[nikatwork]

> The misleading marketing (trumpeting health benefits or - like our parent post - less animal cruelty)

If the product truly is free of animal products, then it is most certainly reducing animal cruelty compared with mass-farmed chicken egg mayo. Ethics aside, that is an objective fact.

[erikpukinskis]

> Ethics aside, that is an objective fact.

It's actually not an objective fact. Compare two scenarios:

10 acres of rainforest were clearcut to grow palm oil to make the mayo

1/2 acre of grassland in Iowa that was previously used for corn is allocated to raise pastured happy chickens, rotated with market heirloom grains. They are allowed to live out their natural life, and are fed even after they stop producing eggs.

Which of those scenarios has more animal cruelty? In one situation you are essentially committing genocide of an entire microecology, in the other you are giving some animals an incredible life, and eating part of their waste stream, eggs which are not necessary for their survival or happiness, and in fact are over-budgeted in their genetics to allow for predation.

Veganism is an OK heuristic for animal cruelty, but it's far from perfect. It's often better than nothing, but a vegan Whole Foods diet may well cause more animal harm than someone living near the poverty level in, say, Korea, eating some animal products, but also making much more efficient use of land. Vegans love to pretend land use doesn't matter, but land use = animal displacement.

Eating more plants can be a great way to reduce cruelty. But Vegan\ism\ as a hard rule is more about religious purity than it is about animal cruelty.

Signed,

Someone who ate entirely vegan today and most days

[kevb]

Just Mayo does not include palm oil

While it might be a fun thought experiment to find situations where a non-vegan dish includes less animal cruelty than a technically vegan dish, for 99.99% the people reading this and in 99.99% of the real world situations they ever be in, choosing the vegan dish will mean choosing significantly less animal cruelty.

A common pro-vegan argument is actually less land use for growing feed crops for raising livestock.

[erikpukinskis]

I never said Just Mayo includes palm oil.

And I'm not really impressed by your made up statistics. Again, if you actually cared about animals you would actually care about the numbers, and not just make up fake percentages to make your decisions seem better.

It's not hard to find vegan diets that destroy more habitat per calorie than many meat-based diets. Look at hunting for example, which is often a net positive for animal habitat.

[thieving_magpie]

Not to nitpick but how do you define animal cruelty? For instance, wouldn't increased farming lead to additional erosion and destruction of habitable land for many creatures? I've always heard that simply reducing the amount of animal products does not always correlate to an increase in benefits for wildlife. I'm asking this legitimately because I am ignorant about it.

[nikatwork]

Eggs in commercial products either come from free-range, barn, or cage chickens. The vast majority are from caged chickens, although this is slowly changing. Caged chickens are locked in a tiny cramped cage, sometimes strapped down with their beaks removed, and are usually pumped full of chemicals.

That's pretty fucked up, the only way this could not reasonably be considered cruelty is if you assert animals have no emotions and science seems to disagree with that notion. Free range is much better, the chooks can roam around in the open doing chicken stuff. I eat free range eggs.

Environmental damage from increased farming is only a major factor where specific habitats are being destroyed, eg Palm Oil in Indonesia. Even then, it's a lesser evil than directly harming individual creatures.

[dingaling]

The largest producer of mayo in the USA and UK, Hellman's, uses only free-range eggs