[cryodesign]

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).

[pharrington]

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.

[cryodesign]

Why does it have to be black or white? It's a spectrum. Or as pmoriarty greatly put it further down:

'If one can't save everything, one must save nothing?'

You should watch the presentation by Ethan Brown, he talks about creating meat using plant protein.

He's a great entrepreneur and 'hacker'. You might enjoy it.