
Sorry, Vegans: Brussels Sprouts Like to Live, Too - tokenadult
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/22/science/22angi.html
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pyre
Personally I don't think that we should link to articles like this. The whole
point of these types of articles is to generate controversy and draw page
hits, by directing more traffic to these articles we are just supporting the
practice.

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dschobel
The plant behavior stuff was fascinating. The conclusion was trite, I'll agree
with you there.

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dschobel
I don't think most vegans/vegetarians delude themselves that they're not doing
_any_ harm through their consumption, but rather are content to be doing
_less_ harm.

Anyway, still a fascinating article if for nothing else than the
sophistication of plant behavior it highlights.

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potatolicious
What sort of harm, though? Instead of the (arguably renewable) leather
windbreaker, now you're pumping oil out of the ground to do it with
synthetics.

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pyre
Harm to the animals. The practices in the livestock industry are pretty
horrible. There are some places where a percentage of the animals survive the
'kill' stage and are still alive as all of their parts are harvested. There
are places where the animals that are too lame to make it through the
slaughterhouse are just tossed onto a pile of dead bodies to freeze/starve to
death (rather than at least killing the animal first).

The livestock 'industry' has turned animals from living beings into 'moving
lumps of commodity resources.' Is this necessarily a good thing? Don't we lose
our humanity at some point?

I haven't look too far into it, but for things like livestock raised for meat,
we grow _a lot_ of food just to feed it to livestock. I've seen some numbers
that put a large portion of the farmland in the US as growing livestock feed
exclusively. How much of our resources are being diverted into raising and
feeding the livestock which could be used for other purposes? These are all
questions that no one asks because it would mean that possibility of limiting
the amount of meat/dairy/eggs that they eat (or eliminating it altogether).
People would rather live in ignorance of these issues that face the
possibility of having to undergo a lifestyle change.

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potatolicious
> Don't we lose our humanity at some point?

I'd argue that the mere act of killing the animal would strip us of our
humanity, industrialized slaughterhouses or not. In any case, there is also
the implication that industrial agriculture kills millions of animals per year
by robbing them of their habitats, or where they get caught and ripped to
shreds by industrial machinery during harvesting.

Simply put, I do not buy the idea that by being vegetarian I'm doing
significantly less harm - I may be one slight degree more removed from the
animal that has to die to put food on my plate, but morally it makes little
difference, and technically it makes even less difference.

> These are all questions that no one asks because it would mean that
> possibility of limiting the amount of meat/dairy/eggs that they eat

