Everything we eat screams

20 years ago I was sitting at my local pub that had just installed an oyster bar, As a daily regular customer, they gave me one of each type of oysters they carried to try for free.
It was lunchtime and an older woman sat down near me with a salad.
“You know those oysters are alive that you are eating?”
“Yes I hope so,” I said.
She kind of rolled her eyes and shook her head.
“You know that salad you are eating is screaming right now?”
She moved away.
True story.
I knew I was right!

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I tend to look askance at those vegans who preach that anyone can do it. Of course some can, but we all have different biochemistry. Without some in-depth research I don’t think it’s completely valid to assume that everyone can. (What research has been tends to lean the other way, though I’m sure it was performed by carnivorous scientists. Oh! Band name!)

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Oh, please. Do you know how vocal (many) meat-eaters are in their derision of vegans? It’s an endless parade of insults, jokes, and mockery.

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If something doesn’t exist, what is it that’s being denied existence?

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But interestingly it is a result of domestication that has enabled the long term survival of many species. It depends if you look at the individual or the genome.

I reckon people should be entitled not to eat anything that they don’t want to eat - for whatever reason: ethics, morality, ecology. They just don’t get to dictate to others what is ‘right’ - it is analagous to religion in that others should be free to believe what they want as long as I don’t have to.

I’m not vegetarian, but this is a very silly argument.

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I don’t think there’s any coherent moral argument that preventing someone/something from existing constitutes harm. Just for starters, failing to have procreative sex whenever possible would be tantamount to murder.

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Again, I’m a meat-eater, but running around naked in the jungle and getting eaten by lions is natural too. I’d like to think humanity is about rising above mere natural behavior.

I know several vegetarians, and I have heard way more meat-eaters bad-mouthing vegetarians than the other way around.

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I have to say that I don’t have experienced personally neither. The vegans and vegetarians that I know are nice and respectful people, and I haven’t witnessed in person anybody deriding them. It seems to be in this kind of forums where the knives come out, with some vegetarians trying to paint carnivores as monsters, and some carnivores painting vegetarians as stupid. I respect, understand, and support both sides.

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You have a good eye.

@hecep actually, I think it was one of the better late episodes of the show. The performances are amazingly strong.

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ummm… that’s nonsense.

We grow LOTS of corn. A lot of it is made not into cows but ehtanol to burn in your car and cause AGW. A lot of corn is harvested for humans to eat the kernals - and for animals to eat the chaff - the stalks. A lot of this gets characterized as cows eating “corn”. Some corn kernels to feed cows And my comment would be" “So What”?
We do not have a corn shortage or a food shortage or a grass shortage.

Cows eat grass. Grass makes up almost all of their mass. Grasslands are generally unsuitable for growing crops. Grass is a product on sunlight, rainfall, and soil. Getting meat and milk and cheese and 100 other things from those 3 things is the exact opposite of “inefficient”.

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As a service for today’s lucky 10,000, here it is:

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If cows would be fed exclusively on grass, you would be right. Unfortunately, these days the vast majority of cows do not feed on grass, but on all sorts of compound feed, which often contains corn or soy beans.

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@thirdworldtaxi isn’t wrong on that count though. We grow tons of corn and much of it is used to feed cows in the mass production of meat. Most cows raised for meat or milk are not wandering about happy in a field before they are killed to make our steaks. They are fed a diet heavy in grains like corn, with a healthy dose of antibiotics in densely packed lots, before being sent into a slaughter house for processing.

the problem isn’t really that we’re meat eaters, it’s how our meat is processed for mass production.

11th-doc-this

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One of the purposes of pain is to remind us to run away from danger. Since plants aren’t very ambulatory, I think it’s highly doubtful that they feel pain. What would be the evolutionary advantage?

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I came to this topic only to make sure someone posts this. I can leave now.

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Eh - source on that? Granted rural Kansas isn’t as big of a beef producer as some states, but I’ve driven around a lot of rural areas and never seen anything I’d call “dense” as far as cows go. Yes some are fed grain, as well as antibiotics (to keep them healthy and more likely to live, though over use can cause other problems), but all the Blank Angus I see munching grass are doing so with a lot of space.

I am sure there are some places that reflect that statement, but I don’t think “most” is accurate.

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Disclaimer: botanist here (as if you didn’t already knew, HAH!), and I know both František Baluška and Dieter Volkmann from my undergraduate studies.

Also: mostly vegetarian (with exceptions) since about 20 years, and friend with some basically life-long vegans. (I’m not surprised how quick this thread went to veggy/vegan discussions, and I am duly surprised no name-calling is yet at hand. :wink: )

Coming back to the stuff some of you started to deride as shit science, I would suggest to go back to Google Scholar and search through the literature. You might start with this:

While I don’t agree with the general assessment, and I truly hate anthropomorphisms in botany, they don’t just make their shit up. OTH, I would argue they call for this shitty journalism by choosing their metaphors wrong. But when you look at the science, seriously, and calmly, you notice we have got a language problem here. As Baluška states, we cannot talk about what is happening in the plant kingdom. Oh, and when you say plant kingdom, you need to think of the fungi as well - other kingdom, same game. Electric currents used for cellular communication. In fact, plant roots communicate (in the physiological and physics sense of the word) with fungal hyphen. And those communicate with the roots of other plants - which don’t even need to belong to the same species. (I could go off a tangent on species’ concepts here. Rabbit hole, meet Dobzhansky.) For the lack of better metaphors or for the publicity, Volkmann and Baluška chose to use the metaphor of plant brain for root system communication, and this stuck. Now even the books of Peter Wohlleben live of that metaphors, and are read by hundreds of thousands of people. Only mildly better that the 1973 bullshit classic brought up above, I would argue.

But still, the science behind this is solid.
The phrasing, and the popular interpretation, are not.

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