Vegan Men’s Group™

The objections

59 arguments against veganism, answered.

Sorted by the shape of the argument rather than its topic, because the same shapes come back whatever the topic. Each answer starts with what is true in the objection. Every figure links to its source. To argue any of them, take it to the debate box.

Psychologists who asked people to justify eating meat found that four words, natural, normal, necessary and nice, covered 83 to 91% of the answers they gave (Piazza et al., 2015). The shapes below are those four, plus the ones men reach for once those have been answered.

Appeal to nature

What is natural, ancestral, or what other animals do is taken as what is right.

If you have to take supplements, the diet isn't natural.

What’s true in it. True. Vegans need a reliable source of vitamin B12, and a man who skips it will eventually get sick.

B12 is made only by certain bacteria and archaea. Plants do not make it and neither do animals; animals accumulate it from microbes, and we have been getting it second-hand. A tablet or a fortified food goes straight to the source. Needing one cheap supplement tells you where a vitamin comes from. It does not tell you the diet is wrong.

Is “natural” really the test? Almost nothing else in a modern man’s life would pass it.

We have canine teeth, so we're meant to eat meat.

What’s true in it. We can digest meat. Nobody disputes that humans are capable omnivores.

A body tells you what an animal can do. It does not tell you what he ought to do. We can also go without: the main body of dietitians in the United States holds that appropriately planned vegan diets can be nutritionally adequate for adults. So the question stops being whether we are able to eat animals and becomes whether we have a good reason to.

If we don’t need to, what is the reason to?

Humans have always eaten meat. It's how we evolved.

What’s true in it. They did, and for most of history most people had no realistic alternative. Meat may well have mattered in our evolution.

“Always” describes the past. It is not a reason for the future. We have always done plenty of things we later stopped. And the refusal is old too: about 2,500 years ago Pythagoras, by his biographer’s account, ordered his most advanced students never to eat anything animate and to treat animals justly, and Plutarch and Tolstoy argued the same. What has changed is that a full diet without animals is now within reach of most men reading this.

Which of your ancestors’ habits would you defend only because they had them?

We're at the top of the food chain.

What’s true in it. We can certainly kill anything on earth. On raw power, nothing competes with us.

Ecologists have measured this. Trophic levels run from 1, plants, to 5, apex predators. The global human trophic level is 2.21, the same as the anchoveta, a small anchovy. We are nowhere near the top of the food chain by diet. And being able to dominate has never been a justification by itself; if it were, the strong could do anything to the weak.

Does having the power to do something make it right?

Lions eat meat. Animals eat other animals.

What’s true in it. Predation is part of nature, yes.

A lion has no alternative and no ability to weigh one. We have both. We don’t take our morals from lions on any other question, and we would be alarmed by a man who did. Nature tells us what happens. It doesn’t tell us what a man should do when he has a choice.

On what other question would you accept “a lion does it” as a reason?

An argument from logic. No figures claimed.

Death is part of life. Everything dies.

What’s true in it. Everything dies. True.

Not everything is killed, and the whole of morality on this point lives in the gap between the two words. A death that comes is one thing; a death a man arranges for his dinner is another, and we have a separate word, killing, because the difference matters to us everywhere else. The circle of life does not require you to hire the slaughterhouse.

If “everything dies” excused killing, what would it fail to excuse?

An argument from logic. No figures claimed.

Eating meat made us human. The big brain came from meat.

What’s true in it. Meat may well have mattered in how our ancestors grew the brains we have. That is a live hypothesis and it may be right.

It is an argument about the past, and the brain it describes is the one you are using now to decide what to eat. Whatever got us here, the question is what we do with the capacity it gave us. Fire, weapons and tribal warfare also shaped us; nobody concludes we are therefore obliged to keep them up. Our ancestors ate what kept them alive. We can afford to ask a second question.

If meat built the brain, does the brain owe it anything?

An argument from logic. No figures claimed.

Tradition and scripture

Custom, culture, upbringing or religious text settles the question.

God gave man dominion over the animals.

What’s true in it. Genesis 1:28 does give man dominion over every living thing.

Read the next verse. “Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat” (Genesis 1:29). In that passage dominion comes with a diet of plants. Daniel asked for ten days of pulse and water and came out “fairer and fatter in flesh” than those eating the king’s meat. And Proverbs 12:10: “A righteous man regardeth the life of his beast.” A good king protects his subjects.

