this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2023
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Has anybody had the patience to investigate on the article and find out what is meant by "vegetarian equivalent"? I cannot believe that lentils or beans could be that expensive. Completely different picture for tofu, meat substitutes and the like.
Let's see getting the recommended dose of B12 implies three eggs or half a litre of milk a day, minimum what 60ct or such. Eggs should be preferred, more and better protein. Package frozen spinach, 80ct, potatoes until you're full let's say 500-1000g let's split the difference another 60ct.
Two Euros, not counting electricity or odds and ends (such as clarified butter to fry the potatoes (pro tip: ~1cm cubes, fry while steaming, then mash), salt, spices).
And that's if a) you're buying at Aldi in Germany, we have ridiculously low food prices and b) know WTF you're doing and c) have time and energy to do it. E.g. without a freezer you really shouldn't keep those spinach packages around. Also no matter how much I love spinach and eggs I wouldn't want to eat it every day.
Beans and rice are going to put you into malnutrition sooner or later, lack of micronutrients. The nice thing about meat is that you really won't have to care about that one.
If you never switch that up, yes. But fortunately there's a lot of other cheap plants you can use. So you can avoid most issues by simply switching it up once in a while. And thanks to a long history of improving the seeds soy now has a comparable biological value to eggs (and beasts most meats). Hence those will work well as a start.
If you're a woman or lose blood for other reasons, you'll likely want some iron supplements, but those can be avoided if you really want to.
B12 however is the one thing you need to take as a supplement if you try to live of plants. So I don't get why you use mention that. It's in any vegan-diet starter post and while it's theoretically possible to obtain enough on a vegetarian diet via milk, consuming that much dairy defeats the purpose of vegetarianism hence most take those pills as well.
Half a litre isn't really much: A glass with your muesli, a yoghurt for dessert, some sprinkles of cheese somewhere and it's covered. A litre of milk is about 100g of semi-hard cheese (think gouda), so three slices can get you over the target.
Cheese and eggs are the foundation of much how peasants not just survived, but survived well, over the last couple of millennia. And those dishes contain all kinds of nutritional details that you have to care about if you want to forego all fish and meat, e.g. Quark, linseed oil and potatoes for that Omega 3 kick if you're too poor to even have fish (salmon was poor man's food back in the days...)
That's a lot in terms of animal suffering and environmental damage. Cheese is worse for the climate than beef.
And given how peasants "survived", well they didn't do much more than that. There's a reason humans only regained their normal size recently. We were much healthier in the stone ages than as peasants. Milk really isn't particularly healthy and that's one of the reasons it's mostly a thing in European and a few populations. Half of the world is still lactose intolerant.
Basically: Milk had its purpose for a few millennia, but now it's time to ditch it again.
I get it you're vegan. Rest assured that I don't even buy non-organic milk, if only for the reason that it doesn't taste good when the cows only eat soy.
I'm not even going to start commenting on that. The 50s want their commercial propaganda back.
Half the world is not culturally and partly genetically descendent from a particular pastoral culture in what's now Ukraine. You can flip the whole thing around and ask why other cultures didn't spread as hard and fast as Indo-Europeans did (speaking of initial expansion, not modern-day colonial bullshit).
Also, half a litre is still within what non-lactose tolerant people can tolerate. It's pushing it, but possible. I mean most Italians are lactose intolerant and they still have their cappuccino. Then, lactose doesn't even begin to be an issue when it comes to even moderately ripened cheeses. India would completely collapse without milk as their version of vegetarian doesn't involve eggs.
If you want to get your B12 from other sources, be my guest. I literally don't care. If you want to argue against milk consumption for other reasons, also be my guest. All I wanted to do is how "vegetarian substitute for meat" can be interpreted in a European context that's on a budget. And it didn't even involve milk because eggs are more bang for the buck nutrition-wise.
I'm not vegan, more like vegetarian and flexitarian with dairy. I'm just trying to explain why (obviously in an orderly fashion, revolutions are expensive) milk from out diet would be a good idea. By now it's fairly clear that the plant based option have more advantages than disadvantages.. Milks isn't particularly bad, but it*s in the "controversial" category. I.e. the stuff one should only consume if one likes the taste, but not for health reasons.
Edit: With eggs the calculation is indeed quite different. They're less of a problem regarding the climate (if you use the water-free portion as a reference) and indeed helpful for protein.
Argh that again. No, saturated fats are not unhealthy. Trans fats, hardened fats, different issue but the saturated scare was an advertisement technique to push margarine at butter prices flanked by a campaign by the sugar industry demonising fat as a whole. The whole "science" behind it is "fire fighters found near conflagration thus fire departments cause fires" type logic. The actual epidemic of heart disease back then was due to people smoking like chimneys but how could you blame cigarettes doctors said they're healthy...
Is that based on those "tons of rain falls on cow pastures and cows drink and pee and we're counting all of that as water usage" numbers. Especially almonds have a much worse water problem, methane burps are an issue yes but can also be addressed by better animal feed and natural supplements, up to 90% reductions and it's not even expensive.
I tried to figure out what they meant by "vegetarian equivalent" but it's not clear from the article and the source link seems broken..