*quality

Boosting this quality contribution up in the Hot Listing - declared quality by littledragon_79.

starts off slow, but worth watching all the way through!

Grocery shopping has become too complicated lately it seems to me. Used to be not all that long ago that you just got what looked good at the big chain grocery store and then made the odd trip to specialist shops for particular things on occasion. Whole Foods does have some good stuff, but it's way too expensive to just buy everything there. Trader Joe's has decent quality and prices but very limited selection. The local hippy organic grocery store/coop is in a similar situation to Whole Foods but with different stuff, and then there is the still the big chain grocery store with good prices on things that don't really vary much in quality. Oh, and of course there are still the delis and butcher shops and whatever else for the particular things they do well. Also, they went and knocked down the Pick 'n' Save that was three blocks away and are building a Metro Mart, which in my experience is exactly the same thing but with fancier decor and higher prices.

I have like five different grocery lists now. So, the end result is that I actually have access to much higher quality food at not unreasonable prices and yet somehow I'm ending up eating frozen pizza a lot more than I used to when it was Pick and Save or nothing.

All those stupid, stupid food trends with all that 'good' advice about healthy eating. What I loathe the most are vegans who try to emulate meat products. That's the hight of stupidity. But...
there's money to be made.

Well that was out of left field.

But it's ok. We secretly hate you for what you eat too.

It's not an us vs. them or you against me thing. A Vegan diet is simply unnecessary and doesn't do anything good what a vegetarian diet can do as well. You're not healthier because you don't drink milk. You're not helping any animals because the vast, vast majority of mankind still prefers meat and that industry is still globalized, trying to produce as cheap as possible. All you do by going vegan is increasing the consumption of soybeans and almonds.
It's a silly restriction on what you eat that forces you to constantly emulate the very products you want to avoid with inferior and/or costlier products.
It's the same with that even more stupid food trend of gluten-free products. Don't have celiac disease? Fuck right off! If you don't have medical reasons (and there a few), that diet is as dumb as one the probibits you only from eating red gummibears.
The food and fitness business is full of dubious and downright wrong information and that leads to ridiculous, overpriced products like asparaguswater.

To claim that the collective non-consumption of 3%ish of the country is not taken into account in meat production is a pretty dim outlook of the intelligence of food executives. Of course one vegetarian doesn't make much difference. Neither does one vote or one person's taxes. If you're railing against incremental action, you'll have problems with a lot more than people's dietary choices.

On the other hand, the business about soy consumption is a baffling new argument circulating the internet. I say baffling, because it only takes about 15 seconds of hard thinking to debunk. (Hint: animals eat soy, you eat animals). Almonds, of course, are as optional for vegans as everyone else.

But all of this is a sideshow. The real point is that I make choices that do no one any harm and make me feel better. You on the other hand apparently go sifting through the internet for arguments against my lifestyle, fail to subject those arguments to even cursory critical thinking in your zeal, and parrot them on a video sharing community while proudly declaring your loathing for people like me.

I think this says a lot more about your relationship to eating animals than it does about mine.

OK, let's ignore the sideshow and get to the point. Yes, you make choices that do no harm and make you feel better unlike others (I'm looking at you, homeopathy). So did Kriss Kross but I still feel compelled to call wearing your pants backwards stupid. Your food trend isn't that much better.
I don't have to sift through the internet to know that. Do you like dessert?
I make a lot of dessert. A LOT! Even vegan. Vegan Vanillasauce. I have to replace milk and cream with soymilk and the eggyolks with some starch (usually corn, for the gluten-free asshats). The only original ingredients are sugar (healthy!) and vanillabean.
You see the problem?
I replace ingredients you object to to mimic a product you shouldn't want in the first place. All the fucking time. All the fucking time I see vegan recipes of dishes that normally contain eggs or milk or butter or even meatproducts. I know a cook who can make vegan Leberwurst. Go on, google 'Leberwurst' and explain to me how somebody who wants to eat that and be vegan isn't a tool.
I don't mind vegetarians at all. They have actually compelling reasons for that diet choice. I wouldn't make that choice ever but I can respect theirs and believe everybody should (a lot of people don't). I loose my respect for individual vegetarians the minute they start talking about Tofuschnitzel. You want Schnitzel? Maybe you should just go and have Schnitzel. You can still eat vegetarian the rest of the week. You're just 'mostly vegetarian' then. That's fine too.
Imagine a man who tells you all the time how he disapproves of the 'homosexual lifestyle' and thinks that kind of behaviour is immoral and wrong. Then that man goes home, tells his wife to get her strap-on and moans 'Channing!' repeatedly while she does him from behind.
That man is as much of a tool as the guy who walks in a restaurant and orders vegan creme brulee. Or any pie. Or pancakes. Or Lasagne. Or a milkshake. Or something with Cheese. Or with Honey. Or icecream. Sorbets are fine though. They're mostly fruit, sugar (healthy!) and water.
I don't hate you, I just call out the stupid thing you do. You want to improve the treatment of animals, make it more ethical? That's fine, I'm with you on that. I just don't see how not using butter can help.

If vegans are getting into arguments with you about whether their food is healthier than yours, well, maybe they're right, maybe they're wrong. I listen to my buddy extolling the benefits of his paleo diet. If he's quick about it, I don't see the harm, whether he's right or not. If he won't shut up about it, or tries to push it on me, he's being a jerk. It sounds like you might have met some vegans who are jerks. So have I.

I also don't think your final question was genuine. You've clearly thought about this long enough to see how avoiding animal products reduces the amount of mistreatment. If you don't think it's important, or you don't think it's worth it, that's fine. The population of dairy cows is large enough that the 1-2million vegans in this country certainly affects how many are bred and subjected to the treatment they receive.

But telling me I shouldn't want meat is just bizarre. It should be pretty clear by now that I'm a vegan because I object to needlessly killing or mistreating animals, and try to reduce that number. I'm not offended by eating meat, just what has to happen to get it on my plate. If Nike used child slave labor to make its shoes, and I didn't approve of child slave labor, would you criticize me for buying another brand of shoes because I "shouldn't want shoes?" Meat tastes great. I don't like killing animals. There is no contradiction between those two sentences.

It sounds like your issue is with the "tells you all the time" part of your analogy, and that's tricky. On the one hand, people who sermonize and try to vilify your decisions are being jerks. On the other hand, if a cause is important enough, it's clearly worth being a jerk. It's a sliding scale. Civil rights campaigners were moralizing jerks too, but in hindsight, we mostly feel they were justified. The inquisition, less so. Some animal activists feel they fall reasonably well on the scale.

There's a long history of people trying to make other lead moral lives. And there's a long history of people getting various degrees of pissed off about it. I would encourage you to tell individuals who actively annoy you to stuff it, and to just relax about the rest of us.

And if you want moralizers to leave you alone, I'd also encourage you not to call their moral choices "stupid" on the internet. Counter-intuitive, I know, but give it a try.