Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/02/03/everything-we-eat-screams.html
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Voice on telephone: Well, Clarice, have the cabbages stopped screaming?
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Ugh. Someone spilled unexamined personification and overreaching metaphor all over this science. Now it’s ruined.
Call me back when plants have a central nervous system. Until then, this all reads as new agey analogizing. All this study demonstrates is that drugs that dampen electrical signaling in animal cells like neurons also dampen electrical signaling in plant cells.
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What about fungi? Can we live on a mushroom-only diet?
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some years ago i wrote a long poem which was a rumination on life and death. one section of it covered this–
we cannot shirk our bodies
our minds we cannot renounce,
our souls need habitation,
they all must be maintained.
the rooting up of the carrot,
the slaughter of the lamb,
by death are we enlivened
by death we are sustained.
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What about when you only take like a piece of the plant, like an apple was going to fall off anyways, am I still a murderer when I’m sipping my Mott’s too? Does syrup count? Like your sucking the blood from a tree but the tree’s still there so your more like a parasite than a predator right? Just tell me what I have to do to stop the violence. Can I teach my gut flora to break up rocks perhaps?
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L. Ron Hubbard knew everything screams, and he liked that.
(He probably stole the idea from someone else, but he’s one of the main sources for the whole “plants have feelings” nonsense.)
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All the researchers did was soaking plants in chemicals used as anesthetics for mammals and found that their ability to function was hindered. Not surprising, considering we already know that all living cells share some basic biochemistry.
This in no way even hints at something like the ability to feel pain or even consciousness in plants.
But the researcher made an inappropriate remark anyway to spark media attention: who knows, maybe they feel pain. Totally not scientifically justified.
But everybody loves misrepresented science like this, because it gives them false peace of mind when they keep abusing animals. I am looking at you, meat eater.
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Pain is an inevitable part of life.
(Not that I’m sure I believe anything without a nervous system can actually register the sensation, just sayin.’)
Everything living being that exists lives off of death, in some way, shape or form.
That’s the circle…
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First we find out Romney was right on Russia, now we find out McCain is right on vegetables. Who knows what tomorrow will bring?
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Carrot Juice Is Murder
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The only diet I’ve found that helps me keep my weight down is a low carb diet.
Sorry animals but my health is more important than yours.
I’ll continue to avoid octopus, dolphin, and gorilla meat but otherwise… pass the brown sauce.
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Yeah, I never understood how vegans can justify denying the natural cycle of life.
Deep down do they just have a phobia of eating living things, or what?
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I understand people who choose to live by a vegetarian diet, but trying to eat totally vegan just doesn’t seem very sustainable, (or appetizing.)
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FLASHBACK:
The bizarro kiddie show “Uncle Floyd” had a recurring sketch called “A Day in the Life of a Food.”
One of the show’s performers would put together a sandwich, or an ice cream sundae, or the like; as the food was spread or scooped out or whatever, an off-screen actor would make agreeable voice sounds. Different performers for different food-voices.
Then the performer would bite into his treat, and all the ingredient-voices would scream in pain and horror.
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We’ve always privileged only the organisms that were most similar to us with shared qualities (with "similar’ on a sliding, culturally-determined scale). Fundamentally solipsistic and also tends to ignore evidence.
Well that’s begging the question - there’s actually substantial evidence that organisms without nervous systems engage in something like “thinking” but that gets rejected because the definition of “think” involves a brain, which plants don’t have. It willfully avoids the possibility that there might be a parallel mechanism that serves the same function. Because, you know, it’s not like we ever see that in biology…
What did the poor rocks ever do to you? (Eating vegetables is just abortion, though.)
The severed sex organs of fungi, you mean, you monster.
There is other evidence, though, of something like cognitive abilities in organisms that don’t have nervous systems, including plants. I don’t find it convincing that plants have consciousness (in a way that’s remotely similar to our own, especially), but then again, I really don’t want it to, so…
Well, unless it exclusively eats seeds, nuts, fruit, dairy or honey (and unfertilized eggs, I suppose). I can’t really think of anything besides some insects that qualify, though… Even “herbivorous” vertebrates tend to also eat animals, occasionally. (e.g. seed- fruit- and nectar- eating birds eating insects as well, cows and sheep eating baby birds and bones) I suppose there might be some birds and possibly small mammals that quality, that eat fruit/seeds and avoid eating insects rather than incidentally eating them (while also having them be a necessary part of its nutrition), but I don’t know what they would be.
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Eating fruits and seeds, and even honey still qualifies as living off of death, as those are part of a living system, a life cycle.
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