[gwern]

It's not supposed to be funny. The shock twist of it being cannibalism is supposed to make you think about the nature of default cultural assumptions and meta-ethics: "what factors Tardo would consider significant—probably very minor ones that the average man would not notice, he thought", and which the host fails to think of despite attempting to hide the slavery & cannibalism, in the same way that you might serve a visitor from India cow steak. (The author was from Brazil, incidentally, which may be relevant to how you interpret this: https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/fontenay_charles_l )

[dzink]

The lesson is to look for what’s missing and hidden.

[hef19898]

True on so many levels, and most of the time ignored.

[js2]

Spoilers. :-(

[Arainach]

If you're worried about spoilers for something, why would you be reading the comments discussing it?

[cess11]

This highly influential story was published in 1954.

[6510]

Maybe funny isn't the right word for you, I mean the story would be better if it encouraged the reader to think for themselves.

How do we know it wasn't a placenta in delicate wine sauce?

I don't object to our culture, I grew up in it, I don't know any better. Killing animals for food is accepted, cannibalism is not. I have no reason to object to burials, we prefer to be eaten by worms underground.

That said, I have no objective explanation why others must follow this example.

It reminds me of a lunch at work, a Muslim points to their dish and says you are not eating pork are you? The Hindu points at his plate and says: cows are sacred to us. They rolled their eyes and didn't know how to progress the conversation. I jokingly told them: we eat everything! Do you also eat people the Muslim asked. I thought for a bit and said, it depends on the situation. He said, that is true, if there is nothing else we are also allowed to eat pork... and everything else.

Likewise, Christianity is also fine with it provided it is forced by necessity.

I talk with 2 angry vegetarians one time who argued that we don't kill animals for food, there is plenty of food. When asked about nutrition they said no one needs that much meat. You are killing animals purely for pleasure. A surprising revelation, they were right!?! I ended the conversation by asking: What has that broccoli ever done to you?

It remains of course a terrible concept in the more atheistic world view but would it be more horrific than people eating sacred animals?

The story is that they had quite the hard time surviving on their planet. If people die trying to survive and there is no other food. Should one chose to die from starvation? Should I be the one to judge here?

I see room for cultural normalization. If someone dies from an accident and you have to plow the fields by hand with half a carrot to eat, it might be required.

The Solar Council is primarily interested in putting its own arrogance on display. Its Planetary Aid agent doesn't give a flying fuck about the slaves. That much is obvious.

To bad Gwern, looks like we will be pulling the plow again tomorrow. Thanks for nothing Solar Council!

> "My recommendation will be of considerable importance to you," said Tardo as they ate. "If it is favorable, there is certain technical aid aboard ship which will be made available to you at once. Of course, you will not receive advanced equipment from the Solar Council until there is a more thorough investigation."

Dude, advanced equipment? All I wanted was a few oxen and some chickens.

[adrian_b]

> What has that broccoli ever done to you?

A better argument for vegans is not that their food does not require the killing of other living beings, but that some of the living beings that are killed for food, e.g. plants, fungi or even bivalves, have a life in culture conditions that is indistinguishable from the life of their free-living relatives, until the moment when they are killed.

On the other hand, most of the vertebrates that are now grown in industrial conditions, or even most of the arthropods, spend their life in conditions that are indistinguishable from intentional torture.

When I was a child and I was eating chicken that were grown in true free-range conditions (at my grandparents), I did not see any problem with that. Those chicken had a happy life, spending all their days roaming and searching for food through a great land area covered with varied vegetation and inhabited by many insects and worms. The only difference from wild chicken was that they could supplement the food that they were gathering themselves with maize grains and that they had a shelter for the night where they were protected from predators.

On the other hand, today I do not feel right if I buy some chicken meat from a supermarket and I imagine that a chicken like those with which I had played as a child would have had to spend all its life in the equivalent of a prison, then be slaughtered to procure me just one day of food.

So I would prefer food that is obtained from living beings whose original lifestyle before domestication was much more appropriate for the requirements of intensive food production, like plants, fungi or even immobile animals, instead of coercing originally mobile animals to live like immobile plants, in order to reduce the production costs.

