| I do not believe that veganism can be criticized for a lack of empathy versus plants. Even if we value identically plants and animals, plants are exploited in a much more benign way than animals. In the past, there were many domestic animals which could be said to have lived quite a happy life for their kind, until the moment when they were slaughtered. Nowadays, the vast majority of the domestic animals live in conditions that can be hardly named other than torture. On the other hand, the cultivated plants do not really live in any worse way than in their wild state. The majority of the cultivated plants are either annual plants, which are killed a very short time before the moment when they would have died anyway, or they are perennial plants from which we take only their fruits, which have been developed by the plants especially for being taken by animals, as a payment for being aided in reproduction. So without giving any preference to cultivated plants or domestic animals, the more ethical choice is to continue to exploit in the current way only the former. I believe that in the future not even cultivating plants will be the most efficient way for producing food and other organic substances. The most efficient way will be to use solar energy gathered by photovoltaic cells to capture carbon dioxide and dinitrogen and incorporate them in some simple organic molecule or molecules, perhaps glycine or a mixture of urea or ammonia with a simple carbohydrate or a short-chain fatty acid. Whatever will be synthesized using solar energy, at a better efficiency than currently achieved by plants, will be used to feed some genetically engineered fungi (or parasitic plants, i.e. non-phototrophic plants), which will produce any kind of desired food or other useful complex organic substances. (A first step in this direction is shown by the recent news about strains of the Trichoderma fungus that have been genetically engineered to produce either whey protein or egg white protein, but in the future it should be possible to make for instance fungi able to grow fruiting bodies that are bananas or turkey thighs). |