> I honestly do not understand why if you desire and need “meat” enough to opt for a highly processed inferior meat analog, why you don’t just eat the real thing.
Many people would like to eat meat without the environmental impact/killing animals. What is hard to understand about that?
Giving up food, a cultural and often deep identity-level cornerstone, is hard even when they conflict with your ethics.
Eating fake meat because you disagree with animal slaughter but enjoy the taste is still consistent.
Anyways I don’t think these are the people who deserve our scrutiny. They are more consistent than those of us who are onboard with vegan ethics but still can’t stop eating meat, which is me most weeks of the year unfortunately.
I think we need to be more careful about fake meat.
It is likely to be very processed food and who knows what the nutritional consequences of something invented last year are for your body.
I agree with the ethics of not causing suffering to animals.
People in the future will very probably despise us for how we treat animals.
"Doing X gives me pleasure, it requires doing Y which causes suffering to entities that are not myself. I will avoid doing X and instead do X' which minimizes suffering in the world, even if it's not as good for me"
It’s not hard to follow, it’s just strange to me on a couple of levels:
Approaching from a non-vegan morality perspective, but vegan for health, I don’t understand why you would opt for something so highly processed instead of having something whole and unprocessed.
From a vegan for morality sake…it’s like Westworld, but the food equivalent.
It is not like Westworld because the pleasure is not in killing / perceiving suffering in others. It’s just in eating (which for most people raised in cities is completely disconnected from the animal suffering).
> Let me be clear: eating something that tastes like meat is not "outside" of my moral code. Causing animals to suffer is.
No offense, but I don’t recall accusing you specifically of anything. I was speaking conceptually and expressing my opinion. Eat how you want and what you want for whatever reason you want. You may be completely perplexed by my choice of diet as I am by a vegan who eats fake meat. For what it’s worth, I eat strict keto, nearly 90% carnivore, and I have zero qualms about killing and eating animals and don’t care if people find that offensive, perplexing, bad for the environment, or whatever. I may find the vegan diet an odd choice, but I’d never work against it.
> I have no idea what are “moral consequences”
Meaning “guilt”
Since you seem to understand why people might want fake meat, it seems you are really just taking a judgmental position in which you condemn others for not going far enough along an axis in which you don't even take one step.
Humans aren't robots. We can't just align every level of our stimulus response around a single goal. Lots of studies have been done on how complicated the relationship between conscious motivation and eating is, and for the most part have come down on the side of "we have very little control over our base desires when it comes to food."
Many people would like to eat meat without the environmental impact/killing animals. What is hard to understand about that?