However, I am a massive hypocrite and I don't let my moral thoughts bother my everyday consumption patterns.
Even if you don't settle on a meat-free diet, any reduction in consumption makes a huge difference en masse.
- Pickle soup is a classic (use a recipe with fermented pickles, which are pretty easy to make at home, but larger grocers often also sell them refrigerated as a kosher product). Aside from the sour cream it's naturally vegan, and a vegan sour cream might work fine.
- Borscht is a delicious beet soup.
- Wild mushroom perogies are also pretty close, save for egg and sour cream in the dough. Vegan substitutes would definitely work there, else if you experiment a bit with the hydration a basic hot water and flour dough would be close.
- Cabbage soup is similar to pickle soup in spirit (using sauerkraut, another lacto-fermented vegetable).
- Placki Ziemniaczane (somewhat similar to US hash browns) is often served with mushroom sauce. Sometimes it'll have egg as a binder, but that's not essential for a very similar dish (replace it if you'd like, or add a bit more flour and water, or just leave it out).
- Braised sauerkraut
- Krupnik is a barley soup, often made with meat stocks, but vegetable stocks aren't bad either.
With any luck, a vegan sour cream ought to get you to that pink classic. No promises though, and the purple version is also great.
Replacing cheese is the hardest, but there are increasingly better options now.
Dip the tofu in spicy red Korean paste sauce or skiyaki sauce.
Every good cult needs a list of low-stakes, illogical rituals, because they serve as nuclei for adherence to higher-stakes illogical beliefs and acts.
Unfortunately, science has made it increasingly difficult to justify the absolutism of many of these religious practices, and so somehow these religions skate by by saying, "oh we're just being practical and realistic" even though they continue to stray further from the dogma which defines their religious beliefs.
It shows you unequivocally that these religious institutions are more interested in maintaining power than adhering to their own belief systems.
But yes, bread is usually part of a vegan diet.
How do you notice that you need more protein? I hear that quite a bit but I have no idea how it manifests.
Environmental impact is another facet tho.
If you just think "eating all animals is 100% horrible" then you're not facing the nuances of reality. You can make a realistic change like eating a bit less whales and cows and eat chickens instead. It's not perfect but it's better.
With your all or nothing thinking you might also want to avoid eating all eggs because egg farms are so inhumane for the chickens. Whereas if you buy the eggs where the chickens are treated better like free range, it's still bad but it's far better. And you're helping shape the industry.
Why not?
And how did you come up with your taxonomy on animal intelligence and acceptable amount of suffering to inflict them?
> egg farms are so inhumane
Because they are? Industrial cages don’t even have enough space for the chicken to turn around. They are spent after a year of laying eggs and slaughtered for meat. Hatched chicks that are male are ground alive. Chickens get their beaks (that has a lot of nerves in it) sliced off without anesthesia. They get pumped full of antibiotics because diseases are rampant in high density farming. Chicken breast chickens are engineered to grow huge breasts too fast and they can’t even stand up.
Industrial farming is the worst, but any kind of farming comes at the expense of the animal wellbeing. Money not spent on the animal is money earned: that is fundamentally broken and can’t result in good outcomes for the animal especially when they can’t express themselves the way we can.
No, that is now pasture. Be truthful to yourself. Cattle ranching, particularly in "undeveloped wilderness" is incredibly destructive of the local environment.
This is the opposite of the truth. In fact cows are cultivating, manure spreading and seeding machines that vastly improve their future forage just by doing their thing, if not over grazed. I know a local rancher who makes all of his money as an elk hunting guide on his property. He keeps a herd of cattle for the purpose of improving the forage for the elk, and for his own table.
I invite you to come and hike on this land. I very much doubt that you would conclude that it has been damaged by the cows. In most places you could walk through a time warp to three hundred years ago and you couldn't tell the difference.
I'm not willing to live the smallest, least healthy life I can tolerate in order to make room for more people to do the same. A high population count does not strike me as a worthy goal, but a healthy and happy one does.
That’s unfortunate and I’m sorry to hear that.
For others reading, know that this is extremely rare. Most people on a vegan diet are healthy (you have to make sure you’re eating a balanced diet, and you don’t need nearly as much protein as you think you do). For iron (which can be lacking especially in women), cook on a cast iron or high carbon steel pan and it will transfer iron into your food that you’ll absorb.
I encourage people who are curious about it to watch « Game Changers » where top athletes (Lewis Hamilton, Schwarzenegger, others) talk about switching to a vegan diet and it’s effect on their health and performance. https://www.netflix.com/title/81157840
If you use the pan very regularly, the trace amounts are enough to add up to enough iron. She doesn’t have that problem anymore for years now.
It’s also the idea behind the lucky iron fish[0] to supplement the diet of people in Cambodia where anemia seems to be a problem.
> Only beef, it's a variant of the carnivore diet that excludes common autoimmune triggers, like eggs & dairy.
Eating grass fed cows probably kills less animals per calorie than many vegetables.
Eating meat is a personal choice but pretending it's somehow more morally virtuous than a salad is probably delusional