Updating towards many animals I eat being more similar to humans than I had previously thought, based mostly on this link from Why Eat Less Meat?. Still unsure what to do about it. Feeling guilty seems unproductive and so does rabid vegetarian advocacy.
Also, I conducted an informal poll on Facebook among my friends about how much they would have to be compensated for going vegetarian for a year, and I got answers generally hovering around $3,000 (I included instructions not to look at other people’s answers first, although I don’t know how well they were followed), although one respondent seriously answered $20,000. At the very least this reflects a general impression that vegetarianism is very inconvenient / unpleasant which could be the target of effective animal altruists. Although...
I can’t answer this question without knowing what the scenario where I don’t cough up the requisite amount looks like. (I have this problem with a lot of “how much would you pay” questions.) Even I assume for the sake of argument that I am in a position where I have to part with money to continue not eating meat, that doesn’t tell me who has me in this situation or what they’re going to do about it. Force-feeding, legal consequences, health consequences, social consequences, if I don’t eat some minimum amount of meat? Meat will be teleported into my stomach on a routine basis without my intervention should I fail to make quota? How much is that minimum?
This is a difficult question. By analogy, should rich cannibals or human child abusers be legally permitted to indulge their pleasures if they offset the harm they cause with sufficiently large charitable donations to orphanages or children’s charities elsewhere? On (indirect) utilitarian grounds if nothing else, we would all(?) favour an absolute legal prohibition on cannibalism and human child abuse. This analogy breaks down if the neuroscientfic evidence suggesting that pigs, for example, are at least as sentient as prelinguistic human toddlers turns out to be mistaken. I’m deeply pessimistic this is the case.
I wasn’t speaking at all about “moral offsets”. I was attempting to counter Qiaochu_Yuan’s point that a high value put on eating meat by meat eaters indicates that being vegetarian is difficult.
I want to answer about $3000, but I am pretty sure that’s almost entirely because of priming. I think the honest answer is that I’m not sure I’m capable of eating meat anymore. Emotionally, I find it disgusting and repulsive. I almost certainly don’t have the enzymes to digest meat anymore, as I’ve been a vegetarian for over two years. The resulting combination is… gastrically unpleasant.
Wow at first I couldn’t understand at all how someone would claim that much money just for not being vegetarian. I think there’s two important biases here though.
“Willingness to pay vs. willingness to accept”. This should decrease your actual figures a lot. For example consumers will ask much more money to accept a bad pixel on their computer screen than they would pay to have it repaired. “Willingness to accept” is not really interesting to economists. Basically ask how much they would pay to eat meat for a year if they had a vegetarian diet by default to get around this.
Maybe not a bias, but as others said here, vastly underestimating the inconvenience of being vegetarian. It’s really not that much of a hassle. Add to that the lower cost and health benefits and the environmental benefits if you care about those and being vegetarian seems like a win-win.
One more thing I’d like to add is that only after turning vegetarian I was first able to understand how severely I had been biased toward neglecting suffering in other species. Speciesist bias you could say. While still eating meat I was simply not able to care about animal suffering enough.
Another effect related to 2 is that many people probably think they can’t find vegetarian dishes that taste as good as their preferred meat dishes. (I mean, I also think this. I don’t currently know of any good substitutes for my preferred meat dishes.)
One more thing I’d like to add is that only after turning vegetarian I was first able to understand how severely I had been biased toward neglecting suffering in other species.
As long as we’re talking in terms of biases, this could itself be regarded as a bias, namely a consistency effect.
Still unsure what to do about it. Feeling guilty seems unproductive and so does rabid vegetarian advocacy.
You could try to eat fewer animal products (which doesn’t require rabid advocacy), especially chicken, eggs, and fish; or you could donate to effective animal charities. I agree that “rabid vegetarian advocacy” is probably ineffective.
