/**
 * file: karbytes_30_december_2023.txt
 * type: plain-text
 * date: 30_DECEMBER_2023
 * author: karbytes
 * license: PUBLIC_DOMAIN
 */

During the past three consecutive years I have mostly adhered to a plant-based diet. During that time period, I ate a meal with meat, dairy, or eggs in it less than once per month. My goal has been and still is to continue that trend indefinitely into the future because that kind of diet seems to be the one which is most optimized to my particular nutritional and ecological aspirations. 

I hope and expect for cultured meat (whose starter stem cells are harvested from a live host animal without hurting the animal and then placed in an incubator such that slabs of meat which humans design to be optimally tasty, nutritious, and affordable to humans which buy and consume such a product) to eventually (within the next 20 years) comprise more than 99% of all meat which is sold. That way, the humans can continue enjoying getting amino acid complete protein which also supplies taste and texture which is savory in ways vegan food tends to never be (and which I think satisfies a primal craving humans have retained since several thousand years ago from when they started proliferating as colonies of hunter-gatherers). 

I can see why some people have contentions with veganism based on my own lived experience as someone trying very hard to be strictly vegan while also living what seems to be a very physically and mentally active lifestyle frought with many challenges which necessitates that I have sufficient strength, stamina, and mental focus to be genuinely effective at embodying such an adventurous, athletic, and grueling lifestyle (and I still sleep outside almost every night rather than inside a building because doing so makes me feel connected to nature and it also gives me a break from being in close proximity to humans). Vegans basically have to take nutritional supplements and oftentimes shop for specialty items which are not conveniently available at most local food stores in order for those vegans to avoid being deficient in key vitamins and amino acids which are normally abundant in animal products such as meat and dairy. What that means is that strict veganism requires more effort to sustain than does being relatively omnivorous. 

So I decided to buy and eat a slab of salmon (which was harvested by killing a fish instead of by cultivating meat in an incubator using stem cells which are originally extracted from a live fish without having to kill or injure that fish) today be
because I felt a bit sickly (which seems to be related to me trying to satiate myself nutritionally by eating relatively large quantities of plant-based food items but, despite being full of such food to a nauseating extent, I still felt vaguely malnourished). I feel slightly better than I normally do physically today than days I have eaten nothing but vegan food for almost one month. Nevertheless, I do not enjoy supplying further demand for more slaughtering, torturing, imprisoning, and rendering homeless of non human animals by humans. I wish the only meat allowed to be sold in stores and restaurants is the "cruelty free" cultured meat I described in this journal entry.

What is hard for me to sympathize with is the opinion and sentiment that the aforementioned "cruelty free" meat is in any way inferior to "natural meat" (i.e. meat which is essentially stolen out of the bodies of sentient creatures by maiming or killing them). I imagine some "devil's advocate" character commentating that, because some species of non human animals have adapted to surviving by consuming the flesh of other animals by injuring or killing those animals, humans should feel no remorse about also consuming the flesh of other animals by injuring or killing those animals. My counterargument to the "devil's advocate" person's argument is that, because humans are more intelligent and less limited in their lifestyle options than are all other species of lifeform of Planet Earth at this time, humans are morally obligated to forge habits and infrastructures which intentionally and effectively minimize the net suffering on Planet Earth.