[callmetom]

> I suspect most people buying these products don't care much about how they're seen when buying these products.

You suspect wrong, and you demonstrated why. How do you know that someone is a vegetarian? They'll tell you almost immediately, either explicitly or by bring up vegetarian adjacent issues. These products facilitate that.

> I personally can't stomach the idea of eating an animal...

So you know better than basically everyone who lived and died since forever? Before you launch into the talking point wherein humans evolve beyond needing to eat other animals, can you think of another fundamental part of the human experience that we evolved out of in the last several thousand years? Probably not, which makes this kind of wishful thinking unlikely to work out well. This reminds me of that Australian kid who was so deranged by environmentalist fearmongering, specifically that we were going to run out of drinking water, that he died from dehydration.

[steve_adams_86]

My choice isn’t about health or evolution or talking points. It just doesn’t feel good to me. I’m comfortable with being empirically wrong, and I actually held off from making the transition because I thought it made no sense to stop eating meat. I liked hunting and spear fishing. I stopped caring if it made sense or not at some point though because it simply didn’t feel good anymore.

I don’t know better than anyone. I do know that I buy plant based meats occasionally because I don’t want to eat real meat — not because I want anyone to see me buying it. Come to think of it, I sincerely doubt anyone gives any shits what’s in my shopping cart. If anything they’d think I’m an idiot for buying pink plant slime for ridiculous prices.

Ironically I think people who don’t eat animals actually don’t like telling people (certainly not in person, though on the internet on a site like HN it can lead to interesting conversations), because people such as yourself make it into something it isn’t. I avoid mentioning it and when it does come up, people seem to think they’re entitled to an explanation of a) why I’d do that and b) how I avoid being super unhealthy.

Sometimes it’s a fairly benign, uninteresting facet of one’s life and there’s no reason to conflate it with a superiority complex or knowing better than “basically everyone who lived and died since forever”.

I drive a large SUV. If I was trying to virtue signal I should probably start there.