Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
I think that was mentioned in The Secret Life of Plants back in the '70s.
For ages, cooks killed lobsters by dumping them in boiling water. Now the "humane" way is to drive a knife through the brainstem.
I wonder if there's a humane way to kill and cook plants.
That's true. It was a fun book but I'm not sure how factual it was. Being a bit of a mad scientist, I put it to the test.
We had some small plants we were growing indoors. I won't say what type of plants, but they were some of them green ones, and they were strictly for medicinal purposes, LOL.
In the kitchen, I took a few of the plants and placed them by a stove burner that was set on Low. In the living room, I set the rest of the plants on the ledge which separated the 2 rooms. The idea was to slowly torture the kitchen plants w/ heat and see if the living room plants responded to their slow roasting.
In the morning, the plants on the stove were all shriveled up, and lo and behold, the living room plants were leaning toward the kitchen plants! Now whether this was because they were in sympathy w/ their poor kitchen mates or because the small differential of heat made them lean that way, I couldn't say. It's a simple experiment if someone else would like to take up the work where I left off.
We were not able to repeat the experiment because our stock of plants was suddenly consumed by fire. They were GOOD plants too!
See the reference articles in the previous thread nored above. Plants definitely communicate & interact in response to noxious factors in the vicinity of the colony.
Communication and interaction have nothing to do with consciousness, which is a requisite for feeling pain.
Quote:
Originally Posted by gypsychic
Bottom line is that NO living thing wants to be eaten, so just eat what you want. I believe in the Native American approach; that you live lightly on the land, take only what you need, and give thanks to the plants and the animals for being your dinner.
Not all living things have wants, though. Having a preference implies consciousness, and plants aren't conscious.
Quote:
Originally Posted by SimplySagacious
You could do us all a great service by scientifically debunking the research.
Except the research doesn't say plants can feel anything. It says they emit sound.
Quote:
Originally Posted by SimplySagacious
So you didn't understand referential then, or now. Got it.
It doesn't matter what different authors say when referencing the research. It matters what the actual researchers said in the study. And they didn't say "scream," nor did they imply that plants are conscious.
Quote:
Originally Posted by SimplySagacious
Obviously they have no idea because farming plants also contradicts the vegan philosophy of abstaining from anything that requires exploitation of other living organisms. I don't know how they reconcile the hypocrisy in their minds.
That isn't, and never has been, a tenet of veganism. Veganism is solely about abstaining from animal products, not the products of any living organism. Vegans are known far and wide for eating plants, so I have no idea how you arrived at the idea that they claim to avoid all living organisms.
A CNS or functional equivalent is likely required for consciousness, and plants don't have that. Therefore, they aren't capable of consciousness and can't suffer.
It takes 3000 cal worth of corn, rice & beans to provide the 60gm of complete protein needed daily by a human. That can be supplied by 6oz of beef. There are 1200 6 oz servings from one steer. One steer needs about one acre of grass per year. How many acres of corn, rice & beans does it take to feed 1200 servings? Do the math.
One six ounce portion of beef doesn't contain anywhere near 3,000 calories, so this is an absurd comparison. And this isn't even getting into the fact that the vast majority of beef that's consumed is finished on corn, not grass. Feeding plants to animals and then eating those animals results in more plants being consumed than if humans ate plants directly. It's not even close.
Quote:
Originally Posted by guidoLaMoto
We can t digest cellulose, so most of the calories in plants pass right thru us.
Most calories in plants aren't in the form of cellulose, so this isn't true.
Quote:
Originally Posted by guidoLaMoto
And then there's the argument that getting rid of meat animals will save the planet. That's advocated by people who have absolutely no idea of how crops are grown. How many passes of a fuel hungry tractor does it take to bring a crop from seed to harvest?....Most of a steer's diet is low maintenance grass, requiring virtually no fossil fuel at all.
So you don't even understand the actual argument you're responding to. Cows are tremendous methane emitters, and methane is a very powerful greenhouse gas.
One six ounce portion of beef doesn't contain anywhere near 3,000 calories, so this is an absurd comparison. And this isn't even getting into the fact that the vast majority of beef that's consumed is finished on corn, not grass. Feeding plants to animals and then eating those animals results in more plants being consumed than if humans ate plants directly. It's not even close.
Most calories in plants aren't in the form of cellulose, so this isn't true.
So you don't even understand the actual argument you're responding to. Cows are tremendous methane emitters, and methane is a very powerful greenhouse gas.
Amazing lack of science in one short post.
I didn't say the 6oz of beef had 3000ca!. I said it had 60gm protein, the point being that veganism is an inefficient way to eat.
Most calories in a plant are in the cellulose. It s the fruits that store the sugars & starches. Some of the veggies we eat are the fruits and some are the vegetative parts. Either way, you re inefficient at digesting and internalizing the nutrients compared to eating meat.
Animals emit some methane, but it contains C that was already in the active carbon cycle, not from sequestered carbon...While metane is about 10x more "powerful" in GHE than CO2 on a molar basis, it's concentration in the ATM is only 1/10,000 that of CO2 AND once emitted by the animal it is rapidly turned back into CO2,..so the over all effect of animals emitting methane is essentially ZERO.....but then, I don't learn my science from NPR.