I agree that aiming to eat less meat rather than none is a worthy goal for many reasons, I just want to add (anecdotally) from the perspective of someone who was a strict veg for 10 years and recently started eating some meat again, that you have to be very strict and planned if you want it to be effective. During the decade I didn’t eat meat I didn’t think about it or miss it because in my mind it wasn’t an option. Now that I have the goal of just eating small amounts of it, it’s much more mentally taxing to actually make the decision at each meal as to whether I should or shouldn’t eat meat this particular meal.
So my, again anecdotal, advice if someone is to try and reduce meat consumption but not eliminate it: be extremely strict about how you’re going to do it, as in say you will only eat meat on weekends for example, or one meal a day, so that you don’t have to consider at each meal whether it’s appropriate or not, which I find draining on willpower.
Not sure that’s a good way of asking. The pain of being veg seems to be inversely correlated with knowing reasons for going veg, and there’s a lot of loss aversion. I got anecdotal evidence from quite a few people telling me that going and staying veg is actually much easier than they anticipated. (It’s important to take the time to learn about health effects, look at meat alternatives and find veggie restaurants).
Reversal test: Imagine you’re vegetarian and earn $3000 more than you currently do. Would you pay $3000 a year ($8 a day) to eat meat again?
I got anecdotal evidence from quite a few people telling me that going and staying veg is actually much easier than they anticipated.
I would expect this, but my point is that if non-vegetarians have inaccurate impressions about how hard it is to go vegetarian then that could be a useful misconception to clear up.
You should read the results of the first study you posted more carefully:
Cohort studies of vegetarians have shown a moderate reduction in mortality from IHD but little difference in other major causes of death or all-cause mortality in comparison with health-conscious non-vegetarians from the same population.
The other links don’t contradict this study, and only look at deaths from specific causes, and not general mortality.
You should read the results of the first study you posted more carefully:
Good point, thanks. My statement is not exactly wrong, but I should have written “healthier than average diets”.
The other links don’t contradict this study and only look at deaths from specific causes, and not general mortality.
That’s quite wrong, examples:
Key 1999:
Total mortality and longevity also differed according to vegetarian status in California Seventh-day Adventists. After adjusting for age and sex, Seventh-day Adventist vegetarians had a relative risk for total mortality of 0.80 (95% CI: 0.74, 0.87) compared with those who ate any meat products. Using a multivariate, multiple-decrement-lifetable approach (19), we showed that vegetarian Seventh-day Adventist women live 2.52 y longer than their nonvegetarian (meat ≥ 1 time/wk) counterparts (P < 0.001), and a similar comparison in men showed a 3.21-y difference in longevity (P < 0.001).
McEvoy 2011 (review):
Overall, vegetarians tend to be slimmer, appear to be in better health, with reduced risk of chronic diseases and greater longevity when compared with omnivores
In that analysis, no significant differences were observed for stroke mortality or overall mortality between vegetarians and non-vegetarians(12).
(...) but no significant differences were observed for overall mortality rates between vegetarians and omnivores in these cohorts. One possible explanation may be that overall mortality was low in the cohort populations compared with the general Western population.
I deliberately only quoted very conservative and reliable sources, and although the effects are not really large, they are statistically significant and positive.
Sorry, I meant in regard to the “compared to health-conscious non vegetarians” part.
The fact that vegetarians tend to be more concerned about eating well is a huge factor that almost every “vegetarian diets are healthier!” study I’ve seen ignores. The first one you posted is the only one that tries to control for that, and they ended up with seeing no significant difference.
$1000 seems pretty high/optimistic to me. Sometimes vegetarian meals are more expensive due to lack of options. Also, preparing veggie food usually takes more time. As a result (after having improved my cooking / food preparing speed) I still get a small monetary benefit though, maybe $500 a year.
Can’t you get almost all of that cost reduction without becoming fully vegetarian? For that matter, could one get some portion of almost all of the befits of being completely vegetarian by becoming a part-time vegetarian?
If the part-time vegetarian still eats significant amounts of meat and eggs, then yes, there will also be a significant ethical difference.