What does dominion ask of the one who holds it?

It's my culture and tradition.

What’s true in it. Food carries family and memory, and giving up a dish can feel like giving up the people who made it.

Tradition explains why we do something. It doesn’t show that we should keep doing it. Every culture has dropped practices its grandfathers thought were normal, and is better for it. The gathering, the fire, the table and the people are the tradition. The animal is the one part you can change without losing any of the others.

What is the part of that tradition you would actually miss?

An argument from logic. No figures claimed.

The Bible allows eating meat after the flood. Jesus ate fish.

What’s true in it. It does. After the flood God tells Noah, “Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you” (Genesis 9:3), and the risen Jesus eats a piece of broiled fish in front of his disciples (Luke 24:42–43).

Both are permissions, not commands, and permission has never been the end of a moral question for a believer. The diet given at the creation was plants (Genesis 1:29), and the prophet’s picture of the world set right has the wolf lying down with the lamb, where “they shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain” (Isaiah 11:6–9). Between those two, “a righteous man regardeth the life of his beast” (Proverbs 12:10) and “blessed are the merciful” (Matthew 5:7). What is permitted in a fallen world and what a merciful man chooses when he has a choice are different questions.

If it is permitted but not required, what decides it for you?

Nutrition fear

A vegan diet is said to leave a man weak, deficient or unhealthy.

Where do you get your protein?

What’s true in it. Fair question. A man does need enough protein, and on plants it takes a little more thought.

Beans, lentils, soy, nuts, seeds and whole grains cover it. A 2019 review of vegetarian and vegan adults in Western countries found that protein-rich plant foods are “sufficient to achieve full protein adequacy,” and that the worry about missing amino acids “has been substantially overstated.” The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics holds that appropriately planned vegan diets can be nutritionally adequate for adults.

How many grams a day are you aiming for? It is easier to hit on plants than most men expect.

You can't build muscle or be strong on a vegan diet.

What’s true in it. In single-meal lab studies plant protein does look a little less anabolic than animal protein, so the worry has a basis.

What matters is what happens over months of training. In a 12-week trial, 19 vegan men and 19 omnivores lifted twice a week with protein matched at 1.6 grams per kilo per day. Both groups gained the same leg lean mass, 1.2 kg, and the researchers found no difference between the groups in muscle or strength gains. Outside the lab, Patrik Baboumian carried a 555 kg yoke ten metres for a Guinness World Record as a vegan, and Kendrick Farris lifted for the US at the Rio Olympics as one.

If the training results come out the same, what is left of the objection?

Soy lowers testosterone and feminizes men.

What’s true in it. A few studies and case reports describing feminizing effects have been published, which is where the idea comes from.

When researchers pooled the clinical evidence, 41 studies in all, they found no significant effect of soy protein or isoflavones on total testosterone, free testosterone or estrogen levels in men, regardless of dose or how long the study ran. A separate analysis of US survey data found the plant content of a man’s diet was not associated with his testosterone level, though that study was small, 191 men.

Which study were you thinking of? I’d like to look at the dose it used.

Vegan diets are unhealthy. You'll end up deficient.

What’s true in it. Some real findings cut against us. In the EPIC-Oxford study vegetarians had a 20% higher rate of stroke than meat eaters, about three more cases per 1,000 people over ten years. And a badly planned vegan diet is unhealthy, like a badly planned diet of any kind.

The same study found vegetarians had a 22% lower rate of heart disease, ten fewer cases per 1,000 over ten years, and heart disease is the leading cause of death for men in the United States. Other large cohorts found about half the odds of type 2 diabetes in vegans and a 35% lower risk of prostate cancer in vegan men. The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics holds that appropriately planned vegan diets can be nutritionally adequate for adults and offer long-term health benefits.

Which nutrient are you most worried about? Let’s look at that one specifically.

Meat has things plants don't, like creatine.

What’s true in it. Correct. Creatine is found in meat, and vegetarians have lower creatine stores.

A systematic review found that when vegetarians supplement creatine, their muscle creatine rises, often to levels above omnivores, along with gains in lean mass and strength. Creatine is a supplement that athletes who eat meat commonly take too. So the gap is real and it closes with a scoop.

Are you already taking creatine? Most men who train are.

