I don’t blame you for not knowing any better, there’s a lot of persistent myths and outright lies about veganism, plant-based lifestyles, and nutrition. But you are spreading misinformation again, about protein. Our society’s obsession with protein has little to do with science, and a lot to do with marketing. In the first place the vast majority of people do not need nearly as much protein as they think they do. It’s so easy to get adequate protein even on a plant-based diet, that as long as you’re at least mostly eating real food and getting enough calories, you are getting enough protein without even having to worry about it.
Even the whole “plants don’t have complete proteins” is a myth. Just about all plants have all essential amino acids. What the protein combining myth points to is that the amino acid ratios in plants are a little bit different than the ratios in our muscle tissues, with some plants being low in a key amino, and other plants being high in that amino but also low in another. Getting what we need is as easy as being sure to eat a variety of plants. A person does not even need to make sure they’re eating rice and beans in the same meal - they could do just as well by either eating a larger helping of one or the other, and/or eating one and then the other at another time or day.
The big takeaway here is to consider that maybe your perspective on plant-based lifestyles is being informed in the same way as if someone who only ever ran Windows started trying to tell you what it’s like to use Linux. Maybe it’s worth checking out the perspectives of people who actually have experience with the thing and know what they’re talking about.
I understand that everyone has different circumstances that make a plant-based transition easier or harder, or maybe even entirely unfeasible, and that’s okay. We’re okay as long as we’re doing what we can with what we have.
On the other hand consider trying to shift your perspective on it. I commented in another thread about the remarkable benefits of going plant-based for my depression, and the thing to understand here is that going plant-based can have near-miraculous benefits for a wide range of things like that. So consider the possibility that a lot of what might be making it hard to switch is that the consumption of animal products is keeping everyone in suppressed, unmotivated, lethargic, or even outright depressed states of mind.
It’s a bit of a chicken and egg problem, but instead of seeing a plant-based transition as a burden, consider that working through the challenges might be just the medicine that a person needs to reach a state of mind where, say, things like home cooking begin to feel possible again.
Again I want to be clear - I know there are circumstances where it’s not realistically possible for a person to go fully vegan, and not realistically possible for a person to do their own cooking. We should be seeking ways to fix that on a societal level. However what I’m telling you is that what everyone thinks is possible is being perceived through the lens of lifestyles that are making everything that much harder - working through that tough transition to being fully plant-based expands the range of what we think is possible. Life becomes significantly more doable on plants.
Oh, and for both health and ethics there is no meaningful difference between which particular animals you choose to eat. For example you’re still progressing heart disease regardless of whether you’re consuming 29 grams of saturated fat, or “only” 23 grams. And a chicken is every bit as capable of contemplating their own suffering as a cow is.
I lean in favor of rebirth, but via naturalistic processes rather than projections of our own moral wants. I don’t need a supernatural explanation to recognize that whatever is most irreducibly “me” was born at least once. Why would I assume it would only be once?
If we follow from that premise, we can also chart a kind of probabilistic, umm, not karma but something not far off: If we’re reborn after death, how do we determine what kind of life our next one is going to be? Pretty obvious actually, just look at what kind of life everyone has already. If, for example, only 1% of humans have an especially good life, it looks like there’s a a really slim chance any one of us is going to be the one who gets to have that kind of life.
By contrast, 99% of humans are living in increasingly bad conditions, lower wages, higher prices and virtually every economic card stacked against us, as well as *gestures broadly*. It’s remarkably more likely that anyone would be reborn as a 99 percenter.
But why should we assume that we would only ever be reborn as a human? The total human population right now is 8.2 billion. There are estimated to be about 20 quadrillion ants in the world. And more than 44 billion animals have been bred into existence and slaughtered for food this year alone. Are you more likely to be reborn a human, an ant, or someone else’s property?
There’s a consequence here if rebirth is the law of the land. It would mean that death is not an escape after all. The only way to give yourself your best chance of a better next life would be to put in effort to make the world better for everyone. There is no way out, only through.