Now I’m curious if plants have enough complexity to their internal experience for it to be possible to be cruel to them or not. One is used to thinking of them as basically inanimate apart from that they grow, but some of them can sort of communicate with other plants in certain ways can’t they?
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.
We need not have grandstanders in the comments, I eat meat products almost every day. This made me chuckle, because it’s actually funny.
You should watch Dominion and double check if suffering in another is funny.
While it may seem dated now (2005), I prefer Earthlings. No need to watch both, they cover roughly the same topics.
vegan btw
you should give a trigger warning when you link gore
Works for hot peppers. The worse you treat them while growing; the hotter, angrier and tastier they get.
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
Where does the rhubarb get energy then? Does it just rely on stored energy in the seed or roots or something and get given light eventually, or can it actually use tiny amounts of light?
The plant has an energy reserve underground that is allowed to build up for a year or two before starting to harvest.
If you are doing it sustainably, you can harvest the shoots until they start showing signs of undernourishment, then you stop harvesting and let it build energy back up.
Forcing the rhubarb is an option for the shoots you plan on eating, they grow faster and sweeter than if they grow naturally
The plant has an energy reserve underground that is allowed to build up for a year or two before starting to harvest.
Not a botanist, but I’m pretty sure that’s why rhubarb is so sweet. Those energy reserves are mostly sugar, so maximizing the energy reserves maximizes the sweetness, like you note below.
Yeah the rhubarb that people grow in their own gardens without a rhubarb torture cellar is way more sour than store-bought, in my experience.
So wait, are they treating the workers horribly, or… Oh, it’s an Onion article.
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.
It’s worth noting 77% of the world’s soy goes to animal feed. Only 5% of soy goes to soy bean products like tofu, soy milk, etc.
Then, 90% of that feed gets used by the animals to walk around, fart, and generally stay alive until they get slaughtered. Essentially, 70% of the soy crops gets wasted on breeding animals to suffer.
This is going to trigger so many broflakes who have made eating meat their whole personality.
And before anybody starts screeching, I’m not even a vegan. I do mostly make vegan food at home, but you can pry my cheese out of my cold, dead hands, and I also occasionally eat fish or meat.
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.
You OK there buddy?
I’m just cheeseposting.
