73
Lab-Grown Salmon Hits the Menu at an Oregon Restaurant as the FDA Greenlights the Cell-Cultured Product
(www.smithsonianmag.com)
this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2025
73 points (98.7% liked)
Vegan
1208 readers
63 users here now
A community to discuss anything related to veganism.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I'm trying to understand it because for example I, if faced with something like the Trolley problem, would pull the lever so that whatever ends up being less deaths in the long term is the rail selected.
But based off the second paragraph you wrote, it sounds like you'd either never pull the lever or would choose the rail that kills the least even if more die in the long run.
For example, you mention infanticide would be bad. But if you don't use vaccines because it uses chicken eggs, you could hypothetically still lead to dead infants via the spread of disease.
And then there's the insects part - wouldn't this omit farming that uses pesticides then? How do you know which did or didn't? It would also include I'd imagine farms that say release ladybugs to control other insects since it required the exploitation of ladybugs.
re: trolley problem, realistically, I wouldn't pull any lever.
Hypothetically, if not using vaccines led to dead infants, then I would simply need to accept that, just as everyone did before vaccines were invented.
Defending one's food supply is not exploitation, but blanketing an entire landscape in poison is ill-advised for several reasons, including the danger that it poses to peaceful animals.
That would be exploitation and therefore not vegan, correct. Sometimes it isn't possible to know which farm does what, and without knowing, every option is equivalent, and ethics doesn't come into it at all. But if one knows, for example, that Farm A exploits ladybugs, Farm B uses fish emulsion fertiliser, and Farm C sprays nicotine-based insecticide on the crop, then given only those three options, the "correct" choice in the context of veganism would be Farm C, as it does not involve exploitation. In practice, Farm C may kill orders of magnitude more animals, but all is fair in self-defence, which extends to one's food and shelter.
If you're concerned about the number of animals killed in crop production, then you should know that the most effective way to reduce it is to live vegan and grow your own food in an environment over which you have complete control. If growing your own food isn't possible, then living vegan and making informed choices about where you buy your food is the next best option, as the vast majority of animals killed in crop production are killed in the production of feed crops for cows, pigs, chickens, farmed fish, and so on.