• seathru@lemm.ee
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    11 months ago

    Works for hot peppers. The worse you treat them while growing; the hotter, angrier and tastier they get.

    • Zoboomafoo@slrpnk.net
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      11 months ago

      Certain vegetables like leeks get buried as they sprout to make the “shoot” part as long as possible.

      Rhubarb is grown in near complete darkness, and it screams as it grows towards a light it’ll never reach

      • seathru@lemm.ee
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        11 months ago

        Rhubarb is grown in near complete darkness, and it screams as it grows towards a light it’ll never reach

        Rhubarb cellars are metal. I forgot all about that.

        • NielsBohron@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          There’s some really great metal band names in here (IMHO).

          • Metalcore: Scream At A Light You’ll Never Reach

          • Stoner: Rhubong and the Devil’s Lettuce

          • Doom: Near Complete Darkness

          • Black: Rhübarb Screams

          • Death: Cellar Crop

          • Goregrind: Fed Shit and Kept in the Dark

          • Country/Folk Metal (aka Hank III): Rhubarb Wire Fences

      • Holyhandgrenade@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        I have a rhubarb plant in my garden, and deep down I know that when I have long perished and my earthly remains have rejoined with the earth’s soil, that rhubarb plant will still be there, stubbornly making more rhubarb than anyone can eat.

      • CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social
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        11 months ago

        Where does the rhubarb get energy then? Does it just rely on stored energy in the seed or roots or something and get given light eventually, or can it actually use tiny amounts of light?

        • Zoboomafoo@slrpnk.net
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          11 months ago

          The plant has an energy reserve underground that is allowed to build up for a year or two before starting to harvest.

          If you are doing it sustainably, you can harvest the shoots until they start showing signs of undernourishment, then you stop harvesting and let it build energy back up.

          Forcing the rhubarb is an option for the shoots you plan on eating, they grow faster and sweeter than if they grow naturally

          • NielsBohron@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            The plant has an energy reserve underground that is allowed to build up for a year or two before starting to harvest.

            Not a botanist, but I’m pretty sure that’s why rhubarb is so sweet. Those energy reserves are mostly sugar, so maximizing the energy reserves maximizes the sweetness, like you note below.

            • hydroptic@sopuli.xyz
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              11 months ago

              Yeah the rhubarb that people grow in their own gardens without a rhubarb torture cellar is way more sour than store-bought, in my experience.

  • sillyplasm@lemm.ee
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    11 months ago

    So wait, are they treating the workers horribly, or… Oh, it’s an Onion article.

    • jarfil@beehaw.org
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      11 months ago

      If it helps, in Argentina they are deforesting large swathes of land and pushing previous owners out at gunpoint just to plant more soy. That’s not an Onion article.

        • jarfil@beehaw.org
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          11 months ago

          Then, 90% of that feed gets used by the animals to walk around, fart, and generally stay alive until they get slaughtered. Essentially, 70% of the soy crops gets wasted on breeding animals to suffer.

      • Ricky Rigatoni@lemm.ee
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        11 months ago

        People who genuinely think plant based diets are cruelty free and environmentally friendly don’t know anything about modern agriculture.

        • usernamesAreTricky@lemmy.mlOP
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          11 months ago

          It’s not perfect, but I think that statement is rather misleading. Problems with plant agriculture are multiplied by animal agriculture which relies on it even more to grow crops for feed. Counterintuitively plant-based diets use fewer crops and less cropland compared to animal agriculture due to not loosing energy from feed crops going to creatures who use that energy on their own body function

        • SolarMech@slrpnk.net
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          11 months ago

          You should assume that any consumption, if not proven otherwise, is not cruelty free and environmentally friendly. The most moral thing to do is to consume less, I guess.

        • Blackmist@feddit.uk
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          11 months ago

          Just see the boiling hot greenhouses in the south of Spain. You can see it from space. All jam packed with discount African labour.

          • Ricky Rigatoni@lemm.ee
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            11 months ago

            And on the environmental side we have clearcutting thousands of acres of forest for farmland, destroying habitats for millions of animals, a continual extermination of many “pest” species for as long as the farm is operational, AND horrifically inefficient irrigation methods that drain the water table of all its juices.

            I’ll never say that mass agriculture is anywhere near as bad as mass animal husbandry for the environment, but the people we see around the world who act like there’s no environmental impact are the ones who irk me.

