Beyond Vegans to Deadans, NoOrgans for Ethical Foods
Vegans do not eat animal products of any type. While this is noteworthy I wonder whether they go far enough.
Perhaps they could be misguided to an extent to draw a line in the sand between animals (warm, cuddly things that have feelings and emotions) and cold heartless creatures like plants.
A skit performed by the famous English comedy duo of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore brought this concept to light for me. The scene involved a waiter in a plush vegan restaurant who was about to serve a steamed vegetable dish to a patron. “Do you know the sound that a carrot makes as its wrenched from the soil breaking hundreds of roots.” He waited a couple of seconds while he gave the customer the plate. He them emitted a blood curdling scream.
The skit was based on a newspaper article of a scientific study that had proven that plants have feelings that can be measured electronically.
Sorry vegetarians and vegans the stuff you are eating has feelings just like animals.
Plants don’t have facial expressions nor can they make sounds like animals but they have feelings none the less.
What is Entropy and Why Does it Matter?
Entropy describes the notion of ‘dust to dust’ that is that all systems tend towards a state of maximum or uniform randomness. Living things can only survive by maintaining and regenerating their ordered structures. A man lost in the desert without food dies and his body decays back to dust once the ‘life-force’ is gone that functions to maintain order and structure. Erwin Schrödinger is famous for the notion that life, decreases or maintains its entropy by feeding on negative entropy. What this means is that living things can only survive if they maintain and regenerate their ordered structures. This require a lot of energy. Plants tap into solar energy to build and maintain their structures. Animals are like parasites. They get energy by feeding on plants and extracting the energy released when the pant molecules such as glucose and carbohydrates are broken down to carbon dioxide and water. So animals feed on negative entropy – the ordered structure of plant, built from solar energy in order to survive.
Examining the Ethics of Vegetarianism
The key points are summarized below:
- We have established that plants have feelings, but no way of expressing these feelings
- The second most serious point is that most vegetables we eat are ALIVE when we eat them. Carrots are alive, apples are alive, oranges and alive, seeds are alive, nuts are alive, soy beans are alive.
- Contrast this with carnivores who only eat dead things. Most human carnivores don’t go out and jump on a cow, kill it and eating it while it is still screaming like lions do. The meat in the butcher shop an supermarkets is all dead. Its been killed by someone else, but its dead when we buy it.
- For vegetarians someone drags the plant from the ground or harvests the fruit or other plant material for them. But what they buy is STILL ALIVE, it is not dead. So vegetarians eating living things while carnivores mostly eat dead things.
Does this change things?
Are there other alternative?
Proposed New Categories of Voluntary Ethical Food Restrictions
Deadans
These people only eat dead things. They eat meat because it is dead, after someone else has killed it for them. They only eat vegetables that someone has killed for them by boiling, steaming or microwaving. They don’t eat fresh vegetables.
NoOrgans
These people refuse to eat anything organic or anything inorganic that could contain traces of organic residues. This includes oil and coal and anything such as plastics derived from organic fuels.
Unfortunately no one has worked out how to survive on these diets except for solar powered robots.
