Vegan here—best essay I have read against veganism so far!
That being said, I have much to criticize that has not yet been in the comments.
However, I also agree that veganism is not necessarily the best thing we can do for the animals, but for reasons that I believe are stronger than the ones you provided. More on that at the end.
Criticisms
Calcium
Calcium is one of the only nutrients we know of that can reduce the mood symptoms of PMS for women and it is practically impossible to get enough calcium from real food from vegan sources (you’re stuck taking medicine for it in the form of supplements or eating artificially fortified sources, like soy milk).
Well, firstly, tofu is famously high in calcium, and whether you consider this a real food (whatever that means, exactly) or not, many vegans do regularly eat it.
The Sniff Test
There’s the sniff test. A large percentage male vegan influencers look pale and sickly.
Unfortunately, while veganism was always meant to be a purely ethical movement, its diet also catches the eye of the kind of person who fall for dumb fad diets (notice how many ex-vegans ping-pong to carnivorism). Thus, there is a lot of overlap between veganism, raw veganism, fruitarianism, and many other variants of a plant-based diet which is not motivated by ethics, but rather by dietary pseudo-science, or by vibes and whim in place of the appropriate degree of caution that one should have when bringing any significant change to their diet.
That being said, if the question we seek to answer is “is a vegan diet healthy?”, then the relevance of the existence of pale and sickly vegans depends on what it is you mean by that question. Are you asking whether the average plant-based diet is healthy? Sniff away. Are you asking whether there are healthy plant-based diets? Then the sickliest vegans are utterly irrelevant, and all the more if vegans vary greatly in how healthy they are, which they do.
And I know you understand this, because you dish a similar criticism against studies that show greater health outcomes in vegans and don’t control for third variables like access to quality food, smoking/drinking habits, and so on. So let’s compare apples to apples, not averages to averages.
Building Muscle
Of course, you can build muscle and be fit as a vegan, but it is much harder, and we know that muscle mass is a significant predictor of all sorts of positive health outcomes.
As a vegan bodybuilder who put on ~23kg (50lbs) of muscle in the last 3 of my 5 years of being vegan, without even being perfectly consistent at the gym (and drinking less than a scoop of protein shake per workout on average), I would strongly contest that it is hard to gain muscle on a vegan diet. Getting all your protein and calories in is easy if you just 1. learn to make vegan proteins taste good, and 2. carry nuts around to snack on.
The reason people often lose weight on a vegan diet is because many vegan foods are more filling (higher in water and fiber) than meat. But if you bias your diet towards more calorie- and protein-dense foods like tofu, seitan, lentils, rich sauces, and nutty snacks, then you can even exceed your calorie goals if you’re not careful.
In any case, it cannot be that much harder if there are record-holding vegan bodybuilders and weightlifters out there. Perhaps it isn’t harder at all once you’ve figured out your eating habits.
Supplementation
What’s wrong with supplements and fortified foods, exactly? I’ve never seen an argument against them that was stronger than an appeal to nature fallacy.
What I would add
Now that I’m done with the criticisms, here are some points to support the thesis that eating meat can be better for animal welfare than being vegan.
Support small farms
It is hard for farms who refuse to resort to the cruel, cost-cutting practices of factory farms to survive against them. Therefore, purchasing meat from such farms can bolster anti-factory competition by helping them occupy more shelf space with ethical alternatives.
Hunting
Hunting is by far the best way to save the animals. Not only could you be contributing to necessary population control where deer are overcrowded and giving the beast a better death than it could ever hope for in the wild, but you could also serve as multiple people’s meat supply (which is often an easy sell, as many people value game as “natural”, “antibiotic-free”, and, of course, ethical), pulling them off factory-farmed meat.
So whereas going vegan produces a single boycotter (yourself) of factory farms, hunting can produce as many boycotters as you can hunt for. For reference, a single deer can cover a whole family’s yearly meat consumption — that’s already 3-4x the impact of being vegan!
And yes, I am on the way to getting my hunter’s. And you should too.
#GoVegan #GoHunting
Well, if we as humans place weight on open individualism (OI) being true, then the question of whether an ASI would shield us from S-risks or not should lose importance to us relative to the question of whether the ASI would serve the greater good, even at the expense of humanity. So if an OI ASI came to pose an S-risk, then perhaps we should trust that such an ASI’s decision to doom humanity serves consciousness better than our species-preserving biases would have it.
A belief in OI goes both ways, by which what I mean to emphasize is not that this belief’s effect on an ASI’s probability of incurring S-risks is ambiguous due to OI providing the ASI reasons both for and against harming humanity, but rather that a belief in OI should lead both us and ASI to care less about our own respective fates.