If you’re just interested in cutting down the cost of your diet, you also might switch to different products such as cage eggs. The cheapest production often is also the most cruel. But I assume that’s not what you meant (and it’s not what I meant either).
Yeah, I meant e.g. adopting a vegetarian diet for three days a week and an unchanged diet for the other four; it would seem to offer 3⁄7 of the benefits of being fully vegetarian.
Okay, now I see what you meant. I assumed that since you’d optimize for financial benefit you want to start with a reduction of the most expensive meat options and thus get more than 3⁄7 of the financial benefit when adopting it three days a week.
If I wanted to optimize for financial benefit, I’d be completely agnostic about eating meat, and I suspect I might end up eating mostly oils for calories but buy bulk grains to grow vitamin-rich yeasts.
Is this still true after accounting for nutritional and health changes necessary to get a vegetarian diet with the same quality as an omnivorous diet? I could cut out all meat, and just replace it with more of the vegetarian things I typically eat, but I would get less protein, and healthy fats, creatine, etc… which I would have to compensate for.
Protein deficiency is very rare even among long-term vegans and it’s pretty hard to miss out on essential amino acids. As for “healthy fats, creatine, etc...”, those can be easily supplemented, which is particularly important for vegans. Also note that meat eaters usually don’t get enough healthy fats either.
Vegetarians have higher life expectancies (1-9 years), as also stated here.
Most vegetarians probably get the majority of their protein from nuts, beans, and grains, which tend to be a lot cheaper than meat. The same goes for fats, etc.
Having been spending $900/year to eat an omnivorous diet, you’d have to be eating a huge amount of meat to save $1K/year by going veg. Something like eating 16oz steak every day.
Having been spending $900/year to eat an omnivorous diet, you’d have to be eating a huge amount of meat to save $1K/year by going veg.
I spend roughly four times that, eating an omnivorous diet which, as it happens, does not include any large slabs of meat, and I’m curious to know where the difference lies. If you were specifically working to economise on food outlay, then it would not be a surprise to you that people not trying to economise have room to cut down by $1000 a year. But if you are not, how does your cost come in at less than $3 a day?
I’m in the UK, where food is more expensive than the US, but not four times more expensive, and while I generally shop at the better supermarkets rather than the cheap ones, I have no inclination towards “luxury” goods, and rarely eat out.
If you were specifically working to economise on food outlay
I was.
The surprising thing to me was not that people would spend more than $1K on food per year, but that the projected savings by eliminating meat would be $1K.
I was generally under the impression that eating on less than $3/day was not particularly typical beyond poverty. I expected roughly $100/month for food, $200 if you indulge in anything like eating out/etc, if you were trying to save money.
A quick search pops up $~150/week as the average American food bill (four times what I came up with), and I found this page which gets more detailed.
What I take away from this is that most people probably could benefit financially from reducing meat intake, and most people seem to be spending more on food than is strictly necessary in general, at least in the US.
ETA: Unclear if we’re talking about specific people or general groups. The $3000 for avoiding meat in Qiaochu_Yuan’s informal survey tells me people value eating habits that come with lots of ridiculous drawbacks a bit more than I thought (and I previously thought people’s values regarding eating were kinda screwy).
under the impression that eating on less than $3/day was not particularly typical beyond poverty
You’re right that no one else I surveyed was spending that little, so it is unusual. I was just surprised to see expected savings larger than what I’m used to spending.
Your link says that “typical family of four in the United States making the median household income would have to double its food expenditures in order to eat what USDA nutritionists consider a healthy diet” but bases that claim on the cost estimates from the Thrifty Food plan. The problem is that these estimates come from a ridiculously limited optimization process where they group food into about 60 categories (“whole fruits”, “orange vegetables”, “whole grain cereals”), then assign costs and nutrition information assuming that people are eating from the category in the proportion people do on average. So if the “whole fruits” people tend to eat are 40% apples, 35% oranges, and 25% bananas, then the cost will be a weighted average of those three. Once they’ve assigned costs and nutrition, they run some optimization to figure out how cheaply one can get the needed nutrients. The problem with this is that they can’t say “eat bananas to get more potassium” because the only knob their optimization thing can tweak is the “whole fruits” one. This means that if a category is not homogeneous in terms of either nutrition or cost, they’ll not be able to optimize well.