  • hydroptic@sopuli.xyz
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    11 months ago

    This is going to trigger so many broflakes who have made eating meat their whole personality.

    And before anybody starts screeching, I’m not even a vegan. I do mostly make vegan food at home, but you can pry my cheese out of my cold, dead hands, and I also occasionally eat fish or meat.

    • 768@sh.itjust.works
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      11 months ago

      This going to trigger so many >!cheeseflakes!< who have made eating cheese their whole personality.

      And before any body starts screeching, I’m not even a vegan. I do mostly make vegan home at food, but you can pry my cold, dead hands out of my cheese, and I also occasionally eat fish or meat.

        • 768@sh.itjust.works
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          11 months ago

          I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re refering to as vegan, is in fact, arch/vegan, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, arch plus vegan. Vegan is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning arch system made useful by the arch corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.

    • TheDoozer@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      The people I know that are hard-core meat eaters are hunters who vastly prefer meat they’ve killed themselves (in a heavily regulated system that prioritizes sustaining the environment). I live in Alaska, though.

      • BluesF@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Yeah, I don’t think that’s the major demographic of aggressive meat eaters on the internet honestly.

          • Mongostein@lemmy.ca
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            11 months ago

            “Whole” is a bit of a stretch, but I lived with a guy for a while whose whole personality seemed to be eating bacon (seriously. every day ate an entire pack of bacon - the expensive stuff too) and smoking weed.

            As a guy that also likes bacon and weed, it became annoying as fuck.

    • psud@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      I found it funny, because it makes out that treating a plant badly makes it taste meaty in the same way that badly treated cattle are less nutritious and less good tasting than those which are free range on landscape like that they evolved on

      • Rodeo@lemmy.ca
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        11 months ago

        Meat is only ruined if the animal is stressed during slaughter.

        Prior to that, for large animals like cows, only the last three months of feeding matters for the quality of the meat. Far less time for smaller animals.

        Treating animals well has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of the meat, except in the few moments immediately before slaughter. We should treat animals well on a matter of principle, and that’s basically the only argument there is to it.

        To be clear, I agree with that principle.

  • CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social
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    11 months ago

    Now I’m curious if plants have enough complexity to their internal experience for it to be possible to be cruel to them or not. One is used to thinking of them as basically inanimate apart from that they grow, but some of them can sort of communicate with other plants in certain ways can’t they?

    • usernamesAreTricky@lemmy.mlOP
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      11 months ago

      There is not really strong evidence of plant sentience. Here’s one paper looking at it:

      A. Plants do not show proactive behavior.

      B. Classical learning does not indicate consciousness, so reports of such learning in plants are irrelevant.

      C. The considerable differences between the electrical signals in plants and the animal nervous system speak against a functional equivalence. Unlike in animals, the action potentials of plants have many physiological roles that involve Ca2+ signaling and osmotic control; and plants’ variable potentials have properties that preclude any conscious perception of wounding as pain.

      D. In plants, no evidence exists of reciprocal (recurrent) electrical signaling for integrating information, which is a prerequisite for consciousness.

      E. Most proponents of plant consciousness also say that all cells are conscious, a speculative theory plagued with counterevidence.

      https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8052213/

      Though something interesting and perhaps counter intuitive to note is that even if we realized plants were sentient, a plant-based diet actually involved killing fewer plants due to the lessened need to grow feed (of which most of the energy is lost)

        • usernamesAreTricky@lemmy.mlOP
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          11 months ago

          Academic writing is usually dry, but every once in a while you run into something like that which changes your perspective on how to roast an idea

        • Zozano@lemy.lol
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          11 months ago

          That’s why I’m a fruitarian. I only eat fruit once it drops from the tree.

          • jaybone@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            The Supreme Court says you are not allowed to interfere with the seed, or stand in shallow water.

            It’s Grow v. Wade.

      • Umbrias@beehaw.org
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        11 months ago

        The issue is we as of yet still have no falsifiable or rigorous measurable definition of consciousness. So any reference to something consciousness isn’t doesn’t make a strong case.

        I don’t think plants have a conventional consciousness, but I don’t think this study found evidence of something it can’t even structure a good definition of.

    • Umbrias@beehaw.org
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      11 months ago

      Well, the first step to this question is the ever infuriating “define cruelty”. It’s easy enough with complex vertebrates who have evolved to socially signal pain, which is almost everything we eat. It’s even easy to extend it to complex vertebrates which hide pain. But it’s hard enough to rigorously say whether something like an invertebrate insect or crustacean even feels pain at all. They certainly have pain responses, but is the qualia of that response in theory internal space recognizable?

