Selfish Effective altruism #3: Why you should think about being vegan.

Hello there!
This is part of my series on "Effective altruism", showing possible ways of doing the most good. Today I'll be giving some arguments of why you should at least think about becoming vegan or to a lesser extent, vegetarian. The former seems like a better long term option though and you will learn why later on in this post.

Preface

For a few months now, I've been contemplating becoming a vegan after reading some posts about factory farming and its effects. A disclaimer: I still eat meat as of writing this post, but I try as many vegetables as I can, I recently started enjoying lettuce so that's a start. I also try to limit my selections of meat to poultry and seafood rather than red meat (I'll go on to why later). This is especially challenging for me as I'm quite a fussy eater.

Suffering of animals

Know it or not, there is a lot of suffering of how animals are getting killed for the meat in your lovely hamburger or Nando's chicken. They are put into factory farms and forced to suffer in terrible conditions like clustered areas and they would also fight with each other. Dog meat in South Korea is a good example of such horrific doings.

You may become vegetarian, but there is still a problem to this. The title of this blog was not "Why you should think about being vegetarian", it was "Why you should think about being vegan". Vegetarians do cause less animal suffering than omnivores or meat eaters, but they still eat animal products - just not from carcasses of animals. What's so bad about this?

Well a lot, for starters chickens are put into cramped conditions where they cannot even spread their wings. They also unusually defecate a lot due to these harsh environments, they would usually be very clean creatures otherwise. These horrible conditions also have some of the chickens dying, leaving the survivors having to deal with the dead ones' rotting bodies. Once their purpose has been spent, they would be sent to slaughter houses. On top of that, male baby chicks are also culled whereas the females are left to grow up and put into horrible cages.


Cows are also given horrible treatment, for both meat and milk. First of all baby calf are born from the mother and both form a relationship immediately. The mother cow produces a lot of milk for the baby calf, however said calf is taken away from the mother to be either artificially inseminated or killed for meat. There is another thing that cows are bad for which will be revealed in the next section.

Climate change and opportunity cost

This constant raising and killing of animals contributes to climate change, the issue that loads of people are talking about. About 11% of global warming is due to agriculture. Animals are being fed wheat that could literally be re-allocated to fed a load of starving children.

Cows for example produce a lot of methane which contributes to global warming (yes, their farts). Red meat from cows or lambs also has double the fat relative to poultry, which is why I said that I would incorporate more poultry than red meat in my meat consumption. Cows and pigs are more inefficient at converting their feed into meat as well as the feed taking up a lot more landmass than chickens. Red meat eaters are also more likely to develop risks of heart disease.

However there are much more sustainable alternatives which don't contribute to global warming or are as fatty.

Plant-based alternatives

Being vegan does not mean you have to give up the luscious taste of that nice burger king whopper. Why? Because there are tech startups hellbent on creating meat alternatives like impossible foods and beyond meat, which are being given philanthropic funding by people like Bill Gates. By meat alternatives I don't mean a veggie burger, I mean a burger that gives you the taste of a meat-based one without the well... meat. A combination of things like wheat gluten and soy beans can be used for the protein (hence making the "meat is good for protein" argument completely moot), coconut oil for the fatty taste and beetroot for the colouring, which can also make the 'meat' go brown when cooked.

I actually tried tofu katsu curry at Yo sushi and it tasted almost no different to chicken, in fact I checked the receipt several times if I ordered the right thing. It was really delicious. Lots of people seem to dislike tofu for being blank. However it seems that if you cook it the right way and add lots of great flavors, you have yourself something that tastes like meat... except it isn't. These vegan meats are also being sold at supermarkets like Tesco as well as existing on the menu of Burger King (unfortunately only in the US as of writing this), which I am very optimistic about. I'm sure you know deep down that you would love a beef burger far more than those cruddy vegan burgers.

Perhaps you could support this movement by buying more of these meat substitutes, rather than real meat.

Conclusion

Despite the fact that I still eat meat, I would eventually like to give it up in favour of having vegan alternatives. That way I can contribute much less to climate change and save loads of innocent animal lives. I would be healthier as well.

As I have said before, I'm a pretty fussy eater but I still try and eat other foods. It's not easy trying to make this switch, but I'm progressing. So if I can at least try this, why can't you?

That's all from me!

Announcing the release of "Arm Strong"

Hello there!

Today marks two things: The 2 year anniversary of this blog and the release of a game called "Arm Strong".

This game was made using the same framework as "Catwalk", making this the second game I've made in monogame. Unlike Catwalk, the levels were not created in a very primitive "scanning pixel image" but rather in my own custom-made editor called "PUPPET", which I briefly mentioned in my last post before this one. I might talk about this editor later on, and possibly release the source code later on.

Here is a screenshot of the game:

If you want to play the game go here.