I can definitely believe going veg would save $1K off of $6K, but I have trouble imagining how you could spend that much without eating out for most of your meals.
Updating towards many animals I eat being more similar to humans than I had previously thought, based mostly on this link from Why Eat Less Meat?. Still unsure what to do about it. Feeling guilty seems unproductive and so does rabid vegetarian advocacy.
Also, I conducted an informal poll on Facebook among my friends about how much they would have to be compensated for going vegetarian for a year, and I got answers generally hovering around $3,000 (I included instructions not to look at other people’s answers first, although I don’t know how well they were followed), although one respondent seriously answered $20,000. At the very least this reflects a general impression that vegetarianism is very inconvenient / unpleasant which could be the target of effective animal altruists. Although...
Another interesting question is to ask current vegetarians how much they would pay to stay vegetarian.
I can’t answer this question without knowing what the scenario where I don’t cough up the requisite amount looks like. (I have this problem with a lot of “how much would you pay” questions.) Even I assume for the sake of argument that I am in a position where I have to part with money to continue not eating meat, that doesn’t tell me who has me in this situation or what they’re going to do about it. Force-feeding, legal consequences, health consequences, social consequences, if I don’t eat some minimum amount of meat? Meat will be teleported into my stomach on a routine basis without my intervention should I fail to make quota? How much is that minimum?
This is a difficult question. By analogy, should rich cannibals or human child abusers be legally permitted to indulge their pleasures if they offset the harm they cause with sufficiently large charitable donations to orphanages or children’s charities elsewhere? On (indirect) utilitarian grounds if nothing else, we would all(?) favour an absolute legal prohibition on cannibalism and human child abuse. This analogy breaks down if the neuroscientfic evidence suggesting that pigs, for example, are at least as sentient as prelinguistic human toddlers turns out to be mistaken. I’m deeply pessimistic this is the case.
I wasn’t speaking at all about “moral offsets”. I was attempting to counter Qiaochu_Yuan’s point that a high value put on eating meat by meat eaters indicates that being vegetarian is difficult.
I want to answer about $3000, but I am pretty sure that’s almost entirely because of priming. I think the honest answer is that I’m not sure I’m capable of eating meat anymore. Emotionally, I find it disgusting and repulsive. I almost certainly don’t have the enzymes to digest meat anymore, as I’ve been a vegetarian for over two years. The resulting combination is… gastrically unpleasant.
Wow at first I couldn’t understand at all how someone would claim that much money just for not being vegetarian. I think there’s two important biases here though.
“Willingness to pay vs. willingness to accept”. This should decrease your actual figures a lot. For example consumers will ask much more money to accept a bad pixel on their computer screen than they would pay to have it repaired. “Willingness to accept” is not really interesting to economists. Basically ask how much they would pay to eat meat for a year if they had a vegetarian diet by default to get around this.
Maybe not a bias, but as others said here, vastly underestimating the inconvenience of being vegetarian. It’s really not that much of a hassle. Add to that the lower cost and health benefits and the environmental benefits if you care about those and being vegetarian seems like a win-win.
One more thing I’d like to add is that only after turning vegetarian I was first able to understand how severely I had been biased toward neglecting suffering in other species. Speciesist bias you could say. While still eating meat I was simply not able to care about animal suffering enough.
Another effect related to 2 is that many people probably think they can’t find vegetarian dishes that taste as good as their preferred meat dishes. (I mean, I also think this. I don’t currently know of any good substitutes for my preferred meat dishes.)
As long as we’re talking in terms of biases, this could itself be regarded as a bias, namely a consistency effect.
