Moral Dilemma: How Can We Eat Without Killing Anything For Food?

Great Debates
1

I am a vegetarian but recently I have come to realize that being vegetarian means I am supporting the murder of plants and the plant’s children which are harvested to be planted and killed at their prime. Every plant is pulled from it’s life giving soil to slowly wilt and rot to death, starving with no water to sustain it.

They pile the carcasses of these plants in massive piles, and spray chemicals on them to keep them looking fresh and full of life, rather than the decaying lifeless husks that they truly are.

Slowly, one by one, the plant’s cell walls break down, causing once rigid and life filled greens to become soft and wilt. It’s body screams in agony in a way no one can hear, it’s pain being released in chemicals that the human brain cannot process.

Finally if it is still alive after being uprooted, given a painful chemical bath, and stacked on the corpses of it’s friends and loved ones, it is subjected to the most inhumane treatment of all: being cooked or eaten alive. Much like a oyster being eaten straight from the shell, or a lobster being cooked in the pot, these poor flora are subjected to death by crushing and cutting teeth, or the blazing hot water of a cook pot.

Everyone complains about the treatment of cattle, but they never think of the poor lettuce leaf, who’s children are stolen from it…only to be subjected to the same treatment it went through itself. Truly the life of a plant on a farm, is hell.

http://www.earthweek.com/2008/ew080418/ew080418g.html

But but but… I thought all pain is governed by nerves and a central nervous system and plants lack these parts? I hear you say…

well plants experience pain in a manner that we do not. They still send chemical signals to other parts of the plant, they simply lack nerves.

Your pain is through electrical AND chemical signals. Plants are purely chemical. When parts of a plant are broken, chemical signals flow out from the cell bodies that are damaged and inform the rest of the plant that there is damage there: pain. The pain signal is how plants know to seal off the water routes to that place (otherwise they would “bleed out” their water and nutrients. Ever notice a plant turns brown and no longer is wet where you break it off after a while? Like a scab.)

These chemicals also serve to let the plant know it does not need nutrients for that part of the plant anymore as it is dead and gone. Without these signals, plants would not know how to grow.

They’re different than you, but you still cause them immense pain as they die, and the harvesting methods that are used on plants are still cruel; even more so as nobody is willing to contemplate the manner in which plants are harmed because they are so different to us.

It seems the only way we can exist without causing harm or murdering something to sustain yourself is to survive off the berries and nuts etc. that FALL OFF the plant without you picking it. Otherwise you are harming the plant, causing it pain. It’d be like cutting a steak off a cow while it still lives.

2

As an unrepentant meatatarian I wholeheartedly agree. I intend to avoid the accidental consumption of vegetables henceforth.

3

Joined our board today to post this? :dubious:

As a vegetarian myself (for a number of reasons), I suggest you may not have considered the concept of minimizing suffering being preferable to not minimizing it, which is interesting since this is an extremely basic component to ethically-based vegetarianism (vs. environmental, for instance).

Should your path still trouble you, look into living as the Jains do, or there are those who claim to be “breathatarians,” gaining all their sustenance from air. Pursuing this may prove enlightening for you! :smiley:

4

Got a reputable scientific cite for that?

As for the “murder” of lettuce… won’t somebody think of the [lettuce] children?

5

…

I will find one for you

6

That’s a joke, not scientific research. There is no such study.

It’s true that plants respond to damage in a number of ways. But so does every living thing, including bacteria. When are you going to stop your own personal daily genocide of trillions of bacteria that live in your mouth? That’s what happens whenever you brush your teeth.

7

He is making the Cabbage Patch kids cry…

8

Dr. Bill Williams, a botanist at The Helvetica Institute. If his preliminary findings turn out to be true, they will prove that killing plants for food is no less cruel than killing animals for food. “Plants are aware,” says Dr. Williams, “and they feel pain!”

Dr. Williams, and his team were doing experiments on talking to plants. He had set out to prove that this helped them only because it blows carbon dioxide over their leaves. He had one team speak lovingly to the plants, and another threaten and verbally abuse them. To the surprise of all involved, the plants that were lovingly spoken to thrived, producing large, lovely flowers. Their growth rates were off the charts! The plants that were verbally abused and threatened never bloomed. Some even withered and died.

His team then connected EEG electrodes to several plants, and measured their responses to various stimuli. “They definitely felt it when we pricked them with needles. One of my staff even burned one with a lighter. Not only did its EEG go off the charts, but so did every plant in the same room!” Dr. Williams is submitting his findings to other scientists for further review. He told me that plants not only seem to be aware and to feel pain, it looks like they can even communicate. They may even be sentient beings.

9

I’ll just leave this here.

10

If it’s true (and I don’t believe it, but whatever), then the choices are:

[ul]
[li]Accept that we’re higher up on the food chain and carry on.[/li][/ul]

or

[ul]
[li]Decide it’s intolerable, kill yourself.[/li][/ul]

There’s no practical way to feed the human race without exploiting other living organisms.

11

If this is true:

What bloody use is this:

???

12

Nm, too silly to contemplate.

13

There’s no such place as the Helvetica Institute, as far as I can tell. Please provide a link to a peer-reviewed article by this “Dr. Williams.”

14

… And in case it’s not abundantly clear; what I mean is: If I put an infant fever thermometer against a teapot, it registers temperature off the scale - should I conclude that my tea is suffering from a life-threatening fever?

If you use the wrong tools for measuring something, you’ll get misleading results. Dr Williams deserves a kick in the pants for being such a klutz.

15

So I guess you believe that life only begins at germination. Embryonic plants are living creatures, too!

A truly just and moral person would eat only seedless fruit that had dropped off of plants without picking. I would still not feel comfortable without waiting for a few days to make sure that all life processes within the fruit had come to an end. The only way to really be sure is to limit yourself to rotten, seedless fruit that has dropped off of a plant without picking. And this ignores the bacteria question.

But this leaves me unfulfilled, for it fails to address the root question, from what does plant sufferring stem?

16

I suggest you look up “The Backster Effect”.

17

That’s what I came in to post. Carrot Juice is Murder.

In other news, anyone who responds seriously to the OP is a very silly person.

18

Plants have been victims of cruelty throughout all recorded history. Humankind’s so-called advancement into agriculture was also it’s moral demise. Once people began farming crops they sold their souls to the devil.

19

Easy, genetic engineering, just find a way to turn humans into plants and pOOf, problem solved.

of course we have a way to do this already, just die and get buried without all the preservatives/coffin and you will achieve pretty much exactly that.

20

You can’t eat without killing anything. That might be possible if we were able to synthesize all of our food, but we’re a pretty long way from that. In the meantime I’m comfortable with vegetarianism on an ethical level because I think it minimizes suffering to animals (even though some animals will die unintentionally and pesticides will be used to protect crops) and because I think it’s a much, much better use of natural resources. It looks like that nonsense about the Helvetica Institute comes from here, by the way.