quick calories: sweet fruits, dried fruits

slower calories: pretzels and crackers

better calories: a fresh fruit and a whole grain sandwich with some spread, some condiments, some leaves.

classic low effort: the mix of nuts and dried fruits (like raisins)

Nuts and seeds alone are obvious, but they also have a lot of calories and may not provide calories that fast, so you can end up overeating. That’s why I go for more starchy snacks from cereals, if any. Try to eat dense calories with more fiber, especially fat.

It also helps to have a bigger breakfast. Speaking of a nice porridge, there are all sorts of portable “oat bars” and similar things. Those can pack a lot of calories too, often too much. (You can make them at home, it’s not that difficult.) If you can’t find those, try looking for “work-out bars” that are plant-based.

And watch your weight. The need for snacks can be a sign that your breakfast was too small.

The Pale Blue Bean

Only applies to artists who can no longer enjoy the spoils.

Not just land use. Arable land (not “marginal”) can be considered as an input to production, a variable in the outcome. It is not the only variable. As we’re talking about industrial agriculture, the other inputs are machinery, seeds, agrochemicals, and fuels (and labor if you want to count it here).

The animal farming sector competes on all these in one way or another, raising demand and pricing out poorer farmers around the world. This isn’t necessarily a rule, but it’s common and it matters; not all inputs are near scarcity. The most important one is probably fertilizers: Savings in fertilizer requirements from plant-based diets - ScienceDirect

Ex. from 2021 Global farmers facing fertiliser sticker shock may cut use, raising food security risks | Reuters

This is made worse by the fact that the rich “developed” countries dedicate a lot of resources to animal farming, including feed crops, and they bring in loads of ag. subsidies for that. Poorer countries can’t afford meaningful subsidies, so they can’t compete to buy the expensive inputs as easily. Effectively, subsidies for eating animals in rich countries translates, through the invisible hand of the global ag. inputs market, into food insecurity in poor countries. I’m not the first to point that out: https://openknowledge.fao.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/0a8bd248-025d-49fd-99e2-d8ae972fa124/content

And marginal land competes with forests, wetlands, biodiversity. “Marginal land” is a poisoned concept: https://tabledebates.org/blog/marginal-lands-sustainable-food-systems-panacea-or-bunk-concept

“modern pig production”

Chilean-born Marco Evaristti is courting controversy to make a point about the treatment of pigs in Denmark, where about 25,000 piglets die daily as a result of the conditions in which they are bred.

wait until Marco finds out that they are bred to be killed.

Farmers who grow feed can also switch to growing food.

Slaughterhouses… maybe they can switch to growing fungi.

“Pastured” and “factory” are not opposites, they’re the same thing with a different scale of intensity. There’s no meaningful ethical difference, but there are points to make about the environment and the climate, such as the basic fact that “grass fed” means more enteric CH4 emissions, making “factory farming” better for the environment due to efficiency. No amount of “regenerative grazing” is going change that, the methane is tied to the amount of fiber in the rumen, and grasses & forbs are full of fiber.

For a more detailed explanation see: Grazed and Confused

Economically speaking is when you see how this is scam on meat eaters. Most of the animal flesh comes from CAFOs. That’s not because grasslands are ugly and CAFOs are beautiful, it’s because that’s the most efficient way to exploit those animals, which means it’s the most efficient way to keep production costs low, which means that it’s the most efficient way to come to market with the lowest prices, which is how “the market” is expanded to a large part of the population (who expects cheap meat). The productive grasslands are already maxed out in most of the World and overgrazing is very common.

The US is plagued with ranchers going into natural parks and other places where they compete with wild herbivores (and call on state agencies to exterminate predators). Put simply, if CAFOs disappeared, then the average meat eater would find animal flesh to be very expensive - a food that is afforded a few times per month in “main dish” quantities, or even a few times per year (traditionally at Easter and Christmas holiday feasts). I would be glad to see that happen, but it wouldn’t be enough, and it fails to teach the ethical lesson, to do the moral work. It only makes animal-based meat a more obvious luxury (it has always been one), creating black markets and creating economic demand to deforest land and to occupy cropland and turn it into pasture – and that’s something that wars have been fought for, for thousands of years.

The only sensible option is to go vegan globally (don’t let animal farmers get away with exports). That frees up plenty of cropland to be reforested or used in more extensive ways.

Give peat a chance!

and this trash food has more microplastics in it

It’s not just in it, it’s the packaging too, and it’s the fat content, because fat usually helps with moving that plastic (and many other things). Packaging also refers to the containers used for food delivery.

from this paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165993623000808

If you’re only focusing on “processed foods”, you’re missing the bigger problem.

But adopting street animals from regions where they are regularly abused and/or killed and with that helping to finance organizations who orchestrate castration programs in those places is not really “burgeois” or a way to “keep them an emotional service slave”.

It was a broad message. Some of it is for the vets who are essentially working for maintaining the pet industry and its market of pet ownership.

Stuffing cats full of vegan food that slowly kills them is as bad as feeding dogs raw animal carcasses because some shithead on the internet told you that this is the “natural” way.

Firstly, we’re comparing “street food” to plant-based pet food. Not “ideal ambrosia for immortality food” to plant-based pet food. That’s the Nirvana fallacy I was referring to, your entire paradigm is wrong.

Secondly, everyone is mortal. Everyone. You too. Me too. If your plan is to create immortal animals, us included, your entire paradigm is completely wrong.

Anyone promoting paleo diets for cats or similar ideas is starting out with bad faith and needs to be dismissed. And for dogs too. If your argument is based on naturalistic fallacies or even traditionalistic fallacies, you should delete your account.

As vegans here should already know, just as a reminder of priorities:

1. The pet sector must die, pet ownership isn’t vegan, pet breeders are the enemies;

2. We’re not doing “optimal nutrition”, sorry. That biohacking shit to create immortal adopted pets isn’t going to work out. It’s hardly even clear for humans what the optimal diet is, and they pretend that they know what it is for cats??? These fools don’t even comprehend that evolution doesn’t give a shit about longevity. It’s a standard imposed by the marketing agencies of pet foods who want to milk pet owner feelings to have their pets die after they do. It’s a false standard that is great for advertising, but otherwise functions as a Nirvana fallacy machine.

3. This is just a rephrase, but pet ownership is bourgeois. Well, aristocratic, then bourgeois. Detach. This isn’t about you, you don’t get to annex a sentient being just to keep them as an emotional service slave or as a status symbol. This one is especially for Americans where pets live better than poor people.