ROCHESTER, MN—Hailing it as the best-tasting and most satisfying such product on the market, vegetarian food manufacturer Greenwood Farms unveiled a more realistic meat substitute Friday made from soy raised in brutally cruel conditions.
I have a rhubarb plant in my garden, and deep down I know that when I have long perished and my earthly remains have rejoined with the earth's soil, that rhubarb plant will still be there, stubbornly making more rhubarb than anyone can eat.
Where does the rhubarb get energy then? Does it just rely on stored energy in the seed or roots or something and get given light eventually, or can it actually use tiny amounts of light?
This is going to trigger so many broflakes who have made eating meat their whole personality.
And before anybody starts screeching, I'm not even a vegan. I do mostly make vegan food at home, but you can pry my cheese out of my cold, dead hands, and I also occasionally eat fish or meat.
This going to trigger so many >!cheeseflakes!< who have made eating cheese their whole personality.
And before anybody starts screeching, I'm not even a vegan. I do mostly make vegan home at food, but you can pry my cold, dead hands out of my cheese, and I also occasionally eat fish or meat.
The people I know that are hard-core meat eaters are hunters who vastly prefer meat they've killed themselves (in a heavily regulated system that prioritizes sustaining the environment). I live in Alaska, though.
I found it funny, because it makes out that treating a plant badly makes it taste meaty in the same way that badly treated cattle are less nutritious and less good tasting than those which are free range on landscape like that they evolved on
Meat is only ruined if the animal is stressed during slaughter.
Prior to that, for large animals like cows, only the last three months of feeding matters for the quality of the meat. Far less time for smaller animals.
Treating animals well has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of the meat, except in the few moments immediately before slaughter. We should treat animals well on a matter of principle, and that's basically the only argument there is to it.
Now I'm curious if plants have enough complexity to their internal experience for it to be possible to be cruel to them or not. One is used to thinking of them as basically inanimate apart from that they grow, but some of them can sort of communicate with other plants in certain ways can't they?
There is not really strong evidence of plant sentience. Here's one paper looking at it:
A. Plants do not show proactive behavior.
B. Classical learning does not indicate consciousness, so reports of such learning in plants are irrelevant.
C. The considerable differences between the electrical signals in plants and the animal nervous system speak against a functional equivalence. Unlike in animals, the action potentials of plants have many physiological roles that involve Ca2+ signaling and osmotic control; and plants’ variable potentials have properties that preclude any conscious perception of wounding as pain.
D. In plants, no evidence exists of reciprocal (recurrent) electrical signaling for integrating information, which is a prerequisite for consciousness.
E. Most proponents of plant consciousness also say that all cells are conscious, a speculative theory plagued with counterevidence.
Though something interesting and perhaps counter intuitive to note is that even if we realized plants were sentient, a plant-based diet actually involved killing fewer plants due to the lessened need to grow feed (of which most of the energy is lost)
Let's say that plants do have some kind of sentience, which is probably very limited due to the evidence we do have. Animals still have more advanced sentience that is closer to our own so it would still be the lesser evil to eat plants. Like why would you eat other people or chimps when there are other options available?
It takes a lot of mental gymnastics to be able to say that plants suffer the same way as animals. I know you're not saying this, but you do hear stuff like this based on this premise.
You can't eat anything in the modern world without killing animals. A combine harvester harvests wheat and mice. A hundred meat eaters are responsible for a single cow death, and the cow lived on marginal land, drinking from streams - you couldn't grow other food on the land (sure some are grown on perfect fertile land, they don't need to be)
Not saying I'm a meat eater, I don't care about mice, but there's blood on all our hands
They are living things. We shouldn't seek to deliberately cause pain if possible. While I like how stuff like bonsai trees look, I also feel a bit bad for them, wired and snipped in so many places and forced to be grown unnaturally small.
Or people who deliberately carve graffiti into trees with a knife.
Plants and trees have interestingly complex communication networks. We barely understand their microfauna and underground microbiomes that allow forests to grow much healthier and disease-resistant than our backyards. I have a funny feeling we know a lot less than we think we know, like when scientists discovered that babies can actually feel pain, or that dogs realize when they are treated unfairly. Stuff discovered within our lifetimes, lol.
They can detect tissue damage and grow away from the source. So being physically cruel to a plant would definitely affect its growth. And yes, they can also share some types of information and resources with their neighbours.
Soy is like trying to replace meat with cork. Sure it's technically a substitute in the sense that you've not got any more meat but it's not really a substitute in the sense that it replaces it in any manner.
Quorn is a much better equivalent. It isn't 1995 anymore, we don't need to eat soy, I don't know why it's still a thing.
You're welcome to it then. Quorn is fine, and I do like diversifying food sources; mycoprotein is good.
But tbh, I like soy because its pretty lightly processed. Tofu can be made at home easily, with nothing beyond tools, water, and vinegar. And if you don't like tofu, that's fine, but its my 'meat' of choice.
Seitan is my second favorite, and again, its pretty easy to make at home; only water and flour is needed.
I do eat quorn sometimes, but not often. And while mycoprotein is cool as a meat substitute, I feel like just eating mushrooms is a better choice for most dishes.
Quorn is expensive..at least near me :( soy can be bought as dry beans for less than 5 bucks a kg. Also everyone can/could grow soy in a flower pot, quorn seems a tiny bit harder no? even though it's basically made of mushrooms
And if soy wasn't the better option why wouldn't cattle-raisers use Quorn?