[peoplefromibiza]

The thing some vegetarians do not understand is that traditional cuisine from all over the World is basically 90% vegetarian, because poor people had to survive too.

I'm Italian, I could eat vegetarian meals everyday for a month without ever eating the same thing twice.

Same goes for all of Europe, Asia, Middle East, Africa or South America.

Vegetable dishes are the foundation of every established culinary tradition.

There's absolutely no need for incredible|magical|impossible|whatever meat.

[valarauko]

> The thing some vegetarians do not understand is that traditional cuisine from all over the World is basically 90% vegetarian, because poor people had to survive too.

You're saying that vegetarians don't know this?

[peoplefromibiza]

> You're saying that vegetarians don't know this?

Arguably some don't.

Read again: some.

[valarauko]

Sure, some people of every ilk are likely to be uninformed about some aspect of the world or the other. How does that apply in the current context? Most meals for most people worldwide are essentially vegetarian, even if the people are not obligate vegetarians. Are there some vegetarians unfamiliar with the reality of practically all world cuisines? Sure - and? Impossible meats aren't directed towards these people, and they aren't looking to substitute the taste of a burger. They're likely not averse to it, for what it's worth.

[peoplefromibiza]

> Sure, some people of every ilk are likely to be uninformed about some aspect of the world or the other

I am absolutely not claiming that, I am absolutely claiming that beliefs based on feelings and not hard truths tend to reject rational arguments, hence their members are usually not the most curious people around and it's common they ignore things that are obvious to the rest of us.

Take a western vegetarian, we all know a few of them and some vegan too.

Most vegetarians/vegan inform themselves in vegetarian communities, which are based on the same western principles where they were born, mainly North America.

Most vegetarian communities are based on spurious correlations, like the fact that 80% of people from India are Hinduists, a religion that promotes a lacto-vegetarian diet letting people believe that 80% of Indians are vegetarians, which is obviously completely false.

Christianity promotes a mostly vegetarian diet too, there's a list of food that you should not consume on certain days, nobody follows those prescriptions anymore, they are thousands years old and come from the Jewish traditions.

But if I say that 30% of the World population is Christian, a religion that promotes a mostly vegetarian diet, things sound completely different.

Don't also forget that in vegetarian circles meat is the root cause of everything bad: from cancer[1] to diabetes[2], deforestation[3], being overweight [4], depression[5] and even infertility[6] (yes, you heard right!)

All these claims have been either debunked, highly exaggerated or correlated when there is no factual evidence. Yet they resist in the narrative of these communities, like the idea that Christ died on a cross and then came back to life 3 days later. It's false, we know it is, but people still believe it and there's nothing we can do about it.

It's easy to understand the stigma that these manipulatory lies can create around "traditional food", these people often think of themselves as revolutionary going against the status quo, so their enemy are their local traditions, not just the meat (everyone eats some meat around them, so it must be "the others their ways and they do not see it").

So they end up eating a lot of food that is not local nor traditional (tradition equals bad, remember?), such as tofu, that in Italy is totally not traditional nor commonly used, yet most vegetarians and vegans rely on it.

The reason why?

Vegetarianism in the west is a business, if you can sell the dirty cheap tofu at 5-10 euros/kg (that's the price in Italy) while poultry costs 3-5 euros/kg (raw, raised on the ground and antibiotic free) you can understand how convenient it is to sell people the idea that you need to eat tofu instead of pasta with tomato sauce (1-1.5 euros/kg), you are in for the big bucks.

Don't dismiss what I say just because you disagree, I've researched the topic a lot, this is just the tip of the iceberg.

> Most meals for most people worldwide are essentially vegetarian, even if the people are not obligate vegetarians

Sooner or later people in the west will understand that there are people among us priding themselves for not eating meat while our pets, for example cats, every year eat 10 times the meat an average central African person has to eat, suffering the horrendous consequences of malnutrition, like watching their children die of hunger or curable disease that their bodies weakened by the forced plant based diet hadn't the strength to fight, and we don't see a problem with that.

The irony is that those people are in developing countries, they are developing, they will eventually eat more meat, no way they will keep dying for a made up belief, for those who care about animal suffering I have an advice: renounce to pets. They eat too much meat, they kill too many animals, they are not sustainable.

[1] https://thetruthaboutcancer.com/cancer-causing-foods-2/

[2] https://www.peta.org/issues/animals-used-for-food/diabetes/

[3] https://thehumaneleague.org/article/meat-industry-deforestat...

[4] https://www.peta.org/issues/animals-used-for-food/obesity/

[5] https://psychcentral.com/depression/foods-that-cause-depress...

[6] https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/foods-to-avoid-when-try...

[valarauko]

I think you're conflating the median North American vegetarian with the median vegan. Your comment makes a lot more sense if I substitute "vegan" for wherever you've used "vegetarian". If you do indeed mean "vegetarian", then I think it makes much less sense in contemporary America, for example.

Yes, almost every vegan I've known is optimizing to minimize animal "cruelty", defined on their own ideological terms. Meanwhile, almost every vegetarian I've known is either one for religious reasons (and have their tradition's cultural cuisines to draw from) or simply don't like meat. I also know many Muslims who avoid meat at restaurants since it's not halal. I am struggling to recall any vegetarians that eat an average American diet by simply replacing meat with something like tofu.

If your intent is indeed to refer to vegetarians, I think that hasn't been the case in the US since perhaps the 90s. American vegetarianism really took off in the cultural context of the 60s and 70s, where Eastern ideas & sensibilities were imported but not the people or their cuisines. If a median American in the 70s wanted to maintain a meat free diet, their options were genuinely restricted. That's certainly not the case now, where the median American vegetarian is likely of recent immigrant descent, and has their heritage cuisine to inspire vegetarian meals. Changes to American immigration policy and the segment of countries where immigrants have come from have changed American vegetarianism. I also think something like Impossible burgers have very little appeal to the median vegetarian, since they're not interested in the taste of meat to begin with.

Yes, unlike the median American vegetarian, the median American vegan tends to appear spontaneously among families that are not themselves vegan. Unlike vegetarians, they don't have a rich family tradition to draw from, and plenty learn to just wing it. That said, I do think even this is likely not the case anymore. Today, in any big city, good vegan/vegetarian food is easy to find. As an illustrative example, I asked a relative who's lived in NYC for 40 years what his favorite restaurant meal has been (he absolutely loves steak). His favorite restaurant is a vegan Korean BBQ. Similarly, I've been informed by Mexicans of an amazing Mexican vegan place in Brooklyn.