Upvote for Tom Waits.

https://videosift.com/video/Free-The-Glutens-Tom-Waits-Interview-2015-Letterman

"We love the low carb Julian Bakery bread"

There's your problem right there. Bread shouldn't be low carb. Bread IS carbs (and gluten too). If you want to cut back on the carbs, stop eating bread!

Same goes for butter.

Don't eat a crap version of the real thing, just eat proper bread and maybe less of it.

Did he die in a movie?

COOL! Tom Waits too!
https://videosift.com/video/Free-The-Glutens-Tom-Waits-Interview-2015-Letterman

Not so much non-vegans, but companies that sell non vegan products are viewing it as a loss of revenue. Even a 7% drop in sales is a lot of money on a country sized scale. They're constantly putting industry sponsored spokes people on talk TV to tell you that being vegan will make your dick fly off like gluten :-)

Particularly primary agriculture industries. Companies further up the consumer chain just end up selling a vegan line of their product, so they aren't so worried about it - which is also why I'm more inclined to believe that the figure is closer to 7%, as I'm seeing even mainstream companies sell non-dairy variants of their flagship ice cream, and large pizza chains with vegan pizzas on their menus. I'd imagine it wouldn't be worth their while unless they had some good numbers to go by, and would otherwise leave it to niche companies.

But it could also just be that they've discovered that vegans will basically do their brand promotions for free over social media, and could just be exploiting that. (Every time a company releases a vegan version of X, a Facebook storm ensues, and companies like free advertising)

I too have adopted some glutens into my house.

Frei Die Gluten

I'm starting a social media campaign to hurt the airline financially because they didn't provide a gluten-free organic lactose-free vegan low-fat meal option for my service rhino. And then I overheard two flight attendants sounding annoyed with my demands so I published the home phone number of the airline CEO. Fucking attention-whores.

Ever read Stephen King's book "The Cell", where people's brains are damaged by cell phones? Look for it in the non-fiction section.

For about 10 years now i've had severe stomach problems, to the point of sometimes being all but housebound. At some point in my attempts to try and find some resolution, i came across the idea of a gut flora transplant.

I never did it because you've got to find someone healthy with a great diet and i suppose bowel regularity, which is difficult in itself because those people are rare and the subject is embarrassing.

But if you're crippled with stomach aches, woken up 7 times a night going to the toilet (and then not even doing anything), then putting someone else's shit into your own bum is nothing. As Terry Pratchett once said about Alzheimer's - it's a desperate situation, and he'd eat the rotting arsehole out of a dead mole if it meant a fighting chance.

For anyone interested, i stopped eating gluten for a while and had minor improvement. When i ate gluten, i'd get feverish and flu-like, joint pain, headaches, sweats and excruciating stomach pain. I figured it was coeliac disease and hoped i would fully recover before long. I didn't, but 2 weeks ago i also cut potato (nightshade vegetable) from my diet and i have been stomach ache free since (that is, 75%+ of the time my stomach feels painless). Apparently lectins are problematic.

If anyone has ever had severe pain for a very long time, they'll know the utter relief and joy of being pain free. It's hard to describe, but for a few days to a week, it's a euphoric feeling.

Yeah. Every Liberal I know uses only locally sourced, organic, gluten free, hand crafted, artisanal firewood.

http://videosift.com/video/Smoke-Flame-Makers-of-Artisanal-Firewood

By the way, if you really care about what's in your food - i mean really care - then you would have independently confirmed for yourself.

I don't get that angry when someone feeds me gluten which puts me in hell for a week. Especially if my mum or dad had just gone out of their way to get something special for me. If i had video of myself behaving like this I would be utterly ashamed and embarrassed, it would probably change me for life.

Just in case you thought that eating gluten free and vegan might be limited or boring http://www.peta.org/living/food/gluten-free-vegan-recipes/

20 examples, but of course you're only limited by what you can find on google

@transmorpher

It's a little difficult to 'debate' your comment, because the points that you address to me are numbered but don't reference to specific parts of my post. That's probably my fault as i was releasing frustration haphazardly and sarcastically, and that sarcasm wasn't aimed at you. All i can do is try and sum up whether i think we agree or disagree overall.

Essentially everything is a question of 'taste', even for you. There's no escaping our nature, most of us don't drink our own piss, many of us won't swallow our own blood, almost all of us have a flavour that we can't abide because we were fed it as a child. So yes, our decisions are defined by taste. But taste is decided by the food that is available to people, within reasonable distance of their house, at a price they find affordable according to the society around them, from a range of food that is decided by society around them. Your average person does not have the luxury to walk around a high street supermarket selecting the most humane and delicious foods. People get what they can afford, what they understand, what they can prepare and what is available. Our ancestors ate chicken because of necessity of their own kind, their children are exposed to chicken through no fault of their own, fast forward a few generations, and thus chicken becomes an affordable, accessible staple. Can we reach a compromise here? It may not be necessary for chickens to die to feed the human race, but it may be necessary for some people to eat chicken today because of their particular life.

