What is your take on the morally of eating plants. Plants are living creatures some would say sentient beings. Recent research is showing they feel pain, communicate with other plants. Do they deserve the same protection?
Good question. Imagine plants feel pain like other animals and like we do. If our objective is to avoid suffering and environmental damage as much as possible, which one would you choose:
1) Eat animals and plants. Remember the animals you eat also eat plants. This creates maximum suffering and damage.
2) Eat plants only. This creates less suffering and damage than option 1.
To answer your question though, if it's scientifically proven that plants are sentient and feel pain like we do (i.e. suffer) then I would only eat what plants produce (e.g. nuts, legumes, apples, etc) rather than the plant itself (e.g. carrots).
If it's scientifically proven that plants are sentient and feel pain (I'm dropping the like conjunction because that's pushing it past the breaking point), you'd prefer keeping them alive in perpetuity to continually rip off their genitals over killing them outright?
Personally, at least until we can efficiently synthesize arbitrary dietary proteins, fats, and fibers, I'll keep using my computer built from rare earths mined with exploited workers to post about the delicious, factory-slaughtered chicken I just ate.
Plants are living organisms. Before we go into any kind of debate that presupposes that plants are "creatures", "sentient" or "feel" anything, you are going to have to provide a whole lot of explaining, backed by the same amount of citations.
Of course plants exchange signals with their environment. And of course they are alive. Of course they behave with purpose (they do things which further their cause of reproducing, as is expected of evolved organisms).
This doesn't imply at all that they are sentient or have feelings, which is what we care about (or should, in any case) when we discuss harming or protecting other living things.
Of course, there are other considerations such as ecological, but that's not what we're discussing here.
1) Eat animals and plants. Remember the animals you eat also eat plants. This creates maximum suffering and damage.
2) Eat plants only. This creates less suffering and damage than option 1.
To answer your question though, if it's scientifically proven that plants are sentient and feel pain like we do (i.e. suffer) then I would only eat what plants produce (e.g. nuts, legumes, apples, etc) rather than the plant itself (e.g. carrots).