I object against this presumptuous attitude. Plenty of us meat-eaters ask
these questions - and we decide to continue being omnivores while being entire
conscious of its consequences (as well as the myriad of negative consequences
of pure vegetarianism). "Them ignorant meat eaters" is all too common a
presumptuous attitude I get from self-righteous vegetarians. Thanks for
portraying us as a bunch of ostriches with heads in the sand, while heroic
vegetarians lead the way. On, comrades!

~~~
pyre
> _Simply put, I do not buy the idea that by being vegetarian I'm doing
> significantly less harm - I may be one slight degree more removed from the
> animal that has to die to put food on my plate, but morally it makes little
> difference, and technically it makes even less difference._

Those animals are going to be mauled by the machinery _anyways_. You are not
saving them from the mauling by eating meat. If you avoid animal products or
at least limit your consumption of them, you are reducing the demand to
produce these products, thereby reducing the amount of animals that are
ravaged by our industrialized food engine. While this might not seem to make a
noticeable different due to our ever-increasing population, were all the
vegetarians/vegans out there to revert back into omnivores demanding
meat/dairy/eggs a resulting ramping up of production to meet this demand would
occur.

There are two points that I have with your argument:

1\. Animals that are ripped to shreds by farming equipment are at least able
to live a 'free' life in the wild. Animals that are part of the industrialized
livestock industry commonly live in cages where they can't even turn around.
Sometimes their flesh melds into the cage walls (as can be the case with egg-
laying chickens) completely grafting them to their cage (i.e. hens whose feet
have grown _around_ the bars/wire of their cage floor leaving them permanently
fixed to the cage).

2\. The idea that "well animals are going to die anyways so why even bother"
is not an attitude that I find healthy or conducive to change.

> _I object against this presumptuous attitude. Plenty of us meat-eaters ask
> these questions - and we decide to continue being omnivores while being
> entire conscious of its consequences (as well as the myriad of negative
> consequences of pure vegetarianism). "Them ignorant meat eaters" is all too
> common a presumptuous attitude I get from self-righteous vegetarians. Thanks
> for portraying us as a bunch of ostriches with heads in the sand, while
> heroic vegetarians lead the way. On, comrades!_

I apologize if I came off that way. Most of the time when expressing your
views as a vegetarian or a vegan all you get are responses like, "I'm going to
eat _TWICE_ as much meat just to offset your moral choice! Haw haw haw!" And I
agree that there are people that have at least weighed these ideas and have
made the choice to eat meat. I applaud you for doing so.

There are plenty of people that think of the topic as 'taboo' because it's
'unsightly.' I've met people that don't go to petting zoos because they don't
want to _see_ the farm animals that they are eating when they eat meat. The
idea that they might associate the meat with the face of an animal frightens
them because it means that they might end up with a moral dilemma. I have
relatives that don't want to hear about the conditions in the slaughterhouses
because it would make it hard for them to eat meat. I have a huge loss of
respect for these people.

Update: I should add that I don't 'look down' on people that eat meat like a
lot of vegans/vegetarians do. Though I may have come off as having a self-
righteous attitude, I don't. Unlike a lot of vegans, I don't have an extremist
attitude. If we were able to ween ourselves off of the heavy dependence that
we have on animals (at least in food) I think that we would be in a much
better place morally and nutritionally as a society (though I am _not_ of the
mind that a vegan diet is 'automatically' healthy like some people seem to
believe; there are tons of unhealthy foods that are perfectly vegan).

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tptacek
This article doesn't go very far towards rationalizing its thesis with the
fact that some vegetable matter is actively, aggressively designed to be
eaten. The balance of reproduction and survival is different between plants
and animals.

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kscaldef
And when you eat those fruits, but then deposit your waste in a toilet and
send it off to a sewage treatment plant, are you in harmony with that design
or subverting it?

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inglorian
Actually, it doesn't really matter. Some argue that industrialized agriculture
is in fact playing right into the plants' design. We contribute to their
survival and spread by continually re-planting them -- corn, for example, is
arguably the king of this kind of adaptation. For more on this, I highly
recommend Michael Pollan's "Botany of Desire" or, for a shorter version, his
TED talk on the same subject.

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kscaldef
I'm fine with that argument (although it seem to apply to raising animals as
well). I was responding more to the parent's suggestion that certain parts of
certain plants are designed to be eaten (and then pass through your digestive
system and re-seeded). That bit of natures design doesn't work so well in the
face of modern plumbing.

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apgwoz
I've made this case to my wife, and she won't have it. The problem with this
of course--you can't be 100% ethical without starving. Sorry plants.

~~~
tokenadult
"All whales are meat-eaters. They feed on the flesh of other animals, even if
these are very small and strained from the water, as are krill." -- Steve
Parker, Whales and Dolphins (Sierra Club, 1994) p. 28.

Yep, we might as well get used to the idea that while plants are autotrophs,

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autotroph>

all of us heterotrophs

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterotroph>

have to eat something, so we may as well eat what helps us be healthy and live
according to our adaptations and place in nature.

~~~
gojomo
Turns out a lot more plants are carnivorous than previously estimated (as with
obvious cases like Venus Flytraps):

[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/wildlife/6727709/Tomatoes-c...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/wildlife/6727709/Tomatoes-
can-eat-insects.html)

