This is the best advice you can give someone imo. Im like 75% vegan, still have eggs and bacon on the weekends, some chicken with dinner, some other stuff here and there. But mostly its beans/tofu and rice with veggies.

Some people think they have to give up everything all at once right now and of course that seems overwhelming.... because it is.

One change I made early on was to look for ways to shorten the distance from my food, become familiar with how it gets to my plate and just keep higher standards overall for things like meat.

The experience of buying meat in particular can be heavily abstracted and sanitized. Every big chain supermarket has an area with rows and rows of perfectly packaged cuts. There is not very much information at all about most of it.

Pick up a Styrofoam tray of boneless skinless chicken breasts from the one or two giant conglomerates. Each package is wrapped in plastic. They all have very consistent appearance, evenly colored and equally plump. They are completely odorless. It is chicken but it's very very far away from being a chicken. It's been through a lot of hands and miles. You've already hit a wall, though, because you're not getting much more information about that meat besides maybe some marketing terms and a picture of a taco or some shit like that. You're being sold the idea of it. All of the horrible stuff is obscured. Even the neutral stuff like what it ate, if it was ever sick or given any medications. All that stuff gets pushed into the memory hole and is supposed to never reach the consumer. If you become too curious, and start digging into it on your own, you naturally end up consuming less. They know this.

Contrast that with what's produced more locally. Try to figure out who in your area is producing with the goal of building up an actual local foodway sustainably. How close can you get to identifiable people actually producing your food? Can you access a co-op, farmers market, CSA?

Folks who do things like regenerative farming and try to build up their soil tend to be very passionate and like to share about it. Visit a nearby farm or ranch. Many have small retail operations. They may deal in larger quantities than you're used to. Find out the process. If an animal is involved, how is it cared for and what does it do all day? Is the animal improving its surroundings or degrading them? Are you willing to meet your food face to face?

IMO if you're going to continue eating meat, you owe it to your food to unpack this stuff, examine how it makes you feel to literally "know how the sausage is made", form deeper connections with your food and community, and find opportunities to make positive changes to your buying habits.

ETA:

not everyone will be able to stomach peeking behind the curtain. But that's actually good. It means you're a compassionate human being, and that feeling can be harnessed and channeled into better personal choices.

I'm just tired of seeing all meat-eating equated, too. The Styrofoam chicken is in a completely different category from a fresh whole chicken acquired locally from, say, a nearby farm that prioritizes regenerative practices.

Compare the true costs and impacts of each. You might forget they're the same species. It turns out that, if you simply let a chicken just... do its chicken things and provide it with what it already knows it needs to satisfy its drives, its natural behaviors and outputs can be directed to benefit the rest of the system. It's not easy. This is a complex system, and there's a lot to learn. But if you can get it right, the chicken is healthy and satisfied, it improves other parts of the system during its life, has at least net-zero if not positive net impact environmentally, and you still get to sell it at the end if that's what you want your operation to be.

The best arguments for not eating meat disagree specifically with what happens at the end of, e.g., a meat chicken's life. I know not to argue against that. It's a principled moral stance.

There will probably always be people who want to eat meat. It is very deeply ingrained human impulse. I think it desperately needs to be scaled way way back. The big players in the conventional national industry need to be seized and taken apart, yesterday. Everything good and useful there needs to be pried out of their hands, brought local, and distributed among the people.

If the tables were turned, and local, sustainable models were the norm, we'd eat way less of it, feel way better, and have the community profit instead of extracted from. "Big chicken" would not exist like it does now. We'd be having completely different conversations.

Which is kind of wild, because I don't know if a steak has ever looked better on film than the cut shown in this scene. I understand that sentiment may not hold true for folks on vegetarian or vegan diets based on ethical grounds, but that may as well be the Platonic ideal of "fancy steak".

Not really. It comes from the position that animals are people, or at least more worthy of consideration than the wants of humans. Neither of which are true in the eyes of basically everyone. Now arguing against factory farming seems to actually be unassailable.

The age old question. Do people make decisions using reasoning? Or do they make decisions based on emotions, and rationalise them afterwards using their reasoning?

Yeah, you can't say the conditions we're subjecting livestock to is "good". You don't give up your rights to eat bbq if you admit it.

"But it's awkward in social settings", "What if I'm going out to eat", "What if it's the only option", "What if I am trying but don't realize something has an animal product"

Idk dude then eat meat in those settings I guess. 95% of your food is consumed outside of those settings so just be 95% vegan or vegetarian.

Yup. The leftism leaves so many leftists' bodies the moment animal liberation comes up. If you recognize the problem, don't be complacent on the solution.

Unlike so many other rights struggles, basic veganism doesn't require action, but rather the cessation of harmful actions. In that regard, it's easier than taking action against other forms of exploitation: simply stop consuming animal products. Plant-based alternatives are readily available (I went vegan in a food desert) and are better for you than eating some poor animal's flesh.