I have noticed that among philosophers, vegetarianism of one form or another is quite common. In fact, I became a vegetarian (technically a pescetarian) myself partly out of respect for an undergraduate philosophy professor. I am interested in finding out if there is a similar disproportion in the Less Wrong community.
I didn't request that this go into Yvain's survey because I want more information than just what animal products you do or don't eat; I'd also like to see nuances of the reasons behind your diet. There are a lot more shades than carnivore/vegetarian/vegan - if you want to be a vegetarian but are allergic to soy and gluten, that's a compelling reason to diversify protein sources, for instance. I'd also like to hear about if you avoid any plant foods (if you think they're farmed in a way that's environmentally destructive or that hurts people or if you have warm fuzzy feelings for plants, maybe). Here are some questions that come to mind:
- What foods, if any, do you normally avoid for reasons other than pure culinary taste, cost, individual health concerns (allergies, diabetes, etc.) or ease of preparation? (Avoiding foods that are considered revolting or just non-food in your culture of origin, like balut or fried locusts, counts as "culinary taste".)
- What are your reasons for avoiding those foods?
- How strictly do you avoid them? For instance, will you eat them if you are served them while a guest at a meal, or if you are hungry and there is nothing else available? Do you check to see if they're in potentially questionable dishes at restaurants (and if so, do you trust what the server says?)
- If you have children or plan to have children, will you expect or encourage them to avoid the same foods?
- Do you try to convince your friends and family members to make dietary choices similar to yours? If so, have you ever succeeded?
- If you avoid a class of foods with valuable nutritive content (as opposed to Twinkies), what do you replace it with to get complete nutrition?
- What are your attitudes to people who are more restrictive in their diets than you are? Less restrictive?
- What is the timeline of your dietary restrictions? (Transitions, lapses, increases or decreases in restrictiveness, etc.)
- If you have not avoided these foods for your entire life, how much did you enjoy them when you ate them, and do you still sometimes want to eat them?
- Is there anything else about your choice of diet that might be relevant or interesting?
It's not a coincidence. People farming meat animals do so because they expect to be able to sell the meat. If they consistently find that they can't sell it all, or have enough surplus floating around that the price drops and underperforming farms can no longer economically stay in the business, then some farms will shut down. If you've eaten 40 hogs in your life, then you have generated demand for 40 hogs. If there's a farm that had produced 40,000 hogs' worth of meat in your lifetime, then it takes 1,000 people like you to support that farm. It's a problem of collective action to get the necessary number of people to quit patronizing it, but that sort of thing is relatively elementary for LW.
You seem to be assuming that meat farming scales linearly in most respects with the number of people consuming the meat. I'd question that assumption, and assume instead that there are marked threshold effects.
Possibly 1000 people swearing off pork would instead have the effect of driving that same farm to a ruthless cost-cutting program, so that it could keep up its volume by selling at lower prices; this would likely be to the hogs' detriment, since they are the "stakeholders" least likely to raise a politically effective complaint about such changes. And frankly, given what I know of the industry, this is a scarily plausible scenario.