I know that the food I eat feels pain. I don’t feel good about it, but that’s definitely the reality.
Don’t plants feel pain too though? I really believe that all consumption creates pain. Perhaps animal suffering is more real or important than plant suffering, but I don’t love that I can’t eat without killing something else.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
No, plants do not feel pain. They do not have a nervous system, they do not have consciousness, etc.
Even if they did, that’s still an argument for veganism. Where do you think animals get the energy they store in their bodies? They don’t absorb it from the sun. They eat plants, use some of that energy sustaining their life, then you eat them and absorb some of what’s left. Anywhere from 1/4 to 1/10th of the energy they originally consumed. Meaning if you are looking to minimize suffering, regardless of whether or not plants feel pain (which they don’t), eating plants directly is how you do that.
Maybe not, but we don’t know for sure
We do not know if plants are capable of subjective sensation. There is no scientific proof that plants feel pain. But it is also quite clear that we cannot simply rule this out. There is circumstantial evidence for this, although not a complete chain of evidence.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2634081/
And to be clear, I’m a shitty human because I eat meat. I’m not arguing for my lifestyle. Just having a related conversation.
In case anyone takes that seriously: farmed animals mostly eat industrial agricultural food. And they need 10 kilo of food for every kilo of meat. So you’re basically killing ten times as many farmland animals when eating meat compared to earing plants directly.
Lower intensity agriculture is possible, but just not as consistent or price effective. You could, for example, raise pigs or chickens mostly on food scraps and have meat that requires little extra inputs, but maybe not if you need to raise thousands of them.
I thought they were making a joke that insects are part of the family and animalia and therefore you’d have to kill way more insects than you would traditional farm animals.
Wait until you hear about how much compost contributed to global warming…
