Similar to recycling, the impact is small. There must be large systemic change. My adoption of a vegan diet, or my diligent recycling of aluminum and plastic, is a drop in the bucket.

[–] threeduck@aussie.zone 2 points 2 months ago

Couldn't that logic be used against literally any good action? Like giving $100,000 to a malaria charity isn't going to stop malaria. If everyone thought like vegans, the world would be vegan, the climate crisis would almost entirely be averted, rivers swimmable, billions of animal lives saved each year.

If during your supermarket shop, you use vegan recipes instead, you'll be one of those dominos. You could be the systemic change!

[–] usernamesAreTricky@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 months ago

The issue is how then do you get that systematic change? Governments are going to be extremely hard to convince to do anything as along as people expect to consume animal products en mass. It's going to have to start with individual action until systematic change is palatable

And with systematic action, it's still going to have to involve change in consumption in the end. Factory farming is pretty much the only thing that scales. Want to avoid it? We're going to need to see great drops in production and in turn consumption

The impacts of people taking action do add up. For instance, in Germany there's been declines in per capita meat consumption over the past decade

In 2011, Germans ate 138 pounds of meat each year. Today, it’s 121 pounds — a 12.3 percent decline. And much of that decline took place in the last few years, a time period when grocery sales of plant-based food nearly doubled.

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23273338/germany-less-meat-plant-based-vegan-vegetarian-flexitarian