๐Plant Harm
Tl;dr: there is no evidence for plant consciousness, but either way, eating plants directly causes the fewest plant deaths and least environmental impact anyway.
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Tl;dr: there is no evidence for plant consciousness, but either way, eating plants directly causes the fewest plant deaths and least environmental impact anyway.
Last updated
'No matter what we do, we have to kill, so it is pointless to be vegan'. This argument commonly comes up as an argument against veganism. This type of argument is called an appeal to futility or defeatism, and is rarely put forth with honesty (though sometimes it is), but rather as an attempt at mockery or distraction. It is also often used with the implication that vegans are being hypocritical by arguing to not kill while killing plants. This is known as a tu quo que fallacy. Even if it were the case that plants were conscious, vegans kills fewer plants than non-vegans anyway, so veganism reduces harm to plants too.
In order to eat animal products, first an animal must be bred and raised. All of this requires energy, and that energy comes from feeding these animals plants. This is well understood in the animal agriculture industry and there exists what is called a food conversion ratio (FCR) to describe how many plant calories are required to produce one calorie in an animal product. It is always less efficient to produce and eat animal products than to eat plants directly. This is because of basic laws of thermodynamics:
Energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transferred
Whenever energy is transferred, there is inefficiency
The trophic pyramid is how nature is affected by these laws. Most of the energy on earth comes from the sun, which phytoplankton and plants (primary producers) capture via photosynthesis and store as carbohydrates, fats, and proteins - this is a transfer of energy. Herbivores and omnivores (primary consumers) consume some of those plants and algae (resulting in a further in a transfer of energy), and carnivores (secondary consumers) consume some of those herbivores and omnivores (resulting in a further transfer of energy), and so on. Every time energy is transferred via one lifeform consuming another, as a rule of thumb, 90% of the energy is lost as heat. The energy isn't destroyed, but it is unable to be converted into a form the organism can use as nothing is completely efficient. Animals use up energy walking around, heating their bodies, etc., so only 10% of the energy makes it up to the next level on the pyramid. So we as humans, if we consume animal products, end up as secondary consumers - meaning we only receive 0.1% of the energy that was originally supplied by the sun. Whereas if we consume plants directly we are generally 10x as energy efficient and receive 10% of the energy originally supplied by the sun. This means that fewer plants are killed by eating plants directly, and less land and resources are required to sustain ourselves. This is better for the environment, which is ultimately better for humans and other animals.
Leaving the realm of hypotheticals and rules of thumbs, we can see that the practical data supports this. "The US Department of Agricultural Economic Research Service puts the figure at 16 kg of grain to produce 1 kg of beef." https://awellfedworld.org/wp-content/uploads/pdf/CIWF%20Eat%20Less%20Meat.pdf Stanford Mag published a figure of 20 pounds of grain to produce 1 pound of beef. https://stanfordmag.org/contents/can-vegetarianism-save-the-world-nitty-gritty Of course, organizations with conflicts of interest against the truth tend to skew the data to attempt to claim more efficient FCRs than exist in reality. This is done by, for example, excluding some of the feed in the calculations.
Consciousness as we currently understand it (which is far from fully) is an emergent property of intelligence. We find that organisms with a brain or central nervous system typically exhibit the behaviours we come to associate with consciousness. While this is abundant in animals, there has never been a single documented case of a conscious plant and no evidence suggest the existence of any such plant. While plants can have some basic reactions to external stimuli, so can doorbells - but we would never say a doorbell is conscious. All plant behaviours come down to extremely simply mechanical reactions. In the case of a Venus flytrap, for example, small hairs act as triggers which cause a mechanism similar to a spring to close the leaves. There is no brain thinking about the stimuli - only direct mechanical action. While the possibility of plant consciousness still exists (as it is an unfalsifiable possibility), there is currently no reason to believe or act as though any plants are conscious.