Vegetarian and Vegan Statistics and more

Recently I was interested in the stastics of people living vegetarian or vegan. So I digged around a bit and found out some disappointing news: The number of vegetarians in the western world did not grow in the last 10-15 years! In spite of that general trend the fraction of vegetarians in the whole population of Germany shot up from only about 1% to around 10%, which you can find out when you check the first very elaborate source on Google Answers and compare it with more recent data from the European Vegetarian Union. Was the first data from the International Vegetarian Union wrong? After all Germany had around 80 million and not 56 million people at that time, but that mistake would only reduce the percentage further. Maybe that data was very old, which is likely when you consider slightly more recent data from the IVU stating that the percentage was between 2% and 3% in 1996. That would mean a 3 to 5 fold increase within just a decade! If you extrapolated that trend optimistically, you would get that half of all Germans would be Vegetarians around 2020!

Such a trend seems to be natural if you believe in moral progress, but what about the rest of the world where the number of vegetarians remains rather constant? Aren’t people open enough for new ideas or do the vegetarians there live in closed communities? Is the belief that society will make moral progress over the course of time nothing but wishful thinking? Does that only happen in special cases or under exceptional conditions? Why does Germany seem to behave so differently? I guess people only change if they see compelling reasons for change. Was the BSE-panic in Germany so shocking that so many people went vegetarian? Probably not, most people just refrained from eating beef for a while. Or are vegetarians in Germany just much better at spreading their meme? I don’t know.

What about vegans? There is less information about that group, but at least I found some refences, Most data was collected by the Vegan Research Panel, presenting some Vegan Statistics, but only for the UK and USA. The demographics for the rest of the world seem to be very poor. There is few data on wikipedia. I’ve not heard of even a rumor that that there are more than 2% of the population of any nation who see themselves as vegan. From my point of view that means that probably far less than 2% of all humans on this planet live with high ethical standards. That is a huge problem when you consider that this makes it quite unprobable that the programmers/educators of the first artificial general intelligences will belong to that group, which brings us back to the very first post on this blog, which was inspired by similar problems.

But hey, what do you expect from hairless apes who have more technology than moral maturity to use them wisely? Humans just started thinking deeply only about 3000 years ago in Egypt, Greece, India and China where the first philosophers appeared, while they have been living in an authoritarian, hierarchical, agricultural and speciesist civilization for more than twice that time. Deeply rooted memes that were aquired over the course of millenia don’t disappear that quickly. Hopefully, living in times where things change dramatically fast will make some people really think about all those memes.

Perhaps I should start with one of them, naming the meme that humans are omnivores or even carnivores. The only alternative you usually hear of is the idea that humans are herbivores, but there is another category: Like other primates humans are frugivores, according to a site about fruitarian diet evidences. The earlies hominids with access to very crude tools possibly live on a diet like that of chimpanzees, with animals, for example insects, only making up around 5% of the diet. To a certain degree those different categories are slightly misleading, because in principle all animals could eat all kinds of food, but there are more or less strong adaptions of the digestive system of a species to special kinds of food. Quite intrestingly the human genome is closer to the horse genome than to that of dogs. Does that tell us something, maybe that humans are more herbivore than omnivore/carnivore (see dog biology)?

Actually, we don’t need quasi-naturalistic hairsplitting, we just need empirical facts what’s good for humans and what not. There are some clear health benefits of the higher quality omega-3 fatty acids Docosahexaenoic Acid (DHA) and Eicosapentaenoic Acid (EPA) which are found in fish oils, but also in algae. V Pure is such an algae based supplement, which only contains DHA and EPA. I just attempted to order it, but I don’t have a credit card. Here in Germany it’s rather usual not to have a credit card, unlike in the USA for example. Why don’t all online shops use PayPal already?

And why don’t we have in vitro meat yet? As a technology with so many good reason for its use it should deserve more funding. We spend billions on a Large Hardon Collider while in vitro meat projects only get few millions? Do we value curiosity more highly than ethics – or even reason?

We are the eternally ascending life!

P.S.: I have registered the domain ourascent.com. It’s currently linked to this deathrant.net, until I will have devised and implemented better plans for it.