“Note to self: Stop. Doing. Anything.”

As a lover of all things “jerky” I find vegetarians and vegans impossibly difficult to understand. Lucky for me, there’s some sane people still out there who console my straying conscious back into the right.

In a particularly interesting article written a few days ago, science columnist Natalie Angier wrote about the viability of ethics-based veganism – a topic I’m sure we’re all familiar with given our own geographical location. In her article, Angier noted that vegans often argue the ethical way of consumption is choosing not to eat meat. In the opinion of Angier (and myself), the choice hits a few snags. Angier highlighted the more ridiculous points of the argument:

“Before we cede the entire moral penthouse to “committed vegetarians” and “strong ethical vegans,” we might consider that plants no more aspire to being stir-fried in a wok than a hog aspires to being peppercorn-studded in my Christmas clay pot.”

The rest of Angier’s article is quite well-written, and focuses on the nature of plant evolution with regards to their efforts to, as she puts it, “Fight to survive”. Weighing heavy is newly developing research from those dastardly thwart-ers of public truth, scientists:

“Plants are not static or silly,” said Monika Hilker of the Institute of Biology at the Free University of Berlin. “They respond to tactile cues, they recognize different wavelengths of light, they listen to chemical signals, they can even talk” through chemical signals. Touch, sight, hearing, speech. “These are sensory modalities and abilities we normally think of as only being in animals,” Dr. Hilker said.”

…

“I’m amazed at how fast some of these things happen,” said Consuelo M. De Moraes of Pennsylvania State University. Dr. De Moraes and her colleagues did labeling experiments to clock a plant’s systemic response time and found that, in less than 20 minutes from the moment the caterpillar had begun feeding on its leaves, the plant had plucked carbon from the air and forged defensive compounds from scratch.”

Now, since Angier’s article was in the “Science” section, it doesn’t stand alone as an Op-Ed piece against the perils of veganism. But by framing the news about the research in her article around the subject of moral veganism, Angier effectively drowns out any voice in favor of “tofu over tilapia”. What should be pointed out is that an argument made against vegetarianism and/or veganism, in this case, can be constructed with respect to refuting the “morally superior” stance that many vegans use to place themselves on a pillar.

Of course, arguments can be made (well, I might add) against large-scale farming, processed food and the like. In fact, arguments can be made against eating animal products for entirely non-moral motivations as well – I know several people who are vegetarians simply because they do not like the texture of meat.

Unfortunately, all too-often we are clubbed over the head with the moral issue of consuming meat (much to the confusion of dentists). If we as humans are going to play the apologist to every other life form on the face of the planet, do the questions stop at, “Do fish have feelings?” or somewhere else down the line? As Angier points out, the news looks grim for vegans as indeed, “Brussels sprouts like to live, too.”

For vegans, it must be difficult having the weight of the lives of a million soy beans on their shoulders. I wish them all the best of luck with that.

Now, where’s my jerky?

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 27th, 2009 at 04:35 by D and is filed under City, Crazy, Die., Eugene, Humor, Northwest, Snark, Stupid. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.