I don't like the use of the phrase 'if i can do it, i know anyone can'. I think it's a mistake to deal in certainties, especially pertaining to lifestyles that you can't possibly know about without having lived them. Are you one of the many homeless people accepting chicken soup from a stranger because it's nourishing, cheap and easy for a stranger to buy, and keeps you warm on the streets? Are you a single mother with coeliac disease, a grumpy teenager and picky toddler who has 20 minutes to get to the supermarket and get something cooking? Or one of the millions using foodbanks in the UK (to our shame) now? I don't think you're willfully turning a blind eye to those people, i'm not tugging heart strings to do you a disservice. Maybe you're just fortunate you not only have the choice, but you have such choice that you can't imagine a life without it. I won't budge an inch on this one, you can't know what people have to do, and we have to accept life is not ideal.

And within that idealism and choice problem we can include illnesses that once again in IDEAL situations could survive without dead animals, nevertheless find it necessary to eat what they can identify and feel safe with.

Yes, those damn gluten hipsters drive me round the bend but only because they make people think that a LITTLE gluten is ok, it makes people take the problem less seriously (see Tumblr feminism... JOKE).

I agree that we must look at what action we can take now - and that is why i keep reminding you that we are not in an ideal world. If the veganism argument is to succeed then you must suggest a reasonable pathway to go from how we are now to whatever situation you would prefer. My "ideal farm" description was just me demonstrating the problem - that you need to show us your blueprint for how we start again without killing animals and feeding everyone we have.

And on that subject, your suggestions need to be backed by real research, otherwise you don't have any real plan. "It's fair to say there is very little risk" is a nice bit of illustrative language but it is not backed by any fact or figure and so i'm compelled to do my Penn and Teller impression and call bullshit. As of right now, the life expectancy of humans is better than it has ever been. It is up to you to prove that changing the diet of 7 billion people will result in neutrality or improvement of health and longevity. That proof must come in the form of large statistical analyses and thorough science. I don't want to sound like i'm being a dick, but any time you state something like that as a fact or with certainty, it needs to be backed up by something. I'm not nit picking and asking for common knowledge to have a citation, but things like this do:

-- 70% of farmland claim
-- 'fair to say very little risk' claim
-- meat gives you cancer claim - i accept it may have a carcinogenic effect but i'll remind you so does breathing, joss-sticks, broccoli, apples and water
-- 'the impact to the planet would be immense' claim - in what way, and what would be the downsides in terms of economy, productivity, health, animal welfare (where are all the animals going to be sent to retire as of day 1?)
-- etc. etc.

Oh, and a cow might get its protein from plants, but it walks around a field all day eating grass, chewing the cud and having sloppy shits with 4 stomachs and enzymes that i don't have................. I'm a bit puzzled by this one... I probably can't survive on what an alligator or a goldfish eats, but i can survive on parts of an alligator or fish. I can't eat enough krill in a day to keep me going, but i can let a whale do it for me...?

1. If not for taste, then you must be doing it because you've been mislead (like I was) to think it's a nutritional requirement. There is zero nutritional reason to eat animals for the majority of people on this planet. Perhaps habit is involved, but nothing that can't be broken if you want to. 99.9% of vegans were not vegan.


2. There is no gene in the human body which specifically makes you eat meat or drink milk. The chemical reaction that makes you crave certain foods is influenced by the foods you eat. In a hypothetical survival situation, eat all of the animals you need to, but we don't live in that situation.


3. I'm a middle-class person just like the majority of the westerners. I wasn't vegan for the first 30 years or so of my life. If I can do it, I know anyone can, they simply must want to. There is no financial, professional, geographical reason for everyone apart from those living in extreme conditions in western society to not become vegan. The reason why I say western society is because not only is western society the biggest cause of this (poor countries are already plant based, using very few animal products comparatively), but because westerners have the opportunity to do it easily.
The only difficult part is finding out correct information, because animal industry groups love to create clouds of doubt by funding misleading research and advertising. But the information is now out there on the internet.


4. It's a nice thought, but until those ideal conditions are reality, we must look at what action we can take now.


5. You don't need to grow your own food, farmers do that for you, and there will be plenty of land free'd up since 70% of all farm land is currently used to feed livestock.


6. There is protein (including the 9 essential amino acids) in almost every edible plant - vegetable, grain, rice, potato, nut and fruit. That simply eating enough to not be hungry means you eat enough protein. You don't need to eat the 3 gluten sources to meet your daily protein requirements. Even if everyone apart from those with celiac disease became vegan, the impact to the planet would be immense, because it's not a common thing. (I'm guessing you must get annoyed with the current trend of hipsters avoiding gluten, when they don't have celiacs or have not had an intestinal biopsy to confirm it).

