Real productive arguing whether a faceless stranger online is healthy.

You can be both healthy and unhealthy without animal products just the same as you can be consuming them. Organic and GMO foods aren’t limited to vegan and non-vegan diets, and processed food is readily available for both.

For me personally, it’s about not paying someone to kill an animal that did nothing to deserve being confined and slaughtered. I’m passing all my physicals and check-ins with flying colors, so I’ll continue not scarfing down dead animals down my throat.

The wikipedia article on Buddhist vegetarianism covers everything here. You can see from some writings that Buddha had made some concessions of eating animal flesh for members of the sangha, but that was only because of their specific context, where they were operating outside the normal economy and relying on receiving alms. Another passage sets further restrictions on monastics:

“… meat should not be eaten under three circumstances: when it is seen or heard or suspected (that a living being has been purposely slaughtered for the eater); these, Jivaka, are the three circumstances in which meat should not be eaten, Jivaka! I declare there are three circumstances in which meat can be eaten: when it is not seen or heard or suspected (that a living being has been purposely slaughtered for the eater); Jivaka, I say these are the three circumstances in which meat can be eaten.”

Another text further declares that there are five type of livelihood that the lay follower should not engage in - one of them is the selling of animal flesh.

So to situate these requirements in a modern context, it would be like a person living a vegan or vegetarian lifestyle to the best of their ability - but also accepting whatever the food pantry has to offer, or possibly going dumpster diving and eating whatever they find. The point is to seek to do the best we can, as much as our circumstances allow.

In Mahayana the injunctions against consuming animals only gets more direct and unequivocal. And in general Buddhist ethics are naturally very aligned with at least the reduction of suffering side of vegan ethics.

The example in your video sounds like it was largely a socioeconomic matter - they do what they can, with what they have. Of course it could also be, at least to some extent, that they haven’t engaged with the matter enough to move away from oyster consumption. They might not have a central nervous system, but things are not so cut and dry.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhist_vegetarianism

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zvE7W1l8wfY

I’m sorry, but if the insights of a respected and accomplished Standford scientist, who routinely contributes original science on the relevant subject matter, is spreading unscientific lunacy - then what exactly counts as good science to you?

Okay, but that’s a whataboutism and has nothing to do with animals. Think about the lowly bee, for example. People often get tripped up when it comes to bugs and veganism. They’re smaller, and must be dumber right? And anyway their minds work in such an alien way to our own that we can’t assume they even perceive things the way that we do.

And yet if you poke a beehive, the behavior of its inhabitants appears to be something that’s functionally identical to anger, and they begin defending their colony in a way where they seem to be expressing something that strongly resembles a lack of consent to having their home assaulted. So even in this case of such a vastly different kind of animal it’s natural to conclude that any taking of their honey is not wanted - not consented to - and thus is a form of exploitation.

There’s nothing absurd about valuing consent.