Great, they’ve ruined vegetarianism.
The idea that it's a worthy goal to minimize suffering caused through your food choices, however, is unaffected by learning about harvesting deaths or by learning that plants might be very minimally conscious.
Wonder how deep that rabbit hole will be in 100 years.
The equivalent of conscientious vegetarians of the future may be those that only eat lab grown human meat, of their own grown cells. Me-steak is the meat of the future. Of course, genetics probably means some of us taste better than others...
You'd have to eat organic molecule synthesized through a non-biological, industrial process that feeds on energy harvested in space, so that all solar energy on earth can be given back to the wilderness.
Yes, using terrestrial solar and wind energy deprives geologic, atmospheric, marine and wild biological processes from the energy they're naturally due, and it is not ethical to use it anymore than it is to eat animal flesh.
More seriously, we're dissipative structures, and we can't survive (i.e. keep our inner entropy low) without raising the entropy in our surrounding. So there's gonna be some environmental disruption if we want to survive, and it's going to be at the expense of other organisms, be they cute, plain or disgusting.
Edit: with all that said, I think our current meat consumption rate is suicidal for environmental reasons. I do think we should limit the amount of meat we eat, but not out of compassion for non-human animals. I may have another opinion if I didn't have kids, but since they're there I'd rather limit as much as possible the cataclysm that's unfolding before our very eyes.
My one quibble is the defeatist “it’s going to be”. Advances in lower-level physics can open up new possibilities. Even now terrestrial solar, while depriving some types organisms from sunlight, can provide shade for other types of organisms to thrive, and who knows what it would be on balance.
I doubt that avoiding any environmental change is in itself a sensible goal, and framing it as always “disruption at the expense of other organisms” seems not constructive. Like any organism, we change the environment purely by existing and interacting with other organisms. Becoming more and more well-off, stable and conscientious ourselves, learning what conscience is and how many conscious agents are around us that are not us, we’ll have resources to iterate and become better at taking care of those agents, from not breaking them up unnecessarily to helping them thrive and build up complexity themselves.
Eventually, if we don’t go extinct too soon, as a result of our growth I believe we’d expand our definition of “us” to include life and nail energy absorption enough to shift the rising entropy entirely to the outside of that scope. That picture of food being synthesized industrially in space, ensuring nothing is harmed in the process—along those lines.
My point here is that renewable energy has an ecologic footprint that goes beyond the ostensible animal deaths caused by the blades of wind turbines. It is a zero sum game, and it is disruptive in ways we can't all anticipate (especially in an economic growth context).
Whether or not other organisms are conscious is not very relevant to our survival. What's relevant is how useful they are to environmental stability.
Also re. taking care, nature is generally brutal. Few wild organisms die of old age, sipping mojitos on the beach.
Starvation, injury, disease or being eaten is the norm, and that chaos is part of what makes ecosystems resilient (within bounds that we're currently breaking).
Sure, other organisms are not relevant to our survival.
What I thought is that if we become able to capture lots of energy from e.g. our local star to maintain a huge sphere of order and low entropy within our habitat, that’d remove the conflict between us vs. other organisms. Basically “our survival” would be expanded to the survival of the whole system of conscious lifeforms we have around.
I mean, on one hand, preserving our natural habitat might keep us humans smart and efficiently developing new cool ways of capturing & dissipating energy at larger scales.
On the other hand, perhaps preserving the whole system of organisms engaging in things like killing each other for whatever purpose within our giant low-entropy sphere will be utterly useless from the universal meaning of life point of view—as in, not at all contributing to energy capture and dissipation.
If that’ll be the case I imagine we’ll evolve quite differently… Something very cyberpunk and AI-heavy comes to mind. Simpler organisms would keep dying away as we & our technology alone skyrocket in accordance with that universal purpose all the way, all the way until the expedited heat death of the universe. Kinda scary how us meatbags too become optional in that scenario.
I can’t imagine anyone would read the whole article and draw the conclusion their click-baity title suggests.
http://www.wri.org/blog/2016/04/sustainable-diets-what-you-n...
So why can't eating plants be morally superior to eat animals.
Some moral arguments I can agree with:
A mostly plant based diet is less resource intensive. Since most wars are about scarcity of resources, eating less meat is voting against war in a tangible way. It is about promoting peace globally.