Vegans can't get iron, omega-3, calcium, zinc or iodine.

What’s true in it. Iron is a fair one. A meta-analysis of 24 studies found vegetarians have lower iron stores than meat eaters, and the gap was bigger in men than in women. And the plant omega-3 in flax and walnuts is barely converted to DHA; one review found no conversion at all in seven trials.

Lower stores are not the same as deficiency: the iron review did not measure anaemia rates, it called high iron stores a risk factor in their own right, and its advice was that meat eaters and vegetarians alike should check their iron and eat more plants. For DHA, every trial in a systematic review found that algal DHA raised DHA levels in vegetarians. So: iron-rich plants with something acidic, an algae-oil capsule, and a blood test once in a while, which is good advice for any man.

When did you last have your own iron and B12 checked?

Plants are full of anti-nutrients: lectins, phytates, oxalates.

What’s true in it. These compounds are real, and a review of the evidence agrees that in high doses, or taken in isolation, some can do harm.

The same review found that the ordinary ways people have always prepared plants, soaking, sprouting, fermenting and cooking, cut lectin content substantially, that phytates do not significantly impair mineral status in a diverse and balanced diet, and that some of these so-called anti-nutrients may in fact be therapeutic. Nobody eats raw dry kidney beans. The foods in question, beans, lentils and whole grains, are the ones the big cohort studies keep tying to lower heart disease and diabetes.

Which plant food have you dropped over this, and what replaced it?

Vegans are more depressed.

What’s true in it. Several reviews do find this. A meta-analysis of 13 studies found vegetarians score higher on depression scales than non-vegetarians, and a review of 18 studies found most of them linked meat abstention with poorer psychological health.

Read what the reviewers themselves concluded. The meta-analysis flagged such high heterogeneity that it called for more research before drawing conclusions. A separate review of 23 studies called the evidence contradictory: 11 found more depression, 7 found less, 7 found nothing. And the 18-study review stated outright that the designs “precluded inferences of causal relations.” None of them can say which came first, the diet or the low mood. A man who went vegetarian because he felt bad about the world is in every one of those samples.

If a study showed gym members were sadder than non-members, would you conclude that lifting causes sadness?

Children and pregnant women need meat. Vegan parents starve their kids.

What’s true in it. The experts are not unanimous, and you should know that. The Royal Academy of Medicine of Belgium said in 2019 that a vegan diet is unsuitable and not recommended for children, adolescents, and pregnant and breastfeeding women. The German Nutrition Society says that for those groups it can recommend neither for nor against, because the data are limited.

The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, the US body, holds that appropriately planned vegan diets are appropriate for all stages of life, including pregnancy, infancy and childhood, with reliable B12. The honest reading is that a vegan child needs a planned diet and a parent who pays attention, and that a careless one can be hurt, which is also true of a child raised on chicken nuggets. The children who come to harm in the news were not harmed by the absence of meat; they were harmed by the absence of planning, and often of calories.

Is the worry that it can't be done, or that some parents won't do it carefully?

Saturated fat was never the problem. The cholesterol science is debunked.

What’s true in it. Some of the old diet advice was bad. Swapping fat for refined carbohydrate and sugar did not help, and the American Heart Association says so plainly.

But the core finding stands. The AHA’s 2017 presidential advisory concluded “strongly” that lowering saturated fat and replacing it with unsaturated fat, especially polyunsaturated fat, will lower cardiovascular disease, and that in randomized trials the swap cut cardiovascular events by about 30%, similar to a statin. That is from trials, not from observational studies, so the healthy-user objection doesn’t reach it.

Which trial do you have in mind that found the opposite?

Personal liberty

Eating is a private choice or a matter of taste that nobody may question.

It's my personal choice. Respect it.

What’s true in it. You do get to decide what you eat, and nobody here can or should force you.

The word to look at is “personal.” A choice is personal when it affects only you. This one has someone on the other end who had no vote. That doesn’t make you a bad man. It means the choice belongs with the other choices we make that land on someone else, and those we expect a man to be able to justify.

Would you call it a personal choice if the animal were a dog?

An argument from logic. No figures claimed.

I just like the taste. Bacon, though.

What’s true in it. It tastes good. Nobody went vegan because bacon tasted bad.

The question is whether a pleasure of yours is enough to justify what it costs someone else. Anywhere else in life we say no: enjoying something doesn’t make it right when it lands on another. Tastes also change faster than men expect. Most of us were sure we could never give it up, right until we had.

