Would you eat meat if they only amputated cow legs but didn’t kill them?! :eek:
Only if the cows sign a waiver.
Mmmmm, bass drumsticks…
Please let’s keep the tempers under control, people. If you just can’t stand it anymore, you know where the Pit is.
Bryan, no offense taken about your nitpick; I’ll modify it here to “sentient life” taken, as that’s the definition I try to work with.
I well realize that plants are very much alive; I work as a horticulturist, and propagate and grow them from little tiny babies, to beautiful flowering sexually active (heh) maturity. I spend most of my waking hours taking care of those green beings, and teaching others how to grow and cultivate them. I truly love plants, and marvel at their methods of survival and diversity of form and adaptation. And, yeah, I talk to them as beings: on my educational talks and garden walks, people say I give them a new perspective about how plants Are alive, and an appreciation of their beauty.
And then I eat them to survive. Honestly, I wish I didn’t have to kill anything, that’d make me most happy. But, here I am, homo sapiens, and I know I gotta eat to live, and kinda like life, so do. I base my choice on doing the least damage possible, with as little suffering as possible. What makes sense to me is drawing the line at sentience, and capability of suffering. One can argue that point, but, I have to make a choice before digesting the next whatever to live, and my choice, with good thought, is to not eat animal flesh, even fish, who probably are not the most bright lights on the planet.
I’ve posted it here before, but, here again: My first decision to become a vegetarian was because I was on boats with my parents, marine biologists, and at 11 years old, saw fish flop around and die, and my tender little heart just hated that. Irefused to eat them, which didn’t make my parents real happy, as with six kids to feed, those fish (on a professor’s salary) were a needed food source, and of course, very fresh and healthy eating. I stuck to my perception, though, and, with a few exceptions in my life, don’t eat fish. This was a case of seeing fish die, and it didn’t sit well with me.
That’s my choice, and I in no way set any untoward thoughts to anyone else who doesn’t see things as I do. My parents have devoted a great deal of their careers toward management of fisheries to help feed people, and try to preserve the marine ecosystem in balance. I understand that need in fairly decent depth.
I just try to make the best decisions I can under my ethical principles, and be gracious about what I do have, and appreciate any life taken to feed my ol’ gullet self. In this case, I do mean any life; I’m grateful for plants that feed me, and try to take only as much as I need. I’m not making a big production of it , it’s my personal observation and choice, and has worked well for me for my life. I’d never presume to ask anyone to go by my observances, and, as you can see here, if someone really wanted to know the reasons, it gets a bit lengthy to explain.
Wrapped up in a little Holiday biscuit, just don’t like to see suffering, pains me, and I figured out a way to avoid that a bit. For those who actually read this far, thanks for suffering through it. 
Rubystreak Thanks for coming to my aid here, I appreciate your efforts.
No worries. I think it’d be kinda cool if humans could live off photosynthesis directly. I suppose some of those sci-fi novels and movies that portrayed future humans consuming all their meals in pill form (presumably synthesized in some ultra-efficient laboratory process several orders of magnitude less damaging to “life” than any farming process) might come to pass, someday.
Of course, this’ll allow for even more humans (hunting/gathering required, say, 100 acres to feed a family, agriculture reduced it to five, fully synthetic diets might reduce it to 0.001 - numbers for illustration only) and growing cities swallowing up all available land could end up doing more environmental damage than agriculture (including animal farming) currently does.
I guess there’s no free, or harmless, lunch.
That would be the absolute perfect solution. Maybe someday we’ll be able to mount solar panels on our heads or something.
My reasons for being a vegetarian are very similar to elelle’s. I abhor suffering and want to decrease the amount of it I cause. When I feel upset is when I feel like people are rubbing it in that, no matter what I do, I’m going to cause it, because humans have to eat other things that were alive to survive. “What makes you think plants don’t suffer” has the ring of taunting to me. Maybe that’s not your intention, Bryan. If not, I apologize for being unnecessarily hostile. I know I’m taking issue with a very basic fact of life, and other people don’t have this angst.
What would be even better is synthesizing our food ala Star Trek. Maybe that could happen someday.
Not having been a Trek fan, (I’m a Star Wars gal!), what exactly did they do? Would that mean you could have a faux cheeseburger that would taste 100 percent like the original, that would also be as healthy as a salad?
