If it makes you feel better, many plants want their seeds to be eaten so they can be spread. Tomatoes are just a package around the seeds, the green stems are the plants ‘body’. It’s more like eating semen than eating a person.
I was using our social construct of race as a (bad) metaphore for species selection when deciding how much to support other trees. But now a second person is digging at it, thats a sign for me to discard that descriptor in future conversations. And only plant semen for me please.
There’s a type of vegetarianism/veganism that only eats plants that “want” to be eaten. Specifically, many plants produce fruits that hold seeds. They make the fruits bright and tasty (which tbh usually means “sweet” but you get the point) so that animals will come along and eat them.
Plants have a problem. They can t walk. That means that any of their offspring are going to grow up right next to them, competing with them for resources. There’s a lot of different ways of dealing with this phenomenon, but one common way is for the plant to bribe an animal to move its seeds further away by wrapping it in something delicious. This is what happens with plants that depend on pollinators like bees - which give pollen to get more mobile organisms to move their genes over there somewhere) and with ones who produce seeded fruits and berries which will pass through an animal’s digestive tract relatively unscathed and wind up in a nutrient rich environment far from itself. There’s also wind-based pollination and different lifecycles and so on, but the point is that being eaten is the entire point of producing fruit - for the most part.
Anyway, that class of people are called “fructarians.” It’s not actually a super healthy diet for a human and I do not recommend it. They intentionally steer away from plants like carrots because you can’t eat a carrot without killing the carrot plant, while you can eat an apple without killing an apple tree, if that makes sense.
In any case, while I respect the motivation, I think it’s going over the top. While I’ll always try to support people’s choices in things like diets and morality, it really doesn’t hold up to scrutiny after a point. I’ve read about religions that encourage people to sweep the road ahead of them as they walk so as to not step on an insect, and who strain their water so as not to accidentally consume what they consider to be a tiny animal. The truth is that you’re messing things up left and right while sweeping in front of you, and anything that does actually get caught in your filter is almost certainly going to die almost instantly.
There was an embarrassingly long time when we thought that animals (and even human children) could not feel pain. This was obviously wrong. At the same time, I don’t think we need to project an existential terror as being felt by a carrot.
The extreme of ethical veganism would be fruitarianism, where you only eat (botanical) fruits, i.e. that which plants give freely in exchange for spreading and fertilizing their seed
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-981-13-8922-1 ;)
Happy to share the pdf. Quanta also has a bunch of articles on plant “cognition.” They are very much living, aware beings.
To be honest, it kind of makes me sad. Is the fresh totatoe I eat alive when I bite it?
Growing things are alive, that’s how they grow.
If it makes you feel better, many plants want their seeds to be eaten so they can be spread. Tomatoes are just a package around the seeds, the green stems are the plants ‘body’. It’s more like eating semen than eating a person.
I can get behind that
You could have just said that straight away. Not an issue for anyone on lemmy if you are into eating semen, you didn’t need say trees are racist
I was using our social construct of race as a (bad) metaphore for species selection when deciding how much to support other trees. But now a second person is digging at it, thats a sign for me to discard that descriptor in future conversations. And only plant semen for me please.
There’s a type of vegetarianism/veganism that only eats plants that “want” to be eaten. Specifically, many plants produce fruits that hold seeds. They make the fruits bright and tasty (which tbh usually means “sweet” but you get the point) so that animals will come along and eat them.
Plants have a problem. They can t walk. That means that any of their offspring are going to grow up right next to them, competing with them for resources. There’s a lot of different ways of dealing with this phenomenon, but one common way is for the plant to bribe an animal to move its seeds further away by wrapping it in something delicious. This is what happens with plants that depend on pollinators like bees - which give pollen to get more mobile organisms to move their genes over there somewhere) and with ones who produce seeded fruits and berries which will pass through an animal’s digestive tract relatively unscathed and wind up in a nutrient rich environment far from itself. There’s also wind-based pollination and different lifecycles and so on, but the point is that being eaten is the entire point of producing fruit - for the most part.
Anyway, that class of people are called “fructarians.” It’s not actually a super healthy diet for a human and I do not recommend it. They intentionally steer away from plants like carrots because you can’t eat a carrot without killing the carrot plant, while you can eat an apple without killing an apple tree, if that makes sense.
In any case, while I respect the motivation, I think it’s going over the top. While I’ll always try to support people’s choices in things like diets and morality, it really doesn’t hold up to scrutiny after a point. I’ve read about religions that encourage people to sweep the road ahead of them as they walk so as to not step on an insect, and who strain their water so as not to accidentally consume what they consider to be a tiny animal. The truth is that you’re messing things up left and right while sweeping in front of you, and anything that does actually get caught in your filter is almost certainly going to die almost instantly.
There was an embarrassingly long time when we thought that animals (and even human children) could not feel pain. This was obviously wrong. At the same time, I don’t think we need to project an existential terror as being felt by a carrot.
https://www.sciencealert.com/plants-can-hear-themselves-being-eaten-researchers-have-discovered
https://daily.jstor.org/plants-know-when-they-are-being-eaten-and-they-fight-back/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hd-h_y1X4oA
Dont tell the vegetarians I guess
The extreme of ethical veganism would be fruitarianism, where you only eat (botanical) fruits, i.e. that which plants give freely in exchange for spreading and fertilizing their seed
Yeah, you are eating their children.
Ideally, you’re providing their children a nourishing, nitrogen-rich environment to begin their growth. Practically, they get flushed.
I’ll be damned, this could explain why the Pope shits in the woods.
“Or… do.” - the angry …what would the term be for some one who eats only artificial foods? The angry that-guy.