How much is ten minutes of taste worth, measured in someone else’s life?

An argument from logic. No figures claimed.

Morality is subjective. Who are you to say what's right?

What’s true in it. People disagree about ethics, and there is no lab test for right and wrong.

But nobody lives as though morality were a matter of taste. You would object if someone kicked your dog or picked your pocket, and you wouldn’t accept “that’s just your opinion” as the reply. Even “it’s wrong of you to judge me” is a moral claim. So the question isn’t whether morality is real; it is whether the one you already hold, which says don’t cause needless suffering, stops at the species line, and why.

Is there anything you would say is wrong for everyone, in every culture? Start there.

An argument from logic. No figures claimed.

Futility

One person's change makes no difference, or the outcome would be no better.

One person going vegan changes nothing.

What’s true in it. Your single meal doesn’t visibly change a supermarket’s order. True.

Farms and stores breed and order to match what sells. Fewer buyers means fewer animals bred, even if no single purchase shows up in the count. And no man’s diet is private. Other men watch what you do, which is the whole reason this group exists. A man who does the right thing only when he can see it tip the scale is not doing the right thing.

Is there anything else you would do only if you could prove your part made the difference?

An argument from logic. No figures claimed.

If everyone went vegan, what would happen to all the animals?

What’s true in it. It is true that these animals exist in these numbers only because we breed them.

That is also the answer. The world will not go vegan overnight. As demand falls, fewer animals are bred, year by year. Nobody releases billions of chickens. The populations shrink the same way they grew, by our decision. And existing in order to be confined and killed young is not a favor we are doing them.

Would you accept being brought into existence on those terms?

An argument from logic. No figures claimed.

Those animals wouldn't exist if we didn't farm them. We gave them a life.

What’s true in it. It is true that a farmed animal exists only because someone intended to sell him.

That is the problem, not the defence. If bringing a creature into existence licensed whatever we then did to him, parents could do anything to their children. We do not accept “you wouldn’t exist without me” from anyone else. And the bargain was never signed by the other party: a life that ends on a schedule set by the one who profits from the death is not a gift he agreed to receive.

Would you accept that deal for yourself: a short, confined life in exchange for having been born?

An argument from logic. No figures claimed.

Everything in moderation. Isn't cutting back enough?

What’s true in it. Less is better than more. Every animal not eaten is one not bred, and a man who has cut back has done something real.

Moderation is a virtue for things that are fine in small amounts. We don’t ask for moderation in the things we think are wrong; nobody praises a moderate thief. So the question underneath is whether you think killing the animal is wrong or merely excessive. If it is wrong, cutting back is the start. If it is fine, why cut back at all?

Is it the amount you object to, or the thing?

An argument from logic. No figures claimed.

Whataboutism

Some other harm (crop deaths, plants, phones) is raised so that this one need not be faced.

Plants feel pain too.

What’s true in it. Plants respond to damage and signal chemically. That is real biology.

Responding is different from feeling. Plant scientists reviewing the question concluded that the likelihood that plants, with no neurons or brains, have consciousness is “effectively nil.” And if plants did count, you would still eat plants directly: 77% of the world’s soy is fed to livestock, and a plant-based world would need about 75% less farmland. Eating animals kills far more plants.

If you believed plants suffered, wouldn’t that be a reason to feed fewer of them to animals?

Harvesting crops kills animals too, so vegans kill as well.

What’s true in it. Yes. Farming of any kind kills animals, and it is right to count them.

Count them, then, and the answer comes out the same. Most cropland feeds livestock: 77% of the world’s soy goes to animals, and a plant-based world would farm about 75% less land, 1 billion hectares in place of 4.1. Eating animals means more crops harvested, and so more field deaths, on top of the animals slaughtered. Veganism doesn’t promise zero harm. It asks for the least harm that is practicable.

If field deaths matter to you, which diet harvests fewer fields?

Fake meat is ultra-processed junk. Oreos are vegan.

What’s true in it. A vegan diet built on fries, sweets and refined grains is a bad diet. In a study of three large US cohorts, people whose plant-based eating leaned on those foods had a 32% higher risk of coronary heart disease.

