Sorry, Vegans: Brussels Sprouts Like to Live, Too

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/22/science/22angi.html

by tokenadult • 17 years ago

16 18 17 years ago

apgwoz• 17 years ago

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.

tjr• 17 years ago

And, then, how is starving ethical to yourself?

tokenadult• 17 years ago

"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• 17 years ago

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...

tptacek2• 17 years ago

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.

kscaldef2• 17 years ago

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?

tptacek2• 17 years ago

What's your point? I'm just saying that it's not reasonable to anthropomorphize plants by saying they have behaviors and adverse reactions to damage.

inglorian• 17 years ago

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.

evgen• 17 years ago

Could one not also make the argument that some animal matter is actively, aggressively designed to be eaten? You don't exactly see herds of feral cows roaming the plains, do you? The ability to be domesticated as a source of food is what enabled the cow to survive while the auroch and other similar animals failed in this task and are now extinct.

dschobel3• 17 years ago

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.

potatolicious2• 17 years ago

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.

pyre3• 17 years ago

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.

dschobel3• 17 years ago

Harm as defined by the intersection of your values and your understanding of economics.

pyre3• 17 years ago

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.

dschobel3• 17 years ago

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

Sorry, Vegans: Brussels Sprouts Like to Live, Too

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