I think we take the wrong approach considering things as animal free substitutes. That’s a high bar.
Meanwhile I’m perfectly happy dipping my veggies in hummus instead of cheese dip. Not as a substitute but as a different choice that is good on its own merit
I can live without cheddar cheese. Maybe. But I need my yogurt.
I saw a milk that claims to be just that on the shelves. Incredibly expensive and (from what I hear) nowhere near the same taste.
The problem is that animals and plants do “what they do” with incredible efficiency. If you want to do exactly what some evolved thing does best, you probably cannot come close to matching it with technology. A century of aircraft design and planes are not in the same league as birds regarding flight efficiency.
If animal-free milk goes the path that animal-free meat is, they may well be reaching the upper bounds of efficiency already, nowhere near close enough to replace natural animal and dairy.
Which is a bit of a shame (as a meat-eater). I think having outside competition that could truly stand on its own would help reduce the corruption of big ag.
If you want to do exactly what some evolved thing does best, you probably cannot come close to matching it with technology.
Not necessarily true - evolution (and simulating evolution) is great at finding local maxima/minima, but not as great at moving out of those in the case where the local min/max is not the global min/max. So, for example, birds might not be the optimal way to do flight efficiency, but between birds and optimal flight efficiency if there’s a region of worse flight efficiency of any real size (more than you could vault in a couple generations of lucky mutations) then evolution will never find it because the intermediate steps to get there will be selected against too heavily to jump the gap.
I don’t think I entirely disagree with you. I was generalizing the real phenomenon that we are unable to engineer competing mechanisms to those found in the wild.
That said, “region of worse efficiency” tends to happen all the time. The accurate argument would be a “region of untenable inefficiency”. A legless bird that evolved the ability to fly its entire life from hatching to death is an unlikely evolution. Not coincidentally, finding ways to keep something up in the air longer-term than birds do is something our engineering is capable of.
Man I haven’t tried Basundi, is it available in Haryana by any chance?
I don’t know man, I’m from Mumbai. Check on swiggy for restaurants in your area.
Or you can make it on you own. The recipe is simple, it just takes long time to make because you need to boil milk to make it thicker.
9% of the population apparently, the highest in the world tied with Mexico.
veganism was invented in the 1940s in Britain
Hence this meme
which would be fine if it were just a straight comparison but it starts bleating about chemicals and preservatives and it’s a bit too purity politicking for my tastes.
usians cannot imagine consuming a treat that does not involve murder. They will literally pay a premium and spend billions in R&D to get non-murder treats to taste more like murder.
My only problem with Indian food. Whenever I try a restaurants it’s shit. But when my coworkers would bring in a feast on Diwali, it was my favorite time of year.
I can’t find any restaurants that taste even similar to their home cooked meals.
I was lucky enough to travel to India once, and try some great food … I wanted to be vegetarian while there, simply because it was so good. The guys thought they were being helpful pointing out meat dishes everywhere we went, but it was typically an afterthought on the menus, not well prepared, not worth eating.
— In an American restaurant the focus is on meat and it is well prepared so that’s what I’m looking for
— in my limited experience with restaurants in India, the focus was on foods that didn’t have meat, and was very well prepared, so that’s what I’m looking for
As long as the vegetarian option is a substitute, or an option, or doing without, rather than the focussing on a good meal, most of will have no reason to select it, no reason to expect it to be a good choice
america bad
Most veg Indian food has dairy added tho. Avoiding ghee is like going through an obstacle course of nice aunties and uncles trying to feed you. And don’t even get me started on curd.
Indian vegans also often use substitutes. I’m for vegan food unity: don’t harm and exploit animals and I support you.
How is the dairy industry in India? I would assume it is nowhere near as cruel as it is in the West, where sadistic practices are incorporated at every stage of the process in the name of efficiency.
CW: how the dairy/meat industry works.
It’s basically the same. The driving factor of mass death in the dairy industry is that to make cows produce milk they’ve gotta get pregnant and calf, so you end up with a bunch of cows that are too old to produce enough milk for market and a big of calves that won’t produce milk, ever.
In the West, those “extra”, “non-productive” animals get killed (the dairy industry is the meat industry). In India, this is still often the case as not everyone is veg and not everyone who’s non-veg avoids beef. But there are enough people that refuse beef for there to be an impetus to follow a “traditional” alternative: you kick the animal out of the dairy for it to fend for itself. In reality, they tend to just starve to death over a long period of time.
For there to be dairy without a culling there would need to be like 30 pet cows for every 1 dairy cow. Assuming the cost of raising the cow is what people pay for, that would mean milk costing 10X more.
My dumb ass assuming India’s culture of reverence for cows would lead to slightly better treatment for them but forgetting that capitalism will always demand the most profitable option.
It depends. India does have some factory farms, mainly for beef. But many dairy cattle are kept by small farmers for whom the milk and meat are a supplement to whatever plants they grow. And these farmers usually belong to dairy co-operative societies like Amul, which do quality control and ensure that the animals are not abused too much. Also some Indian states ban or heavily restrict the slaughter of cattle (although in practise this just leads to them being abandoned or disappearing into the black market).
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Think this post confuses veganism and vegetarianism. Also it’s chemicals all the way down. Those spices? Made of chemicals.
Those alternative burgers are actually pretty tasty but also very heavy because they are imitating beef. For American fare I’d generally prefer a sandwich with deli style meats made out of tofu or seitan, or a bean burger.
Water is a chemical. Salt is a preservative This is fucking stupid.
when I went vegan, I started eating practically exclusively Indian food. dal, chana masala, aloo gobi, so many delicious foods.
BEYOND MEAT IS PEOPLE! WE GOTTA STOP’EM! SOMEHOW!
Ohhhh scary, buzzz words… Chemicals.
But why choose when you can have both?
Honestly the Indian one should have just been “Here’s your meal.” “Thanks. It is delicious, as expected.”
Most vegans in the US do not eat food that mimics meat.
Most Western butt holes cannot handle Indian food that well. The couple times I went to Indian weddings, I was clamoring for anything that would not burn my butthole. The good combined with the ridiculous amount of alcohol made the toilets cry.
