this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2024
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Vegans: .. uh.. now what?
Vegans consume fewer plants than anyone else. It takes a LOT of plants to raise a cow, pig, or chicken. From an economic point of view, meat is a way of refining mountains of cheap, plentiful, safe plant products into a scarce, harmful and addictive luxury product. This comes up a lot, you'd be amazed how many plants rights activists your average vegan runs into.
…addictive?
Addictive like water and air are addictive.
If you think pigs, chickens and cows have the same level of awareness and perception as broccoli, tomatoes or potatoes than you're the potato.
Humans have to eat and with the exception of a few minerals like salt, everything edible to humans is alive on some level. Vegansisn is making an ethical choice about reducing what causes the most pain fear and suffering in another. If I were to develop cancer, a tape worm or a virus should I also allow those living things to thrive as well or does "Uh, now what?" also apply to antibiotics?
Haha as always, you do what you can
Won't someone think of the plants feelings?!?
Eat fruits, the plants give those to you specifically to eat.
In the same way that cultists give human sacrifices to Cthulhu specifically to eat.
I'm pretty sure the fruits are screaming too.
The whole deal is that we get to eat the fruit, and in return we provide the seeds within with a nice nitrogen-rich deposition nice and far from the parent plant.
It's not a death cult, it's a sex cult. The fruits might be screaming, but not in pain
What? The fact that plants physically react to being cut has absolutely no bearing on whether they have conscious experience.
Maybe hundreds of years from now we can synthesize nutrients without involving any living cells. At that point, it could be seen as unethical to enslave, murder and eat billions of microbial cells. For the time being, our life still depends on other living things, so better get comfortable with having mixed feelings about survival.
But they're working on it!
Personally, I'm still just waiting on lab meat.
Doing chemistry by mixing chemicals is like fumbling in the dark. You tend to have ridiculously low yield, because you can’t really control which reaction takes place. It’s just a game of probabilities, which makes this gamble really expensive.
Living cells are doing chemistry the right way by combining specific materials and making specific products. Enzymes are very picky, but with them you can actually control the reactions. Making enzymes is just next level complexity and a story for another time.