There are health benefits to eating less meat.
Meat is very water intensive. Water shortages are a big deal globally at the moment.
There are no doubt others. Just quick and dirty off the cuff thoughts.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/10/thousands-of-diy-foo...
"The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?"
I seriously don't personally like this line of reasoning. At. All.
So, I don't think so.
To each his own.
On the other hand, it's also true that war is often caused by greedy leadership.
I think there is a huge difference between the world before the green revolution and after, and I personally think that this difference is a big part of why we haven't seen major power wars after the middle of the 20th century.
World war two was the last major power war, and it was also the last major power war fought when there were not enough calories for everyone to eat their fill. Coincidence?
After world war two (well, after the 'green revolution' that happened in the mid 20th century) there was enough food, and... you could argue that we haven't had a direct major power war since then.
I personally think that the fact that getting enough calories is generally not a problem anymore has a lot to do with the fact that we haven't seen any major power wars lately.
Are there? To what extent?
I'd very much like to see the science to back up a blanket statement like that.
All the information in the world is but a google search away...
Our current animal feed system is terrible (grow large quantities of monocrop corn and soy on high quality arable land using vast quantities of fertilizer and terrible soil conservation practices).
But farm animals are an important part of the 'circuit' of a viable small farm. Chickens and ducks can help with weeding. Goats and sheep can turn sod into manure, one of them best fertilizers. Having meat/lard/soup bones in the freezer is an important way to get through the winter.
Legumes don't produce a complete protein that we can survive on by themselves. Vegetarian diets tend to skew too far in the direction of carbohydrates. Plants that produce fats and proteins in the quantities we needs (nuts, avocados, etc.) are pretty much as water hungry as animals.
A pure vegetarian diet may not in fact turn out to be more energy efficient or environmentally sound if it just replaces our monocrop animal feed farms with monocrops of unhealthy insuling-provoking carbohydrates.
Historically, highly hierarchical or slaveholding agricultural societies fed their slaves almost exclusively maize/rice/wheat -- and kept the meat/fish for elites. If you look at the archaeological record and remains of those bodies, the health effects are obvious. Short stature, dental health issues, bone density problems, shortened lifespans. Roman soldiers were terrified of their taller and stockier Germanic/Celtic foes who lived on a more well-rounded diet with more meat and dairy.
What about if you add milk and eggs?
Whoops.
0. The pedant in me says kingdomist.
My dislike of the tendency for vegetarians to be all holier than thou was solidified while I was homeless and being harassed online by a holier than thou vegan* who claimed to be vegan because she couldn't tolerate the suffering of the farm raised animals. Meanwhile, she took glee in adding to my suffering, though I was extremely ill and desperately poor because of it.
I am a big fan of "go pray in your closet." Making food choices because you sincerely believe they are morally right is totes cool. Being an asshole to anyone who doesn't eat like you, not so much.
* To make matters worse, she wasn't really a committed vegan. In cold weather, she happily added cheese to her diet. She just preferred to call herself vegan for the virtue signaling associated with it.
Personally I fly a lot (I don't particularly want to), so therefore I could never use that argument. But I have met people who fly as much as I do who try to pull the morally superior diet card and I just move on because they have missed the point entirely.
I still find the vegetarian chism of the past incredible - how can there be a conflict about advocating for less meat consumption by everyone vs trying to convert them all the way to vegetarianism? If you get 50% of the population to eat half of what they had before, it beats converting the 2% you can optimistically get in the short-to-medium term vastly, so just do both.
It's the Copenhagen interpretation of Ethics again - if you interact with a problem in any way, eg by improving it a little, it is now your fault and responsibility to the end. Meanwhile, if you had no interaction, you are morally free not to do anything.
These people definitely exist, as you’ve illustrated, but in my experience they are a small minority.
What’s interesting to me is that vegetarians/vegans have this reputation for being in-your-face about it, yet in reality the experience reported by my veg friends, and later what I’ve witnessed myself, is that they don’t really advertise it or comment on other people’s choices, and when it does come up (e.g. while discussing where to go for lunch) it is all the meat eaters who predictably start in with the wisecracks and the pre-emptive defense of why they eat meat and why being vegetarian is stupid/weak/unnatural/unamerican/etc. You can see it in all the responses to this article!
