discussvegan.

Isn't it more about reducing (flexitarian/reducetarian) than going fully vegan?

Short answer: Reduction is real progress, but whatever reason made you cut back doesn't switch off at 50%. It applies to the next animal too.

Exhibit A
What a global shift to plant-based would cut
−76% agricultural land used for food
−49% food-related greenhouse gas emissions

Reduction captures a share of this; going further captures more. The reason that justifies the first cut is the same reason that justifies the next.

Poore & Nemecek (2018), via Our World in Data

The objection

“Surely the realistic answer is everyone cutting back, not a few people going fully vegan.”

The answer

Agreed, more than you’d expect. Reduction is genuinely good. Someone who halves their meat spares real animals and real emissions, and ten thousand reducers can outweigh a hundred purists. Anyone who sneers at the flexitarian is being both unkind and strategically stupid. Reduce, by all means, and welcome.

But watch the word doing the work: “more about reducing than going vegan.” That little than treats reduction as the destination when it’s really a direction. To test that, ask the only question that matters: why reduce at all?

Whatever your answer (the animals suffer, the planet warms, none of it is necessary), that reason doesn’t switch off at 50%. If a pig’s suffering justified eating fewer pigs, it covers the next pig too. If the emissions justified cutting back, they justify cutting further. The logic that got you to “less” has no natural stopping point short of “none, where you reasonably can”, which is simply veganism’s actual definition: avoiding harm “as far as is possible and practicable”, not perfection. Reduction is the first flight of that same staircase.

So no sneering at the reducer. They’re doing something real, and doing it for the right reason. Just one request: be honest about your own reason.

If the reason you’ve already cut back is a real reason, ask what it is about the remaining animals on your plate that makes it suddenly stop applying.

Sources

  1. Poore & Nemecek, Reducing food's environmental impacts through producers and consumers (Science, 2018)
  2. The Vegan Society, Definition of veganism
  3. Our World in Data, If the world adopted a plant-based diet we would reduce global agricultural land use from 4 to 1 billion hectares (Poore & Nemecek, 2018)