      It’s not an easy question to approach, but it is an important one broadly.

    • sirdorius@programming.dev
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      11 months ago

      Let’s say that plants do have some kind of sentience, which is probably very limited due to the evidence we do have. Animals still have more advanced sentience that is closer to our own so it would still be the lesser evil to eat plants. Like why would you eat other people or chimps when there are other options available?

      It takes a lot of mental gymnastics to be able to say that plants suffer the same way as animals. I know you’re not saying this, but you do hear stuff like this based on this premise.

      • Omega_Haxors@lemmy.ml
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        11 months ago

        Measuring levels of sentience in the context of what’s OK to do to it is an extremely dangerous road to be taking that always ends in eugenics.

          • Omega_Haxors@lemmy.ml
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            11 months ago

            First you say it’s OK to be cruel to one life form because it’s less intelligent, it’s not long before that extends to disabled people. It might sound like hyperbole, but never underestimate the internet’s capacity to steer the ship towards nazi germany when given the chance.

            • sirdorius@programming.dev
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              11 months ago

              Who said anything about intelligence?

              sentient: capable of sensing or feeling : conscious of or responsive to the sensations of seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting, or smelling

              That has nothing to do with being disabled, as people with disabilities still sense the world

      • sqgl@beehaw.org
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        11 months ago

        Check out the Joe Rogan episode with Paul Stamets on how fungi allow trees in a forest to exchange nutrients. Dunno if that is classed as “communication” but it still blew my mind.

        It was the first Rogan episode I saw and the only good one as it turned out.

      • psud@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        You can’t eat anything in the modern world without killing animals. A combine harvester harvests wheat and mice. A hundred meat eaters are responsible for a single cow death, and the cow lived on marginal land, drinking from streams - you couldn’t grow other food on the land (sure some are grown on perfect fertile land, they don’t need to be)

        Not saying I’m a meat eater, I don’t care about mice, but there’s blood on all our hands

        • chetradley@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          Statistically, that cow had a short and miserable life in a factory farm before being killed at a small fraction of their potential lifespan. They were fed a grain-based diet that caused far more mice deaths than it would have to use the land to grow crops to feed humans directly.

          Even in the situation you’ve presented, which again is an exceedingly small percentage (<10% globally, <1% in the US), land is being used which could be rewilded to promote biodiversity. The cow in question is still contributing to GHG emissions and will again be killed around 16 months of age.

        • Tamo240@programming.dev
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          11 months ago

          A quick google gave me

          livestock farming is 2.5 billion hectares, about 50% of the world’s agricultural area and about 20% of the total land on Earth.

          So maybe you should revisit the idea of ‘marginal land’ that ‘couldn’t grow other food’

        • sirdorius@programming.dev
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          11 months ago

          Of course, but livestock require even more agriculture to maintain than the same caloric/protein intake of plant based. So if the choice is 50 animals or 100 animals then the choice is easy.

    • Wahots@pawb.social
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      11 months ago

      They are living things. We shouldn’t seek to deliberately cause pain if possible. While I like how stuff like bonsai trees look, I also feel a bit bad for them, wired and snipped in so many places and forced to be grown unnaturally small.

      Or people who deliberately carve graffiti into trees with a knife.

      Plants and trees have interestingly complex communication networks. We barely understand their microfauna and underground microbiomes that allow forests to grow much healthier and disease-resistant than our backyards. I have a funny feeling we know a lot less than we think we know, like when scientists discovered that babies can actually feel pain, or that dogs realize when they are treated unfairly. Stuff discovered within our lifetimes, lol.

    • emergencyfood@sh.itjust.works
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      11 months ago

      They can detect tissue damage and grow away from the source. So being physically cruel to a plant would definitely affect its growth. And yes, they can also share some types of information and resources with their neighbours.

  • Omega_Haxors@lemmy.ml
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    11 months ago

    Scientists learned that plants can feel pain just like animals do, with that in mind, they hooked the plants up to Christmas music on loop.