The same study found that people whose plant-based eating leaned on whole grains, vegetables, legumes and nuts had a 25% lower risk. Veganism is a position about animals, not a health halo for everything without meat in it. Nobody claims an Oreo is health food. And the man who eats a plant burger once a week does so because it is easy and the animal is left out of it, not because he loves the taste of soy protein.

If the processed stuff disappeared tomorrow, what would be left of your objection?

Your avocados, almonds and quinoa wreck the planet too.

What’s true in it. Some plant foods have a heavy footprint, and almonds and avocados are fair examples.

The question is the whole diet, not the worst item in it. When Oxford researchers linked the real diets of 55,504 people to farm data, including the avocados and the almond milk, vegans came out at about a quarter of the greenhouse gas emissions and land use of high meat-eaters, and 46% of the water use. Swapping almond milk for oat milk is a reasonable move. Swapping it for a steak is not.

If you dropped the avocados, would you then be arguing for beans?

You can't be 100% vegan. Your phone, your medicine, your car tyres. Hypocrite.

What’s true in it. Correct. Nobody alive is harm-free, and vegans are not. The definition itself says “as far as is possible and practicable,” not “perfectly.”

But look at what the charge proves. If I am a hypocrite, the animal on your plate is still dead and the argument against killing him is still standing; my failings don’t feed him. “You can’t do everything” has never been a reason to do nothing anywhere else: a man doesn’t skip paying his debts because he can’t pay all of them. The possible and practicable is a lot, and dinner is the easiest part of it.

If I threw my phone in the river tonight, would that change what you eat tomorrow?

There are bigger problems. Worry about people first.

What’s true in it. There are bigger problems, and human suffering is one of them.

This objection could be raised against any good act, and it never asks you to do the bigger thing; it asks you to do nothing. Caring is not a fixed ration that animals use up. And the problems overlap more than they compete: a plant-based world would farm about 75% less land, with the rest available for people or for forest. The men who have done the most for people have rarely been the ones who said the animals could wait.

Which bigger problem are you working on, and does the chicken help with it?

Denying moral status

Animals are said not to feel, not to matter, or to be well treated anyway.

Animals don't feel pain the way we do.

What’s true in it. It is hard to know what another creature experiences. That is a real problem and not a silly one.

The science has moved a long way. In 2024 the New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness, signed by hundreds of researchers, stated that there is “strong scientific support” for conscious experience in mammals and birds, and “at least a realistic possibility” in all vertebrates, fishes included. Trout have nociceptors with properties similar to those of mammals and birds, and a painful stimulus changes their behavior for a prolonged time. The declaration adds that when the possibility is realistic, it is irresponsible to ignore it.

How sure would you need to be that an animal feels nothing before you would cut it?

I only buy humane, local or small-farm meat.

What’s true in it. Some small farms do treat animals with real care, and that is better than a factory shed.

Two things. First, almost none of the meat men actually eat comes from that farm: more than 200 million chickens are slaughtered every day, and they are not coming from your uncle’s place. Second, even the best farm ends the same way, with the killing of an animal that did not want to die and did not need to. Kind treatment before an unnecessary killing is better than cruelty. It is still an unnecessary killing.

Is there a humane way to kill someone who doesn’t want to die and doesn’t have to?

Nobody dies for milk or eggs. Cows need milking and chickens lay anyway.

What’s true in it. A cow is not killed to fill a glass, and a hen is not killed to lay an egg. If that were the whole story, vegetarian would be enough.

A cow gives milk for the same reason any mammal does: she has given birth. Dairy means keeping her giving birth, and taking the calf, because the milk is sold rather than drunk by him. Joaquin Phoenix put it bluntly on the Oscars stage: we artificially inseminate a cow, take her baby when she gives birth, and put the milk in our coffee. Then ask what a dairy keeps a cow for once her milk falls off, and what a laying flock does with the male chicks it has no use for. Nobody dies for the glass of milk. A great deal of dying happens around it.

Where do you think the calf goes?

We're smarter than them. Animals can't reason, so they don't have rights.

What’s true in it. Humans can reason in ways no other animal can, and that does matter for a lot of things.

It doesn’t matter for the one thing at issue, which is whether suffering counts. We don’t think a man with dementia or an infant may be harmed because he can’t do algebra; what we protect in them is the capacity to suffer, and animals have that too. Intelligence tells you what a creature can do. It tells you nothing about what may be done to him. The test of a man was never how he treats his equals.