I KNEW it, the shivering horror and terror that poor Plants must experience when they think about their nightmarish-ending...and the actual pain, suffering and agony they go through when being killed, so awful.
At least as someone who mainly eats meat, I know that animals are not put-down is such a horrible manner, it is usually quick, with limited pain.
I didn't say the 6oz of beef had 3000ca!. I said it had 60gm protein, the point being that veganism is an inefficient way to eat.
I think you're the one off on the science here buddy. Veganism isn't inefficient. It just has less protein by weight. Your six ounce portion of beef will still require you to consume other nutrients as it doesn't get a person anywhere near their daily needs for calories or specific nutrients like carbohydrates.
But "efficiency" here ought to mean the ratio of inputs to outputs. Feeding corn to cows so we can get calories through meat is far, far less efficient than consuming plants ourselves.
Quote:
Originally Posted by guidoLaMoto
Most calories in a plant are in the cellulose. It s the fruits that store the sugars & starches. Some of the veggies we eat are the fruits and some are the vegetative parts.
But we aren't talking about the calories in the whole plant. We're talking about the calories in the plant food consumed by humans. Vegans aren't eating bark; they're eating fruit. In the plant-based food we eat, calories from cellulose are nowhere close to the majority of calories (and that fiber has human health benefits, even if it isn't nutritive).
Quote:
Originally Posted by guidoLaMoto
Either way, you re inefficient at digesting and internalizing the nutrients compared to eating meat.
The inefficiencies of meat don't happen inside the human. They happen in the process of turning those plants into meat. Using plants to make animals is far less efficient than eating plants. Even cattle, which are incredible meat producers, waste almost half of their bodyweight on non-meat. More importantly, the energy expenditure for non-mass producing activities (walking around, digestion, etc.) is wasted in the process.
Quote:
Originally Posted by guidoLaMoto
Animals emit some methane, but it contains C that was already in the active carbon cycle, not from sequestered carbon...While metane is about 10x more "powerful" in GHE than CO2 on a molar basis, it's concentration in the ATM is only 1/10,000 that of CO2 AND once emitted by the animal it is rapidly turned back into CO2,..so the over all effect of animals emitting methane is essentially ZERO.....but then, I don't learn my science from NPR.
Ha, you have shown yourself to have a poor handle on several scientific and similar concepts in my interactions with you, including your bizarre claim that combining independently-correlated factors doesn't increase risk (in the other thread). So save the "I don't get my science from NPR" comments for when you aren't so grossly misusing concepts that are taught in freshman-level statistics.
The idea that methane emitted by cows is carbon neutral because it isn't sourced from sequestered carbon is 100% bogus. A few points on this:
1. You're probably understating the gap in warming potential for methane and CO2. Methane is about an 80x stronger greenhouse gas during the first two decades of emission, but it's perturbation time is much shorter. Yes, on a hundred year timeline, which is typically the comparison timeline, most calculations put it at 20-30x more powerful than CO2 (not 10x, as you claim here). But in the real world, where near-term carbon emissions are of greater importance, this 80x increase over CO2 in the next decade or two is a really, really big deal. On a simple ppm basis, CH4 is about 25x more powerful in terms of warming potential than CO2, and that increase to about 45x when indirect effects of methane are included. On a mass basis, methane is 70x more powerful.
2. You are right that, on paper anyway, corn should absorb CO2 from the atmosphere during its growth and then release it as the corn is broken down, either in the form of biofuel or cattle production. But the outsized effect of methane due to its chemical structure means that it is producing greater warming effect per carbon atom than CO2. This is really the gist of this discussion. The simple fact that the carbon is already active in the carbon cycle doesn't mean its conversion to CH4 rather than CO2 in cattle doesn't represent a real increase in warming.
3. The relatie concentrations of CH4 and CO2 in the atmosphere are irrelevant for the purposes we're discussing here. What's relevant is the effect of marginal changes in these gases in the atmosphere.
Point #2 above is really the bottom line and the source of your error. Yes, the carbon is always active, but much more warming per carbon atom is produced when it's in methane form.
To add to the above, the only way in which methane is "neutral" is if methane emission from cattle stays constant for twelve years (about the lifespan of methane in the atmosphere before conversion to CO2), which would mean new methane production would be cancelled by the conversion of 12 year-old methane into CO2.
But this is a silly way of using the word "neutral." Imagine I slap you in the face, and it takes about a day for the pain and the mark to go away. Could I conclude that me slapping you is a neutral activity, so long as I only slap you once per day? After all, if I don't slap you more often than once per day, your level of paint and discomfort doesn't change. Of course not. Me slapping you is harmful, just as our curent level of atmospheric CH4 is harmful. We'd be better off with lower levels of methane in the atmosphere, and the simple fact that we aren't continuing to increase the level of methane above and beyond the artificial, harmful level we've established in the past doesn't mean it is neutral in any meaningful sense.
Last edited by Wittgenstein's Ghost; 04-11-2024 at 12:12 PM..
The Indy Standard is an imposter site, lacks transparency, and publishes false information.
The article is true and it properly links to the published study in Cell, a prestigious scientific journal. Harping on this article is an attempt to deflect from the study. Anyone can read the study or the numerous other sources with articles and videos about the study, if you prefer.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
