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As a vegetarian, I constantly have to suffer through idiotic arguments based on headlines like this. I know this happens in all areas of life, but this is defin

As a vegetarian, I constantly have to suffer through idiotic arguments based on headlines like this. I know this happens in all areas of life, but this is definitely the one to which I am exposed most often and it drives me absolutely nuts. Journalists, please stop giving people ammo for their stupid guns.

whichdan 14y ago
Strangely, I've never had anyone argue this to me, but I do get asked, several times per year, if I eat seafood.
- aristus 14y ago
  In many languages, "meat" roughly equates to "red meat". Fish and fowl are considered different categories. I believe this came about because of a Catholic church ruling that fish did not count against the promise to give up meat during Lent. It also lead to silliness like classing the chigüire / capybara, basically a large swamp-dwelling gerbil, as a fish.
  - joeyo 14y ago
    Not just the capybara, but beavers and muskrats too! It actually makes some sense when you consider that Thomas Aquinas' Aristotelianist classification of animals more to do with habitat as anatomy.
- jaylevitt 14y ago
  My usual answer: "Only Broccoli Fish." When they ask what a Broccoli Fish is, I explain patiently that there's no such thing.
- derleth 14y ago
  > if I eat seafood Do you kill invasive insects? Frankly, a shrimp or a lobster is pretty much on a level with a cockroach, when you get down to neural complexity and everything relevant to moral vegetarianism, as opposed to vegetarianism for health reasons. Bony fish are not much more complex. Things like sea cucumber don't even have brains: They have nerves, but they lack any centralized structure for them to converge on. Same with jellyfish. So I suppose my point is that it isn't a dumb question, at least if you're a vegetarian for moral reasons related to killing a living being with emotions.
  - whichdan 14y ago
    You make a very good point, and if you excuse my snarkiness, I shall now describe myself as "an exclusive consumer of plant cells" instead of "vegetarian."
  - jamesbritt 14y ago
    Lobsters may feel pain. http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/7536/does-a-lobster-feel-little-no-pain-when-boiled-alive http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/7536/does-a-lobs...
    - derleth 14y ago
      If you define 'feel pain' correctly, single-celled organisms have been observed to feel pain in that they move away from noxious chemicals.
- whatusername 14y ago
  How about Oysters? http://www.slate.com/articles/life/food/2010/04/consider_the_oyster.html http://www.slate.com/articles/life/food/2010/04/consider_the...
polyfractal 14y ago
For the record, I agree with you. BUT, as a biologist, I often find it amusing that people discount plants completely. It's easy to forget that they are alive too. Fundamentally, they aren't so different from you or a turtle or a fruit fly. Different cellular structure, sure. Not easily recognizable "consciousness", absolutely. Non-motile, check. However, plants are very much alive. They react to stimuli, survive in hostile environments, procreate. They are more alien to our sensibilities, but they are arguably not very much different in the grand scale of things.
- a_bonobo 14y ago
  As another biologist, I like to troll vegetarians by insisting that plants have pain, because what else do you call a signalling system which starts a damage-response-system?
  - thundara 14y ago
    That's just playing off the terrible definition we have of "pain"
  - eru 14y ago
    Also, plants are autotrophs. Cows are heterotrophs. By some inverse of the categorical imperative, you should not do to beings what they are not doing to others. I.e. don't eat the autotrophs. Eat the heterotrophs.
  - colanderman 14y ago
    Usually the line is not drawn around "ability to feel pain", it's drawn around "has a central nervous system", which is used as a rough proxy for "is sentient". Otherwise it would be OK for a vegan to kill and eat a person who has lost the ability to feel pain, but otherwise functions normally. Edit: came along this interesting link about the measure of sentience: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentience_quotient http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentience_quotient
    - a_bonobo 14y ago
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
wisty 14y ago
Downvoted. It's a semi-serious article, not something that suggests you shouldn't eat plants (what else can you eat? meat? cows eat lots of plants when they are being raised). Only a really disingenuous person would claim it's kinder to eat meat. There's arguments in favor of eating meat (there's some book called "The Mindful Carnivore" which goes a bit deeper than "meat bad veg good"), but ... that's way off topic. Nobody with half a brain thinks plants scream when you eat them, and that's not what the article is saying.
- rosser 14y ago
  There actually is a religion/practice that eschews even eating whole or root vegetables on the basis that killing plants is also murder. It's called Jainism, and practitioners eat only fruits, leaves, nuts, seeds, and the like. They also walk barefoot, and sweep the ground in front of themselves as they go to avoid inadvertently stepping on insects.
  - mayanksinghal 14y ago
    And in countries like India, the belief is neither considered outrageous nor is it hard to follow. In fact, Jain food is readily available and basically the same as typical Indian vegetarian food minus the root vegetables plus replacements. It is often hard to distinguish.
wtvanhest 14y ago
I dated a vegetarian for a while and people would always ask her dumb questions about it and make unoriginal (basically exact same) jokes about it so I sympathize with you to a degree. On the other hand, I find it annoying that a vegetarian can draw the line in the sand and decide what is morally correct for everyone to believe. I'm sure there are vegans judging you for eating (milk, eggs etc. whatever you do eat), and there are "vegetarians" that eat seafood who think you are too extreme, and there are probably people who only eat plants that died of natural causes who think all those groups are terrible and should have more self control over their diet. The article was pretty interesting and novel to me and if you get a few more dumb questions from people, I don't think it is the end of the world.
- derleth 14y ago
  > people who only eat plants that died of natural causes Not that I've heard of. I have heard of fruititarians, who only eat the parts of plants the plants produce specifically to be eaten. (It's more complex than that, in fact, but I won't go into it all here.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruitarianism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruitarianism
  - noste 14y ago
    That Wikipedia article mentions that "According to author Adam Gollner, some fruitarians eat only fallen fruit."
- vacri 14y ago
  I find it annoying that a vegetarian can draw the line in the sand and decide what is morally correct for everyone to believe. Only some vegetarians do that, and it's wrong to imply that it's a defining feature of the demographic. I have vegetarian friends that cook me meat when I visit for dinner, despite me asking not to get special treatment. Other vegetarians just don't like the taste of meat, nothing to do with moral or health attitudes. Unless the vegetarian is being vocal about the moral issue, it's pretty impolite to bring up the topic apropos of nothing - it's almost always just the questioner trying to score some sort of point.
dredmorbius 14y ago
As a meat-eater, I've determined that the answer to the question isn't particularly relevant to my dietary choices.
lostlogin 14y ago
What about the intensive questioning on how you get protein. I do t think I've every asked anyone anything like this. Is there anything more boring?