If intelligence decided who may be harmed, what would stop the smarter man from harming you?

An argument from logic. No figures claimed.

Some animals are for eating and some are pets. A pig isn't a dog.

What’s true in it. That is how we were all raised, and the line between the two feels obvious from the inside.

Name the difference. Not the one in how we treat them, the one in them. A pig is as capable of fear and pain as a dog, and the reason you flinch at a dog on a hook and not a pig on one is that someone decided for you, before you could think about it, which animal was dinner. Other countries draw the line in other places. A line that moves with the map is a custom, not a fact.

What does the pig lack that the dog has, apart from your affection?

An argument from logic. No figures claimed.

If the animal is killed painlessly, what's the harm?

What’s true in it. A painless death is better than a painful one. Everyone agrees with that.

But the harm of being killed was never only the pain. It is the loss of everything that would have followed, which is why we don’t think a painless killing of a sleeping man, or of a dog, is harmless. And “painless” at the scale of more than 200 million chickens a day is a claim about an industry running at speed, not a promise anyone has kept. Even if it were kept, you would be left defending the killing of someone who did not need to die, gently.

If painless killing is no harm, why do you want it to be painless?

They'd die worse in the wild. A farm animal has a better life than a wild one.

What’s true in it. Nature is brutal. A wild animal’s death is rarely gentle, and that is not a sentimental point.

But no farmed animal was rescued from the wild. He was bred into a shed by us, and the comparison that matters is not shed versus savanna, it is shed versus not being bred for the shed at all. “Better than the wild” is not a standard we accept for anyone in our care: we don’t tell a dog he should be grateful he isn’t a wolf. The wild is the alternative for nobody on your plate.

Would you accept “better than the wild” as the standard for how your dog is kept?

An argument from logic. No figures claimed.

Practicality

Cost, access, jobs or hard cases make veganism unworkable.

Not everyone can be vegan. What about the Inuit, or a desert island?

What’s true in it. Right. Some people can’t, and in lower-income countries healthy plant-based diets were modelled to cost more, not less.

Veganism has never claimed otherwise. Its definition asks only for what is “possible and practicable.” A man in the Arctic or on a desert island is in a different position from a man standing in a supermarket. The existence of hard cases doesn’t settle the easy one. The question on the table is what you should do, with the options you actually have.

Are you on a desert island?

Vegan food is expensive.

What’s true in it. The meat substitutes in the fridge aisle are pricey, and in lower-income countries healthy plant-based diets were modelled to cost more.

In upper-middle and high-income countries, an Oxford modelling study found healthy, sustainable diets, vegetarian and vegan ones among them, were up to 22–34% cheaper than current diets. Beans, lentils, rice, oats and potatoes are among the cheapest foods in the store. The expensive part of vegan eating is buying imitations of meat. Skipping the meat costs less.

What does a week of your groceries cost now? Price it with beans where the meat is.

What about farmers and the jobs in the meat industry?

What’s true in it. Real families depend on this work, and any change has to reckon with them.

Start with what the work does to the men who do it. A systematic review of slaughterhouse employment found workers have higher rates of mental health problems, depression and anxiety in particular. These are jobs most of us would not wish on our sons. Demand shifts gradually, farmers still grow food, and no other industry gets to continue only because people are employed in it.

Would you want your son working the kill floor?

My family and friends would never put up with it.

What’s true in it. That is a real cost, and it ends more vegan diets than any argument does: social issues were among the top reasons former vegetarians and vegans gave for quitting.

It is also the reason this group exists. The man who is the only vegan at every table needs other men who are not asking him to explain himself. Families adjust to a lot of things, and most of them adjust to this faster than the man fears, once he stops apologising for it. The holiday is the people. The animal is the one part of it you can change.

Which of them would actually walk away, and which would just need a month?

It's too hard. I travel, I can't cook, there's nothing at restaurants.

What’s true in it. It takes more thought than the default, and in some places it takes real effort.

Hard is not the same as wrong, and men do hard things for smaller reasons than this. Beans, rice, bread, oats, potatoes and peanut butter are in every shop on earth; the difficulty is mostly in the first month, learning a dozen meals, and after that it is a habit like any other. If the only argument left is that it is inconvenient, the argument about the animal has already been conceded.

What is the hardest meal of your week to make vegan? Let’s look at that one.

