I remember there was a fictional advertisement for such a product in a sci-fi story, but not exactly where.
Beyond the Blue Event Horizon by Frederik Pohl
The artificial food was called CHON.
I don’t think there are enough current or future vegans in the world to negate anything at all.
There is genuine debate around whether plants suffer. The answer seems to be “no,” at least not in a way we’d recognise as suffering. But that ambiguity is more than enough to spawn a movement. Ethically-harvested honey doesn’t harm bees, for instance, and family dairies can blur the line between animal husbandry and petkeeping.
Familly diaries also comes with they own sets of abuse forgotten because "they love their cows". At the end it’s always a speechless being exploited to serve the dominant interest.
Which is just another data point to make the ethics tricky.
Nah, you can never be 100% sure, its one of those situations reachable only on paper.
Even if it didn't, a guarantee in product marketing is a promise and quasi-legal committment, not a certification of objective universal cosmic truth.
In some cases, everybody knows that statistically there will be at least one case where the guarantee is broken, but that doesn't void anything.
I’ve been vegan 25 years and would be happy to silence the “but what about plants” people once and for all.
Mostly the “even broccoli screams when you rip it from the ground” is a joke more often than actual trolling.
I think the valid moral argument is that as a result of modern agricultural practices substantially more animals are killed than animal husbandry. Usually the counter-arguments involves moving the moral goal posts by valuing farm animals over “pests and insects”, or blaming the modern agricultural practices and suggesting organic farming cures those harms.
what's your opinion on the dialogue between people producing eggs in battery-cages (those classic confined chickens) vs. free-roam ones? so far the discussion points out to _way_ more disease spread in free ones, leading to more suffering and death, specially when we are doing in a commercial scale. wild animals killing those free roam animals also occurs. so far the science on battery-cages went far as: sizing perfectly the cages so you don't have cases of cannibalism between them because they are stressed, decent ventilation........ red meat is also confined for a lot of months before their death to receive proper treatment to not screw the population that's eating their meat. that's also involves tons and tons of (insectoid murder) grains & please don't forget that free-roam practices, considering the amount of land they use, i wouldn't get surprised that the pesticides/herbicides used on the grass fields prior to cows introduction kills a comparable if not more amount of insects vs. plantae/fungi production
seriously, this insect rights argument is pure bullshit from people trying to justify their holocaust-like-inducing diet
As a human being, if you avoid eating plants, or things that eat plants, you die.
I'm not a vegetarian because I love animals -- I'm one because I hate plants.
Edit: had the wrong Sterling book.
Plus there's the "processing" of an enormous mobile smelter-factory of nanomachines we call the human body. Chop and grind, add peptides, acid-bath, add neutralizing agent, churn with fermentation bacteria...
Yeah, I know, people usually implicitly mean "artificial" processing, but that's often more about who is doing the processing, rather than what kind of process is going on.
Over the aeons they have almost certainly been part of some living creature. There’s only a finite supply. And humans have come to monopolise it. We should worry less about killing individual creatures and worry a lot more about wiping out entire species.
That contains a very-unproven assumption that other biological life was present prior to the ignition of our Sun and formation of the solar system... Or that there are "living creatures" in solar plasma.
There are neither enough aeons (10-20 billion years of universe), nor enough living creatures for that.
>There’s only a finite supply*
Finite supply doesn't mean all possible permutations have happenned. It's also not like an infinitely old universe (and even one like that wouldn't necessarily have permutations of molecule arrangements where thats statement is true).
It would be tragic if the only proof of alien life in the solar system was gobbled up by some automated asteroid miner that turns asteroids into shitty consumer goods.
I don’t think we’re good at making claims about where particular organisms sit along a gradient of consciousness we can’t even properly define.
I like to imagine other civilizations in the universe might use this basic distinction to evaluate how sophisticated a culture is — do they still needlessly eradicate life for more convenient consumption? Akin to asking, are they still a pre-warp civilization?
We've revolutionized human life over a few generations, and even more over a few hundred years. One outcome is that you can communicate freely - politically and technologically - with people all over the world. And you use that to say how pointless it is to try to improve.
Think bigger and better. People did all that work to get us to this point; what will we do? How will we pull our weight?
The only thing you have to fear is trendy contempt itself.
A rabbit probably ate a lot of carrots, you are better off eating just the carrot directly if you want to reduce the killing :-)
There is no reason to imagine that if there was alien life it would be able to comprehend us at all, for fictional convenience it has been usual to depict aliens as basically just humans in Halloween costume and there is every reason to assume they would be entirely incomprehensible instead. Even in soft SF, try say Iain M Banks' repeated reference to other forms of life which show essentially no interest in the scale of events that our human-like characters are engaged with. The Stellar Field Liner, a vast entity living in the magnetosphere of a star, the Excession, seemingly a living portal to other universes, or even just the Dirigible Behemothaurs which are island sized creatures that think a Galactic Cycle (225 million Earth years) is not very long.
So, are The Affront the literary equivalent of a human in a halloween costume? Extreme sadism as the only definiting trait I can recall, so they probably count as Planet of Hats* even if the physiology is too different to be a costume department's job in a TV show.
* Pealing a carrot: not cruel
* Skinning a rabbit alive: unnecessarily cruel
For all the nonsense about plants experiencing "pain", they, uh, don't. Animals do. Outside of bad philosophical arguments, everyone behaves broadly in accordance with that belief.
However: plants are only noticeably animate in time-lapse footage, and have no mouth with which to scream.
I have no idea why the particular electrochemical properties of the neurotransmitter exchange membranes in my body are able to give rise to qualia, so without that I can't rule out plants doing that but very slowly.
Of course, if they do, then my skin may have an independent qualia to my kidneys let alone to what I call "me", so as you say, I don't live my life as if it were so.
Where these animals fall in the "they're similar to a human" gradient is highly subjective, especially since it may have an emotional component to it. But we don't have to all agree on the definition of this gradient when the consequences (what to eat) are very personal.
I will say though I admire this in humans. We have achieved plentifulness to the point we can attach moral and emotional meaning to our diet if we wish to. It's a pretty unique expression of our empathy.
Ask yourself how many of these feelings arise from the rational thinking part of your brain vs how they seem to be full body sensations, and realize that the central nervous system might allow such signals/awareness to propagate at mammal speed, but why would a plant need that speed?
There really is no reason why a CNS is needed for these emotions to be active, just a way to distribute hormones/chemical signals throughout the body.
If you dig deep enough, the frontier between alive and death is actually blurry. Things like viruses challenge the intuitive understanding of what alive means.
The water cycle makes it so that any water that you consume today will probably have been part of some other alive being at some point in the past.
Some have indeed wondered about plant rights. There is even a vegetable rights protest song, "Carrot Juice is Murder" [1].