whichdan 14y ago

Strangely, I've never had anyone argue this to me, but I do get asked, several times per year, if I eat seafood.

aristus 14y ago
In many languages, "meat" roughly equates to "red meat". Fish and fowl are considered different categories. I believe this came about because of a Catholic church ruling that fish did not count against the promise to give up meat during Lent. It also lead to silliness like classing the chigüire / capybara, basically a large swamp-dwelling gerbil, as a fish.
- joeyo 14y ago
  Not just the capybara, but beavers and muskrats too! It actually makes some sense when you consider that Thomas Aquinas' Aristotelianist classification of animals more to do with habitat as anatomy.
jaylevitt 14y ago
My usual answer: "Only Broccoli Fish." When they ask what a Broccoli Fish is, I explain patiently that there's no such thing.
derleth 14y ago
> if I eat seafood Do you kill invasive insects? Frankly, a shrimp or a lobster is pretty much on a level with a cockroach, when you get down to neural complexity and everything relevant to moral vegetarianism, as opposed to vegetarianism for health reasons. Bony fish are not much more complex. Things like sea cucumber don't even have brains: They have nerves, but they lack any centralized structure for them to converge on. Same with jellyfish. So I suppose my point is that it isn't a dumb question, at least if you're a vegetarian for moral reasons related to killing a living being with emotions.
- whichdan 14y ago
  You make a very good point, and if you excuse my snarkiness, I shall now describe myself as "an exclusive consumer of plant cells" instead of "vegetarian."
- jamesbritt 14y ago
  Lobsters may feel pain. http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/7536/does-a-lobster-feel-little-no-pain-when-boiled-alive http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/7536/does-a-lobs...
  - derleth 14y ago
    If you define 'feel pain' correctly, single-celled organisms have been observed to feel pain in that they move away from noxious chemicals.
whatusername 14y ago
How about Oysters? http://www.slate.com/articles/life/food/2010/04/consider_the_oyster.html http://www.slate.com/articles/life/food/2010/04/consider_the...