An argument from logic. No figures claimed.

Identity

Veganism is cast as unmanly, extreme or for other people.

Real men eat meat. Veganism is unmanly.

What’s true in it. For most of history providing meat was part of a man’s job, so the feeling has deep roots.

Ask what the manly virtues actually are: strength, courage, providing, protecting those who can’t protect themselves. None of them is served by harming an animal that cannot fight back when you have no need to. In a study of 21,942 men, those aged 60 to 70 who ate the most healthy plant foods had an 18% lower risk of erectile dysfunction. There is nothing masculine about rape, murder or torture, whoever the victim is. Protecting the vulnerable is the masculine thing.

What do you think a man is for? Start there and see where it leads.

Veganism is extreme.

What’s true in it. Some vegans are hard to be around, and cutting back is better than not cutting back.

Look at the definition: veganism seeks to exclude exploitation of and cruelty to animals “as far as is possible and practicable.” That is a modest standard: don’t harm them where you can avoid it. What deserves the word extreme is the practice it objects to, more than 200 million chickens slaughtered every day. Moderation is a virtue for things that are fine in small amounts. We don’t ask for moderation in harming someone.

Which is the extreme position: killing 200 million a day, or declining to?

Stop preaching. Vegans are militant, self-righteous, a cult.

What’s true in it. Some vegans are hard to be around, and a lecture over dinner persuades nobody.

Two things, though. You came to a debate box; nobody is at your table. And whether vegans are annoying is a question about vegans, not about the animal, who is in the same position whoever speaks for him. A man doesn’t decide whether a debt is owed by how he feels about the one collecting it.

If every vegan you’d met had been likeable, would the argument be any different?

An argument from logic. No figures claimed.

Veganism is a white, rich, Western thing.

What’s true in it. Privilege is real, and the cost argument has teeth in poor countries: an Oxford modelling study found healthy plant-based diets cost more, not less, in low-income countries.

The history runs the other way. Pythagoras was Greek, Gandhi was Indian, Thich Nhat Hanh was Vietnamese, Dick Gregory came to it through the civil-rights movement, and Benjamin Zephaniah was vegan from the age of 13. In high-income countries the same Oxford study found these diets up to 22–34% cheaper than what people eat now. The man with a supermarket and a paycheck cannot borrow the Inuit’s exemption.

Which part of the privilege argument applies to you?

Plant-based is a corporate agenda. Gates and the WEF want you eating bugs.

What’s true in it. Money shapes food messaging on every side, and a man is right to ask who paid for a study.

So ask it of every source on this site; each one is linked and most are in peer-reviewed journals you can read yourself. But an argument is not refuted by naming someone else who makes it. The reasons to stop eating animals were written down by Pythagoras, Plutarch and Tolstoy long before anyone had a foundation, and they stand or fall on their own. Nobody here is selling you anything but a question.

Which specific claim on this page do you think is false, and who do you think paid for it?

Environmental counterclaim

Local, grass-fed or regenerative meat is said to beat plants for the planet.

Local meat is better for the planet than imported vegetables.

What’s true in it. Transport does produce emissions, and local food has other things going for it.

Transport is a small part of food’s footprint. A study of US households found it accounts for 11% of food’s greenhouse gas emissions, and final delivery from producer to store only 4%; production is 83%. The authors calculated that shifting less than one day a week of red meat and dairy to other foods cuts more emissions than buying everything local. What you eat matters far more than where it came from.

If the goal is a smaller footprint, why start with the 11%?

Soy farming is destroying the Amazon, and vegans eat the soy.

What’s true in it. Soy is a real land-use problem, and deforestation is a real crisis.

Follow the soy. 77% of the world’s soy is fed to livestock for meat and dairy. Only 7% is eaten directly by people as tofu, soy milk, edamame and tempeh. And the dominant driver of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has been pasture for beef. If the rainforest is the concern, the lever is eating fewer animals.

Knowing where the soy goes, which diet uses more of it?

Cows graze land you can't farm. Ruminants turn grass we can't eat into food.

What’s true in it. True as far as it goes. An FAO analysis found 86% of what livestock eat worldwide is material people don’t eat, and a lot of grazing land would not grow crops.