Seeing the
There’s conflicting evidence. The TOS episode “The Mark of Gideon” features Kirk and an alien woman wandering around an empty Enterprise (an elaborately-detailed mockup, it turns out) and he comments that the “five year” food supply (suggesting a large but finite stock) for 400 crewmembers should be enough to last the two of them indefinitely. However an early episode of Enterprise (televised decades later but chronologically earlier) has the crew answering letters from elementary school students describes some kind of ultra-futuristic recycling process that can convert the “poop” of the crew into usable items, which I assume included (but not ecccch-plicity stated) food (the show later on started making references to the valued but never seen “Chef”).
From TNG onward, the pseudo-magical “replicator” was introduced. In a few episodes, it’s suggested the food it produces is nutritious but bland and being able to cook using real ingredients is a valuable skill (the Japanese Keiko Ishikawa talking to her future husband Miles O’Brien, after he describes his traditionalist mother: “She cooked?!)”. Riker at one point experiments with making omelets and the only person who likes them is Worf.
It’s not a detail I think the writers spent a lot of time on, though I was highly impressed by an Enterprise episode that shows them trading spices, in a nice nod to the basis of entire Renaissance economies. Seems to me that if an alien was interested in anything from Earth, it’d be biological samples that took a billion+ years to evolve and which can never be perfectly synthesized and grown outside of Earth’s ecosystem. The idea of interstellar trade of manufactured goods never made any sense - it’d be infinitely easier to sell the blueprints than the actual item, figuring that any species capable of interstellar travel already has a precision manufacturing base. By comparison, a few kilos of oregano should be downright fascinating.
Voyager, the chronologically last series to date, had a character named “Neelix” who, in addition to providing extremely irritating comic relief, served as ship’s cook. A recurring point was that the isolated ship had a shortage of “replicator rations” and supplemented with Neelix’s foraging and culinary skills. One episode hinged on a bio-sample he’d found infecting the “gelpacks” (biochemical devices of some kind serving multiple and critical functions aboard ship) and the classic line: “Get the cheese to sickbay!” I am NOT making that up.
Semi-related, I’ve seen sketches for a “greenhouse locker”, a phone-booth-sized terrarium that could feed and supply oxygen for one crew member aboard a space station, and fertilized by that crewmember’s waste. I don’t know how practical this is; the process certainly wouldn’t be very efficient, but it could help, I guess.
Oh, and I have a question-feel free not to answer if you don’t want, but if you’re a vegetarian, and you have pets, do you feed them meat?
If only because I’ve heard of SOME (not all!) vegetarians recommending vegetarian pet food, and from what I gather, cats cannot live on a vegetarian diet.
I hope this question isn’t rude-I’m just curious.
Sorry about that, dunno what posted it.
I would love to have people live in a la la way and be able to eat to live in a sustainable manner. But, from what I see in a good gleaning of what is sustainable, it requires better thought. It doesn’t need to have shiny little pills; but it does require better thought of cultivation, and thought to crops harvested.
While I’m on a sci-fi-tear, I also thought it was cool in the TV series Alien Nation that the “visitors” could digest cellulose and one of them discovers, quite by accident, that paper makes a nice potato-chip-like snack food. She has a scene where she’d finish a page in a book, tear it out and eat it. 
Guin, (is that a poor way to abbreviate your name?) I am vegeterian and would never imaging trying to make my pets vegeterian. Not even my dogs who possibly could do well on a veggie diet. I have even sometimes cooked bacon (in the microwave) for my boyfriend and can make him a ham sandwich, as long as I don’t have to touch the meat in anyway. Maybe I am an oddball though, because I still love the smell of steak or bacon or roast beef cooking. Even though I haven’t eaten any meat in 15 years and am totally grossed out by the thought of it touching any part of my person, let alone my lips, it still looks, smells and “sounds” good. If that makes any sense. (It doesn’t.)
Guin is fine.
Thanks. I was just curious-I heard of someone who tried to make his cat vegetarian and the poor thing wasn’t doing so well.
You can’t make cats vegetarian; they need taurine, which is only found in animals. I feed my cats meat and I feel guilty about it. That’s the short answer to that question.
an amusing take on this subject is the page on food pills from the delightful Tales of Future Past website.