You could try to eat fewer animal products (which doesn’t require rabid advocacy), especially chicken, eggs, and fish; or you could donate to effective animal charities. I agree that “rabid vegetarian advocacy” is probably ineffective.
I agree that aiming to eat less meat rather than none is a worthy goal for many reasons, I just want to add (anecdotally) from the perspective of someone who was a strict veg for 10 years and recently started eating some meat again, that you have to be very strict and planned if you want it to be effective. During the decade I didn’t eat meat I didn’t think about it or miss it because in my mind it wasn’t an option. Now that I have the goal of just eating small amounts of it, it’s much more mentally taxing to actually make the decision at each meal as to whether I should or shouldn’t eat meat this particular meal.
So my, again anecdotal, advice if someone is to try and reduce meat consumption but not eliminate it: be extremely strict about how you’re going to do it, as in say you will only eat meat on weekends for example, or one meal a day, so that you don’t have to consider at each meal whether it’s appropriate or not, which I find draining on willpower.
When I read this as “updating towards many-worlds”, I have probably spent too much time on LW.
Not sure that’s a good way of asking. The pain of being veg seems to be inversely correlated with knowing reasons for going veg, and there’s a lot of loss aversion. I got anecdotal evidence from quite a few people telling me that going and staying veg is actually much easier than they anticipated. (It’s important to take the time to learn about health effects, look at meat alternatives and find veggie restaurants). Reversal test: Imagine you’re vegetarian and earn $3000 more than you currently do. Would you pay $3000 a year ($8 a day) to eat meat again?
It’s not only more ethical but also healthier to be veg.
It makes me happy to see you and others taking action due to Peter’s post.
EDIT: Concerning the “although”, I recommend to also read Brian’s comment.
I would expect this, but my point is that if non-vegetarians have inaccurate impressions about how hard it is to go vegetarian then that could be a useful misconception to clear up.
Agreed. Do you have an idea how to go about this?
You should read the results of the first study you posted more carefully:
The other links don’t contradict this study, and only look at deaths from specific causes, and not general mortality.
Good point, thanks. My statement is not exactly wrong, but I should have written “healthier than average diets”.
That’s quite wrong, examples:
Key 1999:
McEvoy 2011 (review):
I deliberately only quoted very conservative and reliable sources, and although the effects are not really large, they are statistically significant and positive.
Sorry, I meant in regard to the “compared to health-conscious non vegetarians” part.
The fact that vegetarians tend to be more concerned about eating well is a huge factor that almost every “vegetarian diets are healthier!” study I’ve seen ignores. The first one you posted is the only one that tries to control for that, and they ended up with seeing no significant difference.
Vegetarian diets are cheaper, you’d get about $1000 just from that, no other considerations involved.
$1000 seems pretty high/optimistic to me. Sometimes vegetarian meals are more expensive due to lack of options. Also, preparing veggie food usually takes more time. As a result (after having improved my cooking / food preparing speed) I still get a small monetary benefit though, maybe $500 a year.
Can’t you get almost all of that cost reduction without becoming fully vegetarian? For that matter, could one get some portion of almost all of the befits of being completely vegetarian by becoming a part-time vegetarian?
Yes. Being a part-time vegetarian is a good choice.
Yes, except the benefit of not hurting sentient beings, I’d say. And probably except the benefit of not being biased towards hurting animals.
Is the benefit of not hurting sentient beings at all significantly different from the benefit of not hurting sentient beings as much?
Treat me as though I don’t understand the moral value in not hurting animals...
If the part-time vegetarian still eats significant amounts of meat and eggs, then yes, there will also be a significant ethical difference.
If you’re just interested in cutting down the cost of your diet, you also might switch to different products such as cage eggs. The cheapest production often is also the most cruel. But I assume that’s not what you meant (and it’s not what I meant either).
Yeah, I meant e.g. adopting a vegetarian diet for three days a week and an unchanged diet for the other four; it would seem to offer 3⁄7 of the benefits of being fully vegetarian.
