If you utterly dismiss farmers as incorrigibly stupid rather than trying to talk with them, they will never change. If you leave agricultural workers to the wolves while the fascists pretend to have their backs, will they support you or the fascists?

Did you know most of the majority-black counties in the USA are rural areas in the South that vote overwhelmingly for Democrats? Are they also ejeets that deserve to get their cows screwed?

What about the people who get screwworms in their injuries? That's gonna be the poor bastards who get employed to work with the livestock. Who works in shitty underpaid farm labour? Poor whites, black people, immigrants. People who have few other choices.

Snobbery against rural areas is just classism. It's how Republicans could get such a grip on them in the first place. Go ahead and only struggle amongst educated people in the cities and scratch your head when when your country stays fascist. Watch the rural-urban divide get wider.

I live in what is considered "regional" Australia

The inbred hicks who think that sharing a name with a coloniser who died a hundred years ago is a flex resent it when they're shown up as simple, unworldly people

They resent the stereotypes, but they go out of their way to reinforce all of the worst of them

Luckily, they're not Queenslanders, or Territorians, so it could be worse

I still have say that I live in paradise, but I choose my company

It's the now classic answer to "Why is this happening now?" Trump fucked it up, Biden tried to fix it without any sense of urgency because he just assumed he'd get eight years, and then Trump came back and fucked it up again.

Spicy bean chili with crispy golden cornbread is a classic American dish that will stick to your ribs pardner!

I can nearly eat my weight in hummus and butter garlic naan with seitan tikka masla, very filling and so delicious!

Or if you're ever not sure you'll get full enough, kick back a baked potato 15 minutes before the meal, it'll give you something to digest.

Slightly related I'm a big fan of trying to get 30g+ of fiber every day, and 1 tsp of psyllium husk in water before each meal. I'll end up staying fuller longer and feel better.

I'm not vegetarian either, but bean quesadillas are always a good, cheap, and easy meal when I'm lazy. It can be as easy as open a can of black beans, drain and rinse, put on a big tortilla with cheese and some jarred salsa, cook both sides in a frying pan. If I'm feeling like doing a little more, I'll add some diced tomato and jalapenos. You can be eating in as little as 10 minutes.

I like a good bowl meal. The template is grain/pseudo-grain, legume, two or three veggies, sauce. So you could have a quinoa and chickpea bowl with pickled red onions, kale, and roasted red peppers, topped with a hummus tahini sauce. Or a black bean and rice bowl with pickled jalapeños, grilled corn (which is also technically a grain but it still works as a vegetable) and chopped red tomatoes, with an avocado crema sauce. It's extremely flexible, easy to make, and good for meal prepping. You can add an additional protein if it's still not filling enough, like fried tofu or crumbled tempeh or seitan "chicken".

It's far from the only way to make an easy, filling veggie meal, but it's one of the easiest frameworks for people used to the "meat, carb, vegetable side dish" style of meal.

I know you didn't ask me but I also grew up on meat and potatoes.

I've recently discovered lentil enchiladas are very tasty. Cook the lentils in vegetable broth, after you have cooked lentils ( pretty good on there own) follow any enchilada recipe and use the lentils instead of meat.

I like to cook the lentils a day before so they are already prepared. The instant pot makes cooking both dried lentils and dried beans quite easy with minimal work.

So I grew up 95% vegetarian. Stir fry can be adapted to fit just about anyone's taste, and is dead simple to make (and filling).

The first thing your going to want to learn is how to cook rice. This might be in a pot, rice cooker, or something else. Find what works for you.

Now with your rice cooking, do a hard pan fry of some tofu. Your goal is to get it crispy via the highest heat your stove can put out (think wok levels if you can). The trick is to use a firm (or extra firm) tofu that has been patted dry and cut into small cubes, oil and a lot of heat. From here add in a few veggies that you like and top with a basic teriyaki sauce.

That's a basic stir fry on rice. Mix the rice into the pan and you start down the road of fried rice.

Yeah not eating enough protein does that. Try TVP. It's an extremely versatile (Chilli, Lasagne, meatloaf, meat balls, bolognese, Asian fried noodles etc.) and cheap (for now) replacement for ground beef. It seems to have a better amino acid profile than chicken:

Chicken: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Total-amino-acids-and-amino-acid-content-g-100-g-meat_tbl1_338348672

TVP: https://www.admanimalnutrition.com/webcenter/content/conn/WCC1/uuid/dDocName%3ATVPSPECSHEET

It blows chicken out of the water regarding minerals like iron, magnesium or calcium. Compare the TVP-spec-sheet with this. Tofu (if made with gypsum as a coagulant) is even more packed with calcium, where 100g can already mean more than 1/2 of your daily needs.

Chicken comes with more vitamins (but also antibiotically resistant bacteria, chloride, growth hormones and animal suffering), while TVP brings anti-oxidants in the form of isoflavinoids.

Yeah it's based on soybeans but you can see tons of manly man vegan body builders eating that stuff on a daily basis. They got big breasts but those are not from phythoestrogens.

Regarding your Burger addiction. TVP is the perfect remedy.

A quadrillion of websites exist for fire vegan recipes (which take care of the vitamins missing with TVP) with one of the most prolific one being https://www.noracooks.com/.

Beans tacos. Basically cook canned black beans in taco seasoning and some water until the water cooks down. Then just throw whatever you like with your tacos on it. Cooking an onion in with the beans makes it even better, but it requires chopping an onion

In general I've found that a lot of meat recipes work well if you replace the meat with beans or mushrooms.

Yeah, there’s a really high Indian population in my area, and India has a huge vegetarian population. So most of the restaurants around me actually have decent veg options. I doubt I’d ever go fully vegan, but even casual “eat meat when you feel like it, but don’t intentionally make it the centerpiece of every meal” vegetarianism is extremely easy nowadays.

Hail seitan!

Meh. Beef is pretty expensive to create in terms of raw resources and work. Much cheaper to just turn the cattle feed into human food.

think we can enlighten the maggots to switch their diets?

Well I think if you eat those we can all agree that is an ok exception to eating vegetarian, it is more like self defense at that point.

It's pretty rare for it to infect people. It does happen, but humans are not a prefered host

You are the meat, in that case.

Republic…. Actually they are reptiles