Polling Thread

How should I answer question 1 if I share all grocery shopping expenses, roughly equally, with my partner?

How many meals do you eat per week that you don't pay for? (Food from parents, free dorm food, free company cafeteria, etc.)

How about subsidies? My university canteen charges for meals less than half the market price; I counted each such meal as 0.6, is that right?

If you do have at least a vague idea of how much you spend, could you estimate your weekly food spending in USD?

Do I have to count the food I pay for that other people eat, too, right? Otherwise, if Alice buys Bob dinner on Wednesday and Bob buys Alice dinner on Thursday they'd have to put in different numbers than if they split the bill both times, even if the amounts of money left in each wallet at the end of the week are the same in either case.

Oops. Please put the words "weekly" into bold font for inattentive people like me. I mistakenly wrote a daily value.

All comments have a relatively low or negative rating. Does anybody have an idea why that is? Tired after clicking so many polls? Or is the polls topic inappropriate?

what that strange grey plushy really is?

Looks like Totoro.

A plushie of Rev. Bayes with a Cthulhu-head hat as an accessory :-D

You should have a question for "This practice is tasty". Seriously. If I didn't find meat tasty I'd be a vegetarian. So I put it under "other benefits".

But I feel like taste is such a driver of consumption habits that it shouldn't be relegated to "other".

I don't eat mammals. Voted as "other or not/applicable".

I don't eat chocolate and I restrict my alcohol consumption because I used to consume both at unhealthy levels.

I identify as a flexitarian, meaning I'm a part-time vegetarian. When it's convenient, I will avoid eating meat. This is usually at restaurants, almost all of which in my city have a vegetarian, if not vegan, option on their menu, or when I'm cooking at home, and there is something in the fridge other than animal flesh, or byproducts, available. In this regard, my biggest 'vice' is that I don't make much effort to restrict my consumption of dairy products, since I'm under the impression that dairy products don't cause much harm to cattle relative to how much suffering is incurred upon other animals used to generate food for humans.

One major reason I try to reduce my meat consumption when it's a convenient option is because I don't exercise much, so I counteract the negative affects this might have on my health in the meantime by consuming fewer calories. Otherwise, my part-time vegetarianism is motivated by my ethics, although I feel very ambiguous about my diet. For example:

• I commonly encounter reports from mainstream media about how, to prevent environmental degradation, via climate change, humans must reduce the amount of meat we eat per capita. E.g., the UN has published reports in this regard in the last couple of years. However, on the other hand, I've encountered counter-arguments about how if we all became full-time vegetarians in North America, we would have to import resource-intensive soy products from the other side of the world, causing a bunch of pollution in the process anyway.

• I'm well aware of how, if they have the capacity to suffer, animals on factory farms indeed suffer very much. That pulls at my heartstrings, or makes me sad, and empathetic, to their suffering, or what have you, so I would like to be a part of easing that suffering. However, my life is full of moral uncertainty, because all the wisest people I turn to in life are split between eating meat, or not. Also, I'm not extremely confident in how sentient non-primates are, or what their capacity to suffer is. Furthermore, if societies moved to abstaining from animal (by)products, we might end up processing more land that results in the deaths of small vertebrates, e.g., rodents, and insects, who might also suffer, and die horribly. So, I find the argument of erring on the side of caution by not eating animals even in the face of uncertainty of their moral relevance appealing, but I'm not so confident in the truth of that that I forgo eating meat entirely.

• I fear being in a maligned out-group like vegetarians, and what moral fortitude I tell myself I have falls prey to the same convenient biases everyone experiences in the face of brains getting what they want now, and damn our ideals, so I eat more meat than I would otherwise believe is morally acceptable of myself. In this regard, I might be a hypocrite.

What I will eat under appropriate circumstances is a very wide set. What I choose to eat in normal life is a considerably more narrow set.

No option for my answer: I'm a picky eater, and meat is one of the many foodstuffs I don't like to eat.

My "other" vote is alternate-day fasting, which I've been doing all year. Not sure if that's what you're looking for, but I feel like it's a dietary restriction, and benefits my health.

How should I answer "This practice improves my personal health" if I think that my vegetarianism does help my health, but this isn't the reason I'm vegetarian?