this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2025
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So, yes, bugs count as meat and eating them outright is avoided by most vegans, but it's impossible to not eat remnants of dead bugs in produce. The agricultural process inherently involves the death of bugs, and that's literally unavoidable.
Some vegans try to avoid the kinds of figs that require wasps to die, but most of the figs in grocery stores are artificially pollinated and don't have wasps in them.
Personally, I'm not going out of my way to avoid produce that has marginally higher bug death. Being vegan is already a pain in the ass without putting further restrictions on "is eating X plant really vegan because it requires Y?" It's still a way better environmental impact than meat, and I hate the purity tests a lot of online vegan spaces turn into. Most other vegans I've met IRL are chill and we can have reasonable discussions around that sort of thing without people getting into a fit over it.
I appreciate the answer, I expanded on my own... non vegan status and thoughts about this a bit more under another replier.
Could I ask you?:
How common is it among the vegans you know to apply the kind of, do as little ecological harm as possible mindset...
How many of them apply that to... other kinds of economic activity?
Like, how many vegans do you know who say, own and drive a car, that may be powered by oil from say, a fracking field?
I'd imagine most who are serious enough to be as ethically vegan as possible are also very much anti-capitalist as possible...
But at the same time, I've personally known a good deal of self described vegans who... regularly drive their own car to work, despite living near a transit line that would totally get them to work... and also, their work is for the corporate office of a highly exploitative (in many ways, of many things) corporation... like Amazon, or MSFT... and then get very aggreived when I just... work remotely, and tell them they should probably take the lightrail/bus.
(I'm from Seattle if you can't tell lol)
For many of us, reducing ecological harm is one of the big motivators, and many vegans apply this mindset elsewhere. I'm also in the US, and it's pretty hard to avoid needing a car outside of major cities which I can't fault any vegans for. Many of the vegans I know are activists for public transit and one in particular has worked to improve it immensely in their city.
Anticapitalist sentiment is pretty huge in vegan spaces. There's a leftist to vegan pipeline and vice versa. Ironically being vegan is pretty big in punk spaces now too.
I won't pretend there aren't plenty of people who are vegan more for the aesthetics rather than the principles because for some reason it caught on as a trend among the remnants of the "upper middle class" for whatever that means with the ever growing wealth disparity. There's a huge supply of overpriced vegan options, but you can also eat vegan super cheap too without shelling out for the pricey fake meat options. I can make a ton of seitan or black beans burgers at home for almost nothing, but it's $$$ at the grocery store.
Ok, that makes sense and generally tracks with my own experiences.
Particularly:
The handful of folks I knew who were actual punks, in actual punk bands, played at local bars, were among the most genuinely kind people I'd ever met, and were the most dedicated, and also non-sanctimonious vegans I knew.
Unfortunately, I was more often around corpo yuppie types... bleck.
If you could link me to some kind of seitan or blackbean uh... patty making guide? I have no idea how that works, but I'd love to learn, love to switch over to something less meat intensive as I slowly recover and can handle more involved cooking procedures.
Sure thing! Here's a few recipes.
Pretty standard black bean burger recipe. It uses a "flax egg" which is flaxseed meal and water and is used a lot in vegan baking. You can omit the sauce and just use whatever you like on a burger. You can also make it cheaper by using dried beans instead of canned.
https://www.ambitiouskitchen.com/ultimate-black-bean-burgers-with-tahini-garlic-cream/
Seitan if you have vital wheat gluten (makes it easier): https://theveganatlas.com/homemade-seitan-recipe/#mv-creation-193-jtr
Seitan if you don't have or want to buy vital wheat gluten and just have flour:
https://thevietvegan.com/washed-flour-seitan-method/#recipe
For other dishes and creators I use recipes from a ton: https://rainbowplantlife.com/ https://thecheaplazyvegan.com/blog/
Learning to cook vegan is a bit of a different mindset from meat, and teaches you to use seasonings way more. My general advice for trying to put together vegan meals is always have a protein (tofu, seitan, edamame, any bean/lentil, quinoa, or oats), some veg, and a seasoning mix or a sauce. That and balance out the oil, acid (vinegar, citrus juice, etc), and spiciness is most of how I do my cooking when I just want to throw together some food and don't have a recipe in mind or want to tweak a recipe to fit my tastes.
Thank you!
Starring this and saving the links to my bookmarks!
I am no stranger to seasoning, but uh, mostly with eggs and potatoes and meat and various baked bready things.
My only real experience with vegan cooking... beyond learning how to make a few interesting salads... is utterly, totally failing at attempting to make tofu into something edible.
Failed quite badly at that lol.
But I will definitely see if I can orient more of my next grocery run (delivery, really, yay disabled) around any of this, see if my arm and wrist can handle the prep.
Thanks!
I'm not a vegan, but it's probably worth remembering that different people might be vegan for different reasons. I can think of three main ones: animal welfare, environmental impact, and health. There's an overlap between the first two, but it's possible to be any one of those without being others. (Though I know a lot of particularly those who do it for animal welfare reasons like to claim that theirs is the One True Veganism and others are false.) Someone who's only into it for animal welfare but doesn't have a larger care for environmental impact would have no particular reason to not drive a car.
There's also the simple fact that it's impossible for most people to care about everything. It's draining. Like I said, I'm not vegan. I'm very bad in the kitchen, and it would just be far, far too much of an imposition for me to change that. But I do try in other areas to advocate for things to reduce harm to the environment, and I try to reduce my own energy usage, for example by cycling or catching public transport. Transport and urbanism are the angle towards a better environment that I've chosen to focus my energy towards, and as long as someone is not actively going out of their way to cause additional harm (e.g. advocating against policy improvements in those areas) I think it's reasonable to allow other people to focus their energy elsewhere.