Okay, now I see what you meant. I assumed that since you’d optimize for financial benefit you want to start with a reduction of the most expensive meat options and thus get more than 3⁄7 of the financial benefit when adopting it three days a week.
If I wanted to optimize for financial benefit, I’d be completely agnostic about eating meat, and I suspect I might end up eating mostly oils for calories but buy bulk grains to grow vitamin-rich yeasts.
Is this still true after accounting for nutritional and health changes necessary to get a vegetarian diet with the same quality as an omnivorous diet? I could cut out all meat, and just replace it with more of the vegetarian things I typically eat, but I would get less protein, and healthy fats, creatine, etc… which I would have to compensate for.
Protein deficiency is very rare even among long-term vegans and it’s pretty hard to miss out on essential amino acids. As for “healthy fats, creatine, etc...”, those can be easily supplemented, which is particularly important for vegans. Also note that meat eaters usually don’t get enough healthy fats either.
Vegetarians have higher life expectancies (1-9 years), as also stated here.
Most vegetarians probably get the majority of their protein from nuts, beans, and grains, which tend to be a lot cheaper than meat. The same goes for fats, etc.
Having been spending $900/year to eat an omnivorous diet, you’d have to be eating a huge amount of meat to save $1K/year by going veg. Something like eating 16oz steak every day.
I spend roughly four times that, eating an omnivorous diet which, as it happens, does not include any large slabs of meat, and I’m curious to know where the difference lies. If you were specifically working to economise on food outlay, then it would not be a surprise to you that people not trying to economise have room to cut down by $1000 a year. But if you are not, how does your cost come in at less than $3 a day?
I’m in the UK, where food is more expensive than the US, but not four times more expensive, and while I generally shop at the better supermarkets rather than the cheap ones, I have no inclination towards “luxury” goods, and rarely eat out.
I was.
The surprising thing to me was not that people would spend more than $1K on food per year, but that the projected savings by eliminating meat would be $1K.
I was generally under the impression that eating on less than $3/day was not particularly typical beyond poverty. I expected roughly $100/month for food, $200 if you indulge in anything like eating out/etc, if you were trying to save money.
A quick search pops up $~150/week as the average American food bill (four times what I came up with), and I found this page which gets more detailed.
What I take away from this is that most people probably could benefit financially from reducing meat intake, and most people seem to be spending more on food than is strictly necessary in general, at least in the US.
ETA: Unclear if we’re talking about specific people or general groups. The $3000 for avoiding meat in Qiaochu_Yuan’s informal survey tells me people value eating habits that come with lots of ridiculous drawbacks a bit more than I thought (and I previously thought people’s values regarding eating were kinda screwy).
You’re right that no one else I surveyed was spending that little, so it is unusual. I was just surprised to see expected savings larger than what I’m used to spending.
Your link says that “typical family of four in the United States making the median household income would have to double its food expenditures in order to eat what USDA nutritionists consider a healthy diet” but bases that claim on the cost estimates from the Thrifty Food plan. The problem is that these estimates come from a ridiculously limited optimization process where they group food into about 60 categories (“whole fruits”, “orange vegetables”, “whole grain cereals”), then assign costs and nutrition information assuming that people are eating from the category in the proportion people do on average. So if the “whole fruits” people tend to eat are 40% apples, 35% oranges, and 25% bananas, then the cost will be a weighted average of those three. Once they’ve assigned costs and nutrition, they run some optimization to figure out how cheaply one can get the needed nutrients. The problem with this is that they can’t say “eat bananas to get more potassium” because the only knob their optimization thing can tweak is the “whole fruits” one. This means that if a category is not homogeneous in terms of either nutrition or cost, they’ll not be able to optimize well.
I think most people spend much more than that on food. The internet seems to think it’s about $6000 a year.
I can definitely believe going veg would save $1K off of $6K, but I have trouble imagining how you could spend that much without eating out for most of your meals.
I guess it involves buying more stuff than you’ll be able to eat before it goes bad, and hence having to throw lots of stuff away.