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Pop wrote

if our goal as vegans is to subsist without being cruel to other lifeforms

I'm interested to know who has this goal and who thinks you can be cruel to a plant, and whether just killing them would constitute cruelty

I have multiple separate but interrelated goals re veganism;

  • to not participate in the capitalist consumption chain of animal products as much as possible
  • to be minimally mediated from the things that I affect
  • to cause as little suffering as possible

Also I think an ethics that doesn't take into consideration everything (in this case health) is not an ethics, just some kind of morality

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yaaqov wrote (edited )

I tried to pursue something like this goal, but I could not arrive at any solution besides like, not eating anything.

I mean, there’s a huge amount of evidence that tons of plants use a variety of defense mechanisms to prevent their ingestion. It’s incredible actually. They release toxins. They move, if slowly (but not always). They call for help from wasps using chemical signals. Lettuce sends news of its damage to its neighbors. Countless food plants poke and prickle you. The very taste that we love about garlic is its chemical response to damage. Isn’t that fucked up? We’re like that evil clown from It, who scares kids before eating them because it likes the taste of adrenaline.

And I don’t know about “pain”, or “sentience”, but christ. I can’t chop vegetables anymore without cringing a little. Even eating fruit, I can’t shake the feeling that it’s akin to r*pe, in some sense; just because something has genitals doesn’t mean they are ours to use.

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ziq wrote

I don't have that goal but I understand the reluctance of some (religious) people to eat root crops since you harvest the crop before it has a chance to complete its lifecycle; killing it before it fulfils its goal of reproduction. Most plants are renewable and can be harvested repeatedly without killing the plant.

But even with some root crops, potatoes / sweet potatoes for example, the plant makes lots of tubers in the ground, so harvesting some of them and leaving others doesn't kill the plant since it grows back from a single tiny tuber even if you kill all the leafy growth.

I avoid eating carrots mainly because they're hard to digest, but I rarely grow them because it doesn't feel right somehow to kill a plant in order to eat it. I like to let my plants go to seed after they've fed me so they can come back on their own the next season.

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