Certain vegetables like leeks get buried as they sprout to make the “shoot” part as long as possible.

Rhubarb is grown in near complete darkness, and it screams as it grows towards a light it’ll never reach

Future generations will not look kindly upon this comment.

That’s how it worked for my kids, too.

If it helps, in Argentina they are deforesting large swathes of land and pushing previous owners out at gunpoint just to plant more soy. That’s not an Onion article.

This going to trigger so many >!cheeseflakes!< who have made eating cheese their whole personality.

And before any body starts screeching, I’m not even a vegan. I do mostly make vegan home at food, but you can pry my cold, dead hands out of my cheese, and I also occasionally eat fish or meat.

The people I know that are hard-core meat eaters are hunters who vastly prefer meat they’ve killed themselves (in a heavily regulated system that prioritizes sustaining the environment). I live in Alaska, though.

X Headline is going to trigger Y group

I found it funny, because it makes out that treating a plant badly makes it taste meaty in the same way that badly treated cattle are less nutritious and less good tasting than those which are free range on landscape like that they evolved on

There is not really strong evidence of plant sentience. Here’s one paper looking at it:

A. Plants do not show proactive behavior.

B. Classical learning does not indicate consciousness, so reports of such learning in plants are irrelevant.

C. The considerable differences between the electrical signals in plants and the animal nervous system speak against a functional equivalence. Unlike in animals, the action potentials of plants have many physiological roles that involve Ca2+ signaling and osmotic control; and plants’ variable potentials have properties that preclude any conscious perception of wounding as pain.

D. In plants, no evidence exists of reciprocal (recurrent) electrical signaling for integrating information, which is a prerequisite for consciousness.

E. Most proponents of plant consciousness also say that all cells are conscious, a speculative theory plagued with counterevidence.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8052213/

Though something interesting and perhaps counter intuitive to note is that even if we realized plants were sentient, a plant-based diet actually involved killing fewer plants due to the lessened need to grow feed (of which most of the energy is lost)

Well, the first step to this question is the ever infuriating “define cruelty”. It’s easy enough with complex vertebrates who have evolved to socially signal pain, which is almost everything we eat. It’s even easy to extend it to complex vertebrates which hide pain. But it’s hard enough to rigorously say whether something like an invertebrate insect or crustacean even feels pain at all. They certainly have pain responses, but is the qualia of that response in theory internal space recognizable?

It’s not an easy question to approach, but it is an important one broadly.

Let’s say that plants do have some kind of sentience, which is probably very limited due to the evidence we do have. Animals still have more advanced sentience that is closer to our own so it would still be the lesser evil to eat plants. Like why would you eat other people or chimps when there are other options available?

It takes a lot of mental gymnastics to be able to say that plants suffer the same way as animals. I know you’re not saying this, but you do hear stuff like this based on this premise.

They are living things. We shouldn’t seek to deliberately cause pain if possible. While I like how stuff like bonsai trees look, I also feel a bit bad for them, wired and snipped in so many places and forced to be grown unnaturally small.

Or people who deliberately carve graffiti into trees with a knife.

Plants and trees have interestingly complex communication networks. We barely understand their microfauna and underground microbiomes that allow forests to grow much healthier and disease-resistant than our backyards. I have a funny feeling we know a lot less than we think we know, like when scientists discovered that babies can actually feel pain, or that dogs realize when they are treated unfairly. Stuff discovered within our lifetimes, lol.

They can detect tissue damage and grow away from the source. So being physically cruel to a plant would definitely affect its growth. And yes, they can also share some types of information and resources with their neighbours.

Long answer: Yes, with an “if”.

Short answer No, with a “but”.

Not Mariah Carey!!?!?

Can you cite a scholarly source on that? The “scientists say plants feel pain” is a very common point but there’s no actual scientists claiming they “feel pain”

Also 70% of all crops grown in the US (with similar numbers in many other countries) are grown to produce animal feed. So even IF plants felt pain (they dont) going vegan would still be better because itd mean less plants getting “hurt”

That being said, Im guessing you dont really believe this anyways, unless you apologize everytime you trim a plant or walk on grass lol

It’s funny because this would actually sell. And it’s funny because it hurts too much to feel how disturbing it is.

The flavor comes from the suffering

You should watch Dominion and double check if suffering in another is funny.

You’re welcome to it then. Quorn is fine, and I do like diversifying food sources; mycoprotein is good.

But tbh, I like soy because its pretty lightly processed. Tofu can be made at home easily, with nothing beyond tools, water, and vinegar. And if you don’t like tofu, that’s fine, but its my ‘meat’ of choice.

Seitan is my second favorite, and again, its pretty easy to make at home; only water and flour is needed.

I do eat quorn sometimes, but not often. And while mycoprotein is cool as a meat substitute, I feel like just eating mushrooms is a better choice for most dishes.

Quorn is expensive…at least near me :( soy can be bought as dry beans for less than 5 bucks a kg. Also everyone can/could grow soy in a flower pot, quorn seems a tiny bit harder no? even though it’s basically made of mushrooms

And if soy wasn’t the better option why wouldn’t cattle-raisers use Quorn?

Finally, having more good options is good :)

Its a complete and excellent source of protein thats easily farmed and can be prepared in a million different delicious ways. It is also thousands of times less destructive for the environment than meat, as well as being cheaper to produce.

Soy has been consumed for thousands of years. Also this is entirely anecdotal and opinion: but Quorn sucks. Morning star/beyond meat all the way

I don’t know. I want to hear more about these brutal conditions. It may add the suffering flavor soy has been missing all this time.