This is remarkably consistent here up and down the east coast anyway, I don’t know if it’s different in other parts of the country. I’m just sort of bemused by the difference between reputation and reality.
On visits home, I have been accused of being vegetarian because I don't necessarily have meat as part of Every. Single. Meal. For health reasons, it is not unusual for me to choose a vegetarian option. Even when I do eat meat, it is typically the smallest portion of anyone at the table.
I have thought very long and hard about food and ethics. I occasionally spell that out if it seems pertinent for some reason. Getting on my high horse about how my food choices are ethical or about the amount of time I have put into deciding my position on the matter as a means to piss on other people never strikes me as pertinent.
So it rather annoys me when a) I am equally given hell for my food choices by both vegetarians and by those who perceive me as a vegetarian and b) vegetarians inevitably assume that they have thought more on the matter and researched it more than I have simply because I don't agree with them.
Most of the world is raised on either a shame model or a guilt model. If you are choosing to not eat meat for ethical reasons, it isn't surprising that meat eaters will feel judged by you. Most vegetarians are, in fact, judgy about the diets of others. It isn't hard to convey that fact and meat eaters are not oblivious to it.
I rarely get hassled these days, in part because I mostly either eat alone or with my two adult sons. When I do attend a meal at a social function, if anyone comments on a lack of meat on my plate, I go out of my way to make it a non issue. I don't talk about food ethics. I usually avoid talking about my medical situation. I try to frame it as "Oh, the (vegetarian option) just looked scrumptious! I really love cheese dishes!"
Because I am a big believer in go pray in your closet and not interested in making my food choices a political issue between me and friends, family or acquaintances. So I go to great lengths to frame it as a personal choice that implies nothing at all about them.
One way to understand why certain vegans act like this, is to learn about Secondary Traumatic Stress Disorder. This is more common than it looks and watching documentaries like Earthlings can definitely trigger it on people who are not well equipped to witness this level of violence.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24942105
If you count cephalopods as "fish", some species are as smart as primates.
Plus fish are in the same kingdom as any other animal , which means you can hardly be a "vegetarian" unless you only eat vegetables (well, fungi and yeasts are OK too IMHO).
Interestingly some do it for moral/religious reasons and some do it for health reasons, and it does seem the latter are the ones who want to bring it up.
Of course this analysis ignores things like environmental consequences, and creating new animals through fish farms.
(I'm a vegetarian who doesn't eat fish, just thought it was interesting to hear marginal difference in consequences being considered for once.)
This is true in the animal kingdom as well. Especially for a farm animal, being eaten. If wolves can catch deer or elk, they can catch a cow. I mean you've seen cows right, not very fast. :) This is also an unfortunate consequence when animal rights activists decide to release domesticated animals, they don't know how to survive in the wild. My family would always take cats people didn't want anymore on our farm, and they disappeared quickly. We assumed coyotes, because their parents didn't teach them how to be careful. :( Instinct can only get you so far, you need to be taught as well, and generations in captivity means the parents didn't know what to teach.
And food gets scarce in winter. I was watching a documentary where one chipmunk was storing acorns, and another was hiding nearby, and just stealing them. I don't remember the name, but it was on netflix, and it was focused on high speed, high resolution camera work. The animals seemed to be an excuse to use the cameras, lol.
Also, if I had to die, I'd rather have a humane execution like a farm animal, rather than being eaten or starving. I know there are 'documentaries' that portray suffering on farms, but the farmers I know take good care of their animals. At least in the dairy magazines my dad gets, they are constantly stressing animal comfort, prevention of disease, reduce stress, etc. Because this maximizes production. First, those documentaries are biased, and second, those farmers aren't good at their jobs. Our cows seem happy and content, and why shouldnt they be? Plentiful food and water, we keep threats away(which is unfortunately why predators are often endangered or threatened), we do everything we can to make them comfortable, healthy, and happy. Keep in mind cows don't care about being in captivity, they don't have the concept of freedom. They just want food, safety, and mating.
Hope this doesn't sound harsh, but that argument is wrong. A good farm is supposed to be the ideal environment for the animal, the same way a garden is supposed to be the ideal place for a vegetable. The animals die much more humanely than in the wild. I facepalm every time i hear on of those "it is more ethical to hunt than buy from the store" arguments.