[EnigmaFlare]

That's not the vegan reason at all. If it was, it would permit eating free-range chickens as you say, and cows. Meat cows have a great life. They're given plenty of food, protection from predators, and when they are killed, it's much less of a torture than dying naturally from disease, predation, or starvation. Wild animals are more often the ones living in what we humans would see as torture. Just because it's natural doesn't mean it's all sunshine, lollipops and rainbows.

Even humans have lifted ourselves out of our natural environment and created civilization so we're not in a constant daily struggle to not die from violence or starvation. It's a double standard to want that for humans but not for animals.

[6510]

> Just because it's natural doesn't mean it's all sunshine, lollipops and rainbows.

The thing I cant figure out is why [we] humans are so upset by completely normal things.

Then we turn around and kill things for pleasure and are highly disrespectful to the life forms that feed us.

If you search the web for broccoli you find pictures with the bottom cut off, entirely chopped up or growing for consumption. I couldn't tell you where or how it grows naturally.

When you say broccoli people don't picture the plant, they think of a freshly killed one.

This is wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broccoli#/media/File:Broccoli_...

I wouldn't want to be depicted like that. That the broccoli doesn't know doesn't mean I don't know.

It's the rock star vegetable - in a league of its own. We should be building statues to honor it. We should have a world broccoli day where we not eat it but talk about its greatness.

[EnigmaFlare]

If you go that far into respecting things, why stop at life? We treat molecules pretty poorly, ripping them apart, discarding their unwanted body parts, etc.

So it's a bit silly to base morals on anthropomorphism. Instead, these long-lived rules about eating humans, pork, cows, etc. are probably based on practicalities. I don't quite know what they are but you can imagine that allowing cannibalism would be a step closer to farming people to eat which has to be a very tantalizing prospect since the livestock can also run the farm, making it completely free food! Or maybe it's to do with disease transmission. Pork is easy to get food poisoning from if you don't cook it properly. Maybe cows are worth more for milk than meat during a famine, and people might worsen their long term situation trying to survive in the short term by killing their cows.

I agree broccoli's great. It the main vegetable I eat.

[6510]

That's it, they should have murdered everyone except the slaves. The livestock can run the farm themselves without management.

What still bothers me about the story is that they ate the steak and that it was served at all. Why would you bother to hide the slaves and cook a slice for the people not suppose to see them? Would they really be that naive?

A bit like vegetarians and vegans forgetting that in order to grow the fruits and vegetables everything previously living there was killed or displaced.

[aziaziazi]

> wild chicken

This does not exist, chicken is a species made by and for humans. As for cows, pigs, sheeps, most horses…

Most vegan wouldn’t be vegan if industrial farming doesn’t exist.

[adrian_b]

All domesticated species have wild ancestors, even in the cases when after domestication they have diverged enough from their ancestors to be considered as being now distinct species.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_junglefowl

While the ancestors of horses have been hunted to extinction a long time ago, the wild cows that have existed in Europe until a few hundred years ago (a.k.a. aurochs) and the wild pigs that still exist have remained genetically close enough to their domesticated relatives that frequent interbreeding between them has happened, during the many millennia since the domesticated cows and pigs have been brought to Europe.

The chicken breeds that were previously widespread, before their replacement with the optimized modern breeds, had a behavior very similar to their distant South-Asian ancestors and they were quite capable of taking care of themselves, when given an appropriate space.

There is no relationship between vegans and industrial farming.

Nevertheless, nobody could be truly vegan centuries ago, without acquiring serious health problems. Veganism has become possible only after the development of the industrial technologies required for the production of the supplements needed to provide various essential nutrients, vitamins and minerals that either do not exist in plant food or they exist in too small quantities and which either cannot be produced by humans at all or they can be produced, but in too small quantities for ensuring a good health.

[aziaziazi]

This is partially true. Let me correct that vegans faced serious health issue before the 50s when b12 source (bacteria) got discovered. They may have survived by eating dirty vegetable (without the washing, bacteria are still on the plant) but it’s very unlikely they got enough.

Veganism definition has nothing to do with industrial farming, however try ask vegans if they would have taken this way if industrial farming does not exist, you’ll make them think twice. In the circle I gather many says they would prefer eating flesh from an hunted wild animal than buying soap containing glycerin from pigs that never saw the sun.