polyfractal 14y ago

For the record, I agree with you. BUT, as a biologist, I often find it amusing that people discount plants completely. It's easy to forget that they are alive too. Fundamentally, they aren't so different from you or a turtle or a fruit fly. Different cellular structure, sure. Not easily recognizable "consciousness", absolutely. Non-motile, check. However, plants are very much alive. They react to stimuli, survive in hostile environments, procreate. They are more alien to our sensibilities, but they are arguably not very much different in the grand scale of things.

a_bonobo 14y ago
As another biologist, I like to troll vegetarians by insisting that plants have pain, because what else do you call a signalling system which starts a damage-response-system?
- thundara 14y ago
  That's just playing off the terrible definition we have of "pain"
- eru 14y ago
  Also, plants are autotrophs. Cows are heterotrophs. By some inverse of the categorical imperative, you should not do to beings what they are not doing to others. I.e. don't eat the autotrophs. Eat the heterotrophs.
- colanderman 14y ago
  Usually the line is not drawn around "ability to feel pain", it's drawn around "has a central nervous system", which is used as a rough proxy for "is sentient". Otherwise it would be OK for a vegan to kill and eat a person who has lost the ability to feel pain, but otherwise functions normally. Edit: came along this interesting link about the measure of sentience: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentience_quotient http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentience_quotient
  - a_bonobo 14y ago

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

wisty 14y ago

Downvoted. It's a semi-serious article, not something that suggests you shouldn't eat plants (what else can you eat? meat? cows eat lots of plants when they are being raised). Only a really disingenuous person would claim it's kinder to eat meat. There's arguments in favor of eating meat (there's some book called "The Mindful Carnivore" which goes a bit deeper than "meat bad veg good"), but ... that's way off topic. Nobody with half a brain thinks plants scream when you eat them, and that's not what the article is saying.

rosser 14y ago
There actually is a religion/practice that eschews even eating whole or root vegetables on the basis that killing plants is also murder. It's called Jainism, and practitioners eat only fruits, leaves, nuts, seeds, and the like. They also walk barefoot, and sweep the ground in front of themselves as they go to avoid inadvertently stepping on insects.
- mayanksinghal 14y ago
  And in countries like India, the belief is neither considered outrageous nor is it hard to follow. In fact, Jain food is readily available and basically the same as typical Indian vegetarian food minus the root vegetables plus replacements. It is often hard to distinguish.

wtvanhest 14y ago

I dated a vegetarian for a while and people would always ask her dumb questions about it and make unoriginal (basically exact same) jokes about it so I sympathize with you to a degree. On the other hand, I find it annoying that a vegetarian can draw the line in the sand and decide what is morally correct for everyone to believe. I'm sure there are vegans judging you for eating (milk, eggs etc. whatever you do eat), and there are "vegetarians" that eat seafood who think you are too extreme, and there are probably people who only eat plants that died of natural causes who think all those groups are terrible and should have more self control over their diet. The article was pretty interesting and novel to me and if you get a few more dumb questions from people, I don't think it is the end of the world.

derleth 14y ago
> people who only eat plants that died of natural causes Not that I've heard of. I have heard of fruititarians, who only eat the parts of plants the plants produce specifically to be eaten. (It's more complex than that, in fact, but I won't go into it all here.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruitarianism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruitarianism
- noste 14y ago
  That Wikipedia article mentions that "According to author Adam Gollner, some fruitarians eat only fallen fruit."
vacri 14y ago
I find it annoying that a vegetarian can draw the line in the sand and decide what is morally correct for everyone to believe. Only some vegetarians do that, and it's wrong to imply that it's a defining feature of the demographic. I have vegetarian friends that cook me meat when I visit for dinner, despite me asking not to get special treatment. Other vegetarians just don't like the taste of meat, nothing to do with moral or health attitudes. Unless the vegetarian is being vocal about the moral issue, it's pretty impolite to bring up the topic apropos of nothing - it's almost always just the questioner trying to score some sort of point.

dredmorbius 14y ago

As a meat-eater, I've determined that the answer to the question isn't particularly relevant to my dietary choices.

lostlogin 14y ago

What about the intensive questioning on how you get protein. I do t think I've every asked anyone anything like this. Is there anything more boring?