    • KaleDaddy@beehaw.org
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      11 months ago

      Can you cite a scholarly source on that? The “scientists say plants feel pain” is a very common point but there’s no actual scientists claiming they “feel pain”

      Also 70% of all crops grown in the US (with similar numbers in many other countries) are grown to produce animal feed. So even IF plants felt pain (they dont) going vegan would still be better because itd mean less plants getting “hurt”

      That being said, Im guessing you dont really believe this anyways, unless you apologize everytime you trim a plant or walk on grass lol

      • Omega_Haxors@lemmy.ml
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        11 months ago

        They send literal pain signals down their leaves when they’re injured, in a system extremely similar to our nervous system; using ion channels. Once the signal is received then the plant knows to put up whatever limited defenses available to them. Grass probably wouldn’t care if you stepped on it because it doesn’t really injure them, though that smell that comes out of mown grass is the horrified screams of agony.

        Plants that are routinely stressed will flower much earlier than they would normally in a last-ditch attempt to pass their genes.

        • KaleDaddy@beehaw.org
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          11 months ago

          I asked for a scholarly source. A youtube reel of someone reading a tumblr post isnt an academic source or anywhere to be getting scientific information from.

          Im asking because the wording youre using “horrified screams of agony” is not remotely related to the reality of “plant has some kind of reaction when cut” which is more likely to be what is actually written in whatever scholarly article was the basis for the trash tabloid click bait articles everyone got the “plants feel pain” idea from. But again that doesnt refute any of my other points even if it were true that they “feel pain” (which they dont in any recognizable way)

          • Omega_Haxors@lemmy.ml
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            11 months ago

            You genuinely thought I was going to get you a source? Since when in the history of man has a harassing commenter ever actually wanted a source? It’s just debate bro shit so that you can feel intellectually superior. If you want to look into it fine but i’m not playing your stupid game.

            • KaleDaddy@beehaw.org
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              11 months ago

              You said something absolutely wild, if i said “aliens invented cheese” youd probably want proof. me refuting your points and literally just asking where you heard this information should not have you accusing me of harassing you and “debate broing” you. The reality is you just heard some random thing on the internet, never fact checked it because you thought itd be convent ammo in discussions about veganism. And now youre getting angry because i called you out on that. We all are guilty of doing that occasionally but flying into a rage and being rude whenever you’re called out is a dangerous way to live

              • Omega_Haxors@lemmy.ml
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                11 months ago

                Man you really want to look like the good guy in this exchange. How about you go harass someone else.

  • Godric@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    We need not have grandstanders in the comments, I eat meat products almost every day. This made me chuckle, because it’s actually funny.

  • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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    11 months ago

    Soy is like trying to replace meat with cork. Sure it’s technically a substitute in the sense that you’ve not got any more meat but it’s not really a substitute in the sense that it replaces it in any manner.

    Quorn is a much better equivalent. It isn’t 1995 anymore, we don’t need to eat soy, I don’t know why it’s still a thing.

    • BedbugCutlefish@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      You’re welcome to it then. Quorn is fine, and I do like diversifying food sources; mycoprotein is good.

      But tbh, I like soy because its pretty lightly processed. Tofu can be made at home easily, with nothing beyond tools, water, and vinegar. And if you don’t like tofu, that’s fine, but its my ‘meat’ of choice.

      Seitan is my second favorite, and again, its pretty easy to make at home; only water and flour is needed.

      I do eat quorn sometimes, but not often. And while mycoprotein is cool as a meat substitute, I feel like just eating mushrooms is a better choice for most dishes.

    • pipes@sh.itjust.works
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      11 months ago

      Quorn is expensive…at least near me :( soy can be bought as dry beans for less than 5 bucks a kg. Also everyone can/could grow soy in a flower pot, quorn seems a tiny bit harder no? even though it’s basically made of mushrooms

      And if soy wasn’t the better option why wouldn’t cattle-raisers use Quorn?

      Finally, having more good options is good :)

      • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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        11 months ago

        And if soy wasn’t the better option why wouldn’t cattle-raisers use Quorn?

        I don’t understand the question what does cattle raises got to do with meat substitutes for humans?

    • KaleDaddy@beehaw.org
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      11 months ago

      Its a complete and excellent source of protein thats easily farmed and can be prepared in a million different delicious ways. It is also thousands of times less destructive for the environment than meat, as well as being cheaper to produce.

      Soy has been consumed for thousands of years. Also this is entirely anecdotal and opinion: but Quorn sucks. Morning star/beyond meat all the way

    • ursakhiin@beehaw.org
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      11 months ago

      I don’t know. I want to hear more about these brutal conditions. It may add the suffering flavor soy has been missing all this time.