Journalists, please stop giving people ammo for their stupid guns.
BUT, as a biologist, I often find it amusing that people discount plants completely. It's easy to forget that they are alive too. Fundamentally, they aren't so different from you or a turtle or a fruit fly. Different cellular structure, sure. Not easily recognizable "consciousness", absolutely. Non-motile, check.
However, plants are very much alive. They react to stimuli, survive in hostile environments, procreate. They are more alien to our sensibilities, but they are arguably not very much different in the grand scale of things.
Edit: came along this interesting link about the measure of sentience: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentience_quotient
A central nervous system is defined as "the complex of nerve tissues that controls the activities of the body". Plants don't have "proper" animal nerve tissues, but they do have a complex system that controls activities of the plant, by sending mRNA/proteins through the phloem to the parts of the plant that need regulation (a lot of it is local regulation but psssst, this kills the trolling)
Nice link! Never heard of that before. But if (non-conscious) IBM Watson has a quotient of +12, and humans have one of +13, what good is it for?
On the other hand, I find it annoying that a vegetarian can draw the line in the sand and decide what is morally correct for everyone to believe.
I'm sure there are vegans judging you for eating (milk, eggs etc. whatever you do eat), and there are "vegetarians" that eat seafood who think you are too extreme, and there are probably people who only eat plants that died of natural causes who think all those groups are terrible and should have more self control over their diet.
The article was pretty interesting and novel to me and if you get a few more dumb questions from people, I don't think it is the end of the world.
Pretty much everyone does that. People don't notice so much when other people are drawing the same lines as them.
Only some vegetarians do that, and it's wrong to imply that it's a defining feature of the demographic. I have vegetarian friends that cook me meat when I visit for dinner, despite me asking not to get special treatment. Other vegetarians just don't like the taste of meat, nothing to do with moral or health attitudes.
Unless the vegetarian is being vocal about the moral issue, it's pretty impolite to bring up the topic apropos of nothing - it's almost always just the questioner trying to score some sort of point.
That said, I eat vegetarian most of the time because the alternative is to eat scary meat, which I'm not going to do. It's insensitive to the animal and a serious risk for me. Accordingly, I haven't eaten fast food in over a decade.
I'm also going to Spain next month and have every intention of gorging myself on delicious cured pork products every chance I get.
Not that I've heard of. I have heard of fruititarians, who only eat the parts of plants the plants produce specifically to be eaten. (It's more complex than that, in fact, but I won't go into it all here.)
Only a really disingenuous person would claim it's kinder to eat meat. There's arguments in favor of eating meat (there's some book called "The Mindful Carnivore" which goes a bit deeper than "meat bad veg good"), but ... that's way off topic.
Nobody with half a brain thinks plants scream when you eat them, and that's not what the article is saying.
When they ask what a Broccoli Fish is, I explain patiently that there's no such thing.
Do you kill invasive insects? Frankly, a shrimp or a lobster is pretty much on a level with a cockroach, when you get down to neural complexity and everything relevant to moral vegetarianism, as opposed to vegetarianism for health reasons.
Bony fish are not much more complex.
Things like sea cucumber don't even have brains: They have nerves, but they lack any centralized structure for them to converge on. Same with jellyfish.
So I suppose my point is that it isn't a dumb question, at least if you're a vegetarian for moral reasons related to killing a living being with emotions.
http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/7536/does-a-lobs...