[jdougan]

> What has that broccoli ever done to you?

"Carrot Juice is Murder", Arrogant Worms

https://youtu.be/dII1gqGmyso?si=ZGtUy-LvpdZaqQ0N

[Dr_Birdbrain]

I agree with your last point—the Solar Council should have provided conditional aid. The most basic assistance could have removed the justification for cannibalism.

[shkkmo]

But would removing the justification really mater given the entrenched power structure that has grown dependant on a certain way of veiwing other humans?

The cannibalism is not the primary issue, but is a clear indicator that the inspectors have been lied to and slavery is present, which was previously clearly established as one of the major disqualifying cultural traits.

[shkkmo]

> The Solar Council is primarily interested in putting its own arrogance on display. Its Planetary Aid agent doesn't give a flying fuck about the slaves. That much is obvious.

That isn't entirely clear. There is a lot of context that is elided. Given the time frame, clonized 1000 years ago and this is the first ship ever to visit, transit costs can reasonably be assumed to be very high and the resources available to assist each colony may be low.

The lack of livestock when founding a colony is not unique to this colony but was ubiquitous at the time it was founded. Presumably the approach to lack of livestock is also not unique. It is an entirely plausible that the Solar Council has tried various approaches and reached the conclusion that attempting to change or assist such culures externally is a waste of limited resources and/or actively harmful.

The underlying issue is not the cannibalism, since the Solar Council agent ate the meal and presumably knew or at least suspected when the colony was established. The issue is the way those in power treat their subclass.

Attempting to fundamentally change a planetary scale civilization with limited resources is not something we can safely asssume is feasible.

[gwern]

> How do we know it wasn't a placenta in delicate wine sauce?

I've never seen a placenta described as an "inch-thick steak" by people who have eaten steaks many times before. It is not a thick muscle, and none of the anthropological accounts of disposing placentas mention it tasting like a steak (it is usually prepared in a non-steak fashion), and checking now accounts of it like https://www.cosmopolitan.com/lifestyle/a8465402/american-aft... confirms that it tastes rather unlike a thick beefsteak.

Also, this question is a good example of irrationality in insisting on evaluating pieces of evidence in isolation, rather than as a whole. You see this kind of motivated reasoning a lot in scandals and coverups.

The point the story makes is that there are two possible worlds: one in which there is no slavery, and the various anomalies the visitors observe are simply anomalies (eg. those itinerant fieldworkers really did just happen to have moved on to the next town already); and one in which there is and the local authorities are making every effort to cover it up as part of a systematic, planned campaign of deception and lies. And the visitors are trying to figure out which world they live in.

If they lived in the first world, perhaps it really is just a human placenta, somehow (maybe there's a clever way to prepare it), and it is cannibalism of one of the most harmless sort, or it is some sort of very well-developed vegetarian meat substitute; but combine that with all the other anomalies, and it is immediately obvious they lived in the second world, where it is exactly what it seems - a thick meaty steak from the only adult mammal they have observed on the planet, indicative of an entire social structure gone horribly wrong for a millennium and unfixable without centuries of reconstruction, which is actively manipulating & deceiving them and everything from it should be regarded as further lies & attacks, and it is pointless to do any further inspections or reveal to them what the misteak was.

Insisting on interpreting each point in isolation will yield the wrong answer. "How do you know the fieldworkers are slaves? Can you prove it?" "How do you know it was a steak and not a placenta - prove it!" etc.

> The story is that they had quite the hard time surviving on their planet. If people die trying to survive and there is no other food. Should one chose to die from starvation? Should I be the one to judge here?

To point out the obvious, cannibalizing humans as a normal state of affairs cannot have starvation as an excuse - if you're a human. Because you could just eat what they were eating. You can starve to death in a field of cows because you can't eat grass, and have necessity as a justification, but not in a field of fellow humans eating grapes or wheat or all the other crops implied to be raised successfully and maintain a stable population there... And given trophic efficiency, if starvation were an actual concern, you would feed more humans by not raising any for cannibalism.

[rexpop]

> What has that broccoli ever done to you?

False equivalence; generally disingenuous. You're a troll?

[teapot7]

That's rather evasive. The broccoli must have done something quite traumatic.