[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.