Posted on 12/22/2009 1:39:23 AM PST by neverdem
I stopped eating pork about eight years ago, after a scientist happened to mention that the animal whose teeth most closely resemble our own is the pig. Unable to shake the image of a perky little pig flashing me a brilliant George Clooney smile, I decided it was easier to forgo the Christmas ham. A couple of years later, I gave up on all mammalian meat, period. I still eat fish and poultry, however and pour eggnog in my coffee. My dietary decisions are arbitrary and inconsistent, and when friends ask why I’m willing to try the duck but not the lamb, I don’t have a good answer. Food choices are often like that: difficult to articulate yet strongly held. And lately, debates over food choices have flared with particular vehemence.
In his new book, “Eating Animals,” the novelist Jonathan Safran Foer describes his gradual transformation from omnivorous, oblivious slacker who “waffled among any number of diets” to “committed vegetarian.” Last month, Gary Steiner, a philosopher at Bucknell University, argued on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times that people should strive to be “strict ethical vegans” like himself, avoiding all products derived from animals, including wool and silk. Killing animals for human food and finery is nothing less than “outright murder,” he said, Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “eternal Treblinka.”
But before we cede the entire moral penthouse to “committed vegetarians” and “strong ethical vegans,”...
--snip--
“Even if you have quite a bit of knowledge about plants,” Dr. De Moraes said, “it’s still surprising to see how sophisticated they can be.”
It’s a small daily tragedy that we animals must kill to stay alive. Plants are the ethical autotrophs here, the ones that wrest their meals from the sun. Don’t expect them to boast: they’re too busy fighting to survive.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
My nephew is dating a vegan. She is doing this thinking she will stay slim. Unfortunately, her ethics doesn’t extend to chocolate chip cookies.
I agree with you about the ‘ethical autotrophs’. They take silliness to celestial levels!
At least this one admits she's a deluded kook. That sets her apart from most.
Just don’t tell her that there’s eggs in the cookies. :D
Sheep and silk worms don’t have to die to provide their raw material; what’s so moral about not using wool or silk? Absurd!
Read the article. It is most fascinating how plants attract dragonflys; etc., to deal with meddlesome insects feasting on them.
Allowing a steer to graze on it and then killing the steer for slaughter results in far fewer animal deaths.
IIRC, silk worms are steamed inside their cocoons, after which the silk can be unwound.
It takes a lot of chickens to equal the meat in a steer. She could save more lives by eating beef. Maybe she should consider eating whale.
The only answer for these types really appears to be suicide. They’d stop consuming even plants, which apparently this person regrets. They’d begin *feeding* other lifeforms as well. Actually there’s endless parasites and symbiotes eating on all humans all the time, so she’s on the plate as well currently and down the road.
Tell that to the Venus Fly Trap. Damn murderers!
I knew I shouldn’t have assumed! Too lazy to do research. Thank you for the correction and blechhh, what a way to go. The vegans, etc., may be as indignant as they want about the worms. Uh oh, I just looked. Horrors, silkworm moths can no longer fly because of our dastardly intervention! Who knew? They are doomed to a hot, bubbly death instead of bulb-burn syndrome or ingestion by some other creature. Ahh, such is life.
how can you eat a plant? It’s so cruel. Plants can’t even move away from you when you try to eat it.
Plants are the ethical autotrophs here, the ones that wrest their meals from the sun.
She needs a bowl of Caster Bean soup. One spoonfull nd she would be joining Sadam. However all plants wrest they food from the earth and process it with the help of the sun.
It is bizarre that vegans avoid wool. Nobody kills sheep to get wool fibers to wear.
Instead they urge the use of petroleum based fibers or plant materials that must either be raised with a lot of pesticides or undergo considerable chemical processing to become useful as fiber.
Liberal vegans are clods. I always tell them they’re insensitive and dense because they can’t hear a carrot cry when pulled from the ground. And eating an alfalfa sprout sandwich is like listening to a plant version of the Gettysburg battle. They scream all the way down through your gullet.
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