The same analysis found livestock still eat a third of the world’s cereal harvest, and that producing a kilo of boneless meat takes an average of 2.8 kilos of human-edible feed from ruminants and 3.2 from pigs and chickens. The cow on the hillside is the picture; the feedlot and the broiler shed are the plate. A plant-based world would farm about 75% less land, and the rest could go back to forest and grassland.

How much of the meat you ate this week came off a hillside, and how much from a shed?

Regenerative grazing sequesters carbon. Grass-fed beef is carbon negative.

What’s true in it. Grazing can put carbon into soil. That part is real, and the Oxford researchers who reviewed it said so.

They also did the arithmetic. The sequestration potential of grazing management is 295 to 800 million tonnes of CO2-equivalent a year, which offsets only 20 to 60% of the grazing sector’s own emissions, and makes, in their words, “a negligible dent” in livestock emissions overall. It is also time-limited: soils reach a new carbon equilibrium within decades and the sequestration rate falls to zero, while the methane keeps coming. Their summary of the ambitious claims for holistic grazing was one word: wrong.

If the best case offsets part of the cattle’s own emissions for a few decades, where is the carbon-negative beef?

Cow methane is part of a natural cycle. It's not new carbon.

What’s true in it. Methane is short-lived, and it is fair to say the usual 100-year accounting handles it badly. The scientists behind the GWP* metric showed that the conventional approach falls short when methane emissions are stable or declining.

Short-lived is not harmless. The IPCC reports methane concentrations up 156% since 1750, far beyond anything in the natural record, and says that strong, rapid and sustained cuts in methane would limit warming. A stable herd keeps the extra methane topped up; the warming it already caused stays as long as the herd does. And the metric argument only works in your favour if herds are shrinking, which is exactly what we are asking for.

If the herd stays the same size, what happens to the warming it has already caused?

Anecdote

One man's experience, or a friend's, stands in for the evidence.

I tried going vegan and felt terrible.

What’s true in it. Take that at face value: you felt bad, and nobody can argue you out of how you felt. A badly planned vegan diet will do that, and if it was bad, a doctor or registered dietitian is the first call.

But it is evidence about the plan, not the principle. The dietetic position papers hold that appropriately planned vegan diets are adequate at every stage of life, from infancy to old age, and for athletes. The word doing the work is planned: enough calories, enough protein through the day, a reliable source of B12. Neither those papers nor anything else in our sourced list names a medical condition that requires eating animal flesh; if you know of one, name it and we will look. A man who felt bad on a vegan diet has learned something about his plan. He has not learned anything about veganism until the plan was sound.

What did a typical day of eating look like, and were you taking B12?

Most vegans quit anyway. 84% go back to meat.

What’s true in it. That number is real. A Faunalytics survey found that 84% of people who had ever been vegetarian or vegan had gone back, and that health was the most common reason they gave for quitting after not liking the food.

Look at who was quitting. The only motivation a majority of them gave for starting was health, not animals; a third lasted three months or less; and the reasons for stopping were being unsatisfied with the food, health, social pressure and inconvenience, in that order. That is a portrait of a diet tried as a diet, without planning or a reason that could survive a bad week. People quit gyms at a similar clip and nobody concludes that exercise does not work. A man who starts because of the animal and plans his food is a different case from the one in that survey.

Which of those four reasons would be yours?

The carnivore diet fixed my health. My friend cut out plants and feels great.

What’s true in it. People who overhaul their diet often feel better, and nobody can tell you that you don’t.

What one man’s story cannot do is separate what he added from what he removed. The week a man goes carnivore he also drops alcohol, sugar, seed-oil fried food and late-night snacks, and he starts paying attention. That is what trials are for, and the position papers on vegan diets rest on cohorts of tens of thousands, not on stories. Nothing in our sourced list names a condition that requires eating animal flesh.

What else changed the week you started?

I knew a vegan who was rude and sick. And Hitler was a vegetarian.

What’s true in it. Some vegans are rude and some are unwell, as some of everyone are. On Hitler: he described himself as a vegetarian from 1942, and historians accept that he mostly ate that way during the war.

He was also recorded eating ham and caviar in 1937, and the biographer Robert Payne argued the ascetic image was Goebbels’ propaganda. Either way it proves nothing: an argument is not refuted by the worst person who ever agreed with it, or the argument against murder would be in trouble. The animal’s case does not depend on the character of anyone making it.

If you learned the rudest man you know was right about something, would you change your view of the thing?

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