7. I think it's fair to say that there is very little risk, when the alternative is eating a well documented carcinogen (meat, especially processed meat, see the World Health Organisation). Surely not giving yourself cancer is a good reason to avoid meat?

8. We can philosophize about minute details of sentience, or something like abortion, but really that is say like we shouldn't drive cars because we don't fully understand the laws of physics. We know enough about physics to improve our way life. It's the same about veganism, we know farm animals are mistreated, we know they feel pain and misery, and they have a will to live, so lets fix that first, and then we can philosophize about sentience.


9. It's not about the people that don't have a choice, it's about the people that do, and the majority of people do have a choice, that is the point.


10. Again there is protein in everything you eat - how do you think a chicken or cow get's it's protein? From plants!

I have to strongly disagree with the suggestion that animals are killed and tortured for my "taste preferences" and "pleasure".

It gives me no pleasure that an animal has to die for me to eat. My pleasure in the consumption of that animal is a fleeting, automatic chemical reaction triggered in my body. In an evolutionary sense, i only receive this pleasure because it prolongs the survival of my species to feel it.

Most of these arguments reek of over simplification and ignorance to the reality of the society westerners live in.

In ideal conditions, i would eat meat from animals that i tended, who died of natural causes (mostly old age i assume) which i would personally butcher. In reality, it is not possible and even if it were possible for one person, it would not be possible for every person - we have limited space, limited resources, limits placed by law, limits on our time. As well as the cost of the land, I would have to hope enough animals died naturally to sell enough humane meat to pay taxes on the land and maintain my farming equipment, buy grain for the animals and so on. Or maybe i could grow my own grain and use primitive DIY tools, but then i'd probably need help for all the farming i'd have to do every day and now i'd need enough animals to die to feed three, so more land, more grain... Oops, it looks like this is getting complicated doesn't it. Shall we keep going until we reach a society of 70 odd million people, or should we consider that the problem is far more complicated than comments here would care to acknowledge?

Furthermore gluten is often the primary protein source for vegans, but i have a disease that requires me to avoid that protein in entirety. The smug, holier-than-thou field radiating from certain commenters here will i'm sure extend far enough to condescendingly say "ah, but you can be a vegan and avoid gluten, you poor, uneducated, smiling murderer!" Yes, and you could live your life without ever being touched by the sun's rays, or sail a small sailboat without ever getting wet, not even a droplet. And how can we know what effect gluten-free-veganism may have on public health when it is extended to a population of 7 billion? What a dangerous experiment to salivate over - reckless and potentially harmful in a way that a butcher could never hope to be.

It would be wonderful if the world was ideal. I wouldn't have this disease, and all people of the world could enjoy their own 10 acre farm and eat only those animals whose time had come. Unfortunately when i am abroad, away from home, the only source of protein that i can entirely trust might perhaps be a roast chicken. And i will eat it, the only true pleasure from which i take is that i will not spend the next three days doubled up in bed.

There are people worse off than me, but i don't know enough about their situation to use it as a point in this discussion. To people like me, the language used by some people here makes me think of someone dancing around at a diabetics convention shouting "I can't believe you losers have to use insulin! I hope you all realise that drug addicts use needles!"

I reject any notion that these people have a moral advantage over me. Have any of them ever heard of walking a mile in another man's shoes, or does their narrow mind only reach as far as "ME"?

By the way, plants are also alive. Or is this about sentient life? Shall we move on to abortion then, if non-sentient life is ok to end? Shall we have the philosophical discussion about degrees of sentience and types of sentience and whether we can even know if a plant has its own brand of sentience? If yes, let's try to at least do it without you being smug and in return without me being sarcastic.

Worrying about how people treat vegans? How about the language used to describe people who have no choice in the matter, lest that choice be never leave your own house and eat only this very small list of things which you may or may not find too disgusting to stomach? Am i to live in misery and squander my life so that a chicken could have an extra 2 years to run in circles? This issue is not fucking black and white despite the attempts to paint it so.

Good bit of poetry, i enjoyed it. I don't agree with the sentiment though.

Firstly and most convincingly for me, animals have been eating other animals since there existed anything that might be called an animal. Essentially we evolved as we are because we ate meat.

Secondly, food intolerances/allergies/etc. never seem to be acknowledged by crusading vegans or vegetarians, and i have a real bee in my bonnet about that. I'd love to have the luxury of choice but if i eat something that has been near to something that had gluten in it, i'm going to be bed ridden for days. Depending on where you live, buying ONLY food labelled "gluten free" can go from easy and cheap to near impossible and extortionate. Some people have it even worse than that and have to exclude more. When you aren't making the food yourself, (travelling, visiting friends, all kinds of stuff) sometimes the only thing that you can feel safe eating is meat. No one in that position wants a guilt trip from someone with the freedom to opt in and out of their limitations.