I wouldn't really call this completely processes. It's just soy flour mechanically processed with some seasoning.
I'd put it into the same category as fish sticks or chicken nuggets.
Not something I would eat every day, but if someone wants to do it, they'll be fine.
...Fish sticks and chicken nuggets are some of the more iconic "highly processed foods" out there though? And think about it, "just soy flour with seasoning" sure, but what about the "meat" on the bones? That's going to be soy flour and a mixture of saturated and unsaturated fats, binders, textural elements, seasoning, thickeners and so on.
Basically the soy-flour bones are just one additional element, it's not like people are going to be buying them on their own, they'd realize that they're just seasoned dog treats.
So blending a fish and pressing it back together with some flour is the most processed thing you can think of?
If that's the case, maybe there is nothing wrong with processed foods.
I'm skeptical, because many things, like Corn Ethanol, are actually not what they're promised to be. I would love it if this wasn't the case here, but I suspect it is.
1. White people as a whole wish to suppress the speech of black people
2. The speech of anybody else who isn't also white is suppressed
It also presumes, instead of knowing something. Do you know any black people in Italy? Have you heard of any of them complaining that they have no "power to respond"?
EDIT: Case in point; I'm not white, (nearly) all my representatives are white, I don't feel like I have no power to respond. Stop making non-whites victims.
"Na celotni meji dela 1400 policistov, večina jih bo premeščenih v enote za izravnalne ukrepe, ki bodo selektivne kontrole potnikov, blaga in vozil lahko izvajale v bližini meje in v notranjosti države."
Roughly translated: 1400 police officers work at border. Most of them will be moved to other units, which will perform selective checks of passengers, goods and vehicles close to border and in country interior.
Yes, spot checks on the road are how Schengen EU handles border control in general across the board. This means that Slovenia will be aligning the Croatian border checks with all others being done across EU.
The UK is not blocking exports. The EU were free to conclude contracts with the (not very productive) UK manufacturers at the same time HM government was doing so.
This is a really strange argument.
Even though you wouldn't exist if not for your parents, but you would still probably agree that they shouldn't have you for dinner?
When animal smugglers are caught at the border, the police has to handle the animals. They can't release them into the wild, they can't repossess and sell them because of the unknown health risks and costs, and they can't keep them at the border for all time. The most common result is thus to kill them.
Similar when there is an dangerous pandemic among animals, the most common response is to kill all the sick and those close by. Culling is the most common response to bird flue.
For obvious reason we do not treat humans in the same way, and it would be extremely inhumane to do so.
What makes rewilding / reforestation a better focus for helping animals? I'd have thought the current situation dire enough that one would want to focus on the low-hanging fruit like regulations against the current cruelties and elimination of "Ag-Gag" laws.
> The cow wouldn't even exist if it weren't useful to us.
I hate this argument so much.
For a start, animals are perfectly capable of breeding on their own. They don't need you. You are not their god.
Who is pretending they are something they are not? They are sentient beings whether you like it or not. You might think you are superior, but your cat and your dog are certainly not.
And who says that being alive is good? They're born into captivity, without a chance and many of them tortured for their entire life. But that's OK, because at least they got to live?
The problem is that, as far as we can tell, they're not self-aware. They have no concept of "captivity". Their life is their life; they don't have hopes, dreams, or desires. They eat, shit, and fuck. That's all they do in the wild, that's all they do in captivity.
The beauty of being human is that we are not controlled by our instincts. We have meta-cognition, which therefore makes us distinct from all other animals. This is why the vast majority of the earth's population agrees that killing a human and killing an animal are very different things.
I actually think this is a legitimate concern. Here's my rationalization: Plants probably don't have a sense of individuality. Personally, I wouldn't care about eating parts of an animal that grew back (like eggs or milk). Plants seem to be no different.
I don't think it's clear why the root of a plant like a carrot should have any special significance except to us. What about onions, turnips, potatoes, etc?
I meant a carrot is something that would probably be more individualized than say a strawberry. So I get your point about eating from plants that grow back, but I guess a carrot wouldn’t fall under that categorization.
Also, what about animals that regrow limbs? Would you eat the arms of a starfish every so often?
I think it's possible combined with ethical farming practices I could be convinced it's not so bad to eat starfish arms (although they don't sound very appetizing).
To be clear I do already eat meat today. I am just not convinced about its necessity and am interested in ways to avoid doing it.
Respectfully, you and most people have no clue what plants experience. There were those studies published in recent years that suggested plants "scream" when they are being eaten or destroyed, presumably to warn other plants.
We don't know what anything or anyone else experiences internally. But we know enough to make some good guesses.
Plants lack a brain, the organ responsible for thoughts. There's no more reason to think they have thoughts than a cell inside your body, or a computer. All three can process stimuli and communicate.
"Screaming" is editorializing for page views. They found some plants will produce an ultrasonic click every few minutes when dry or when cut. Because it's sound, and because we're looking at it with a human bias, some articles used the term "scream". But it's similar to when plants release chemical signals to communicate. Just because it's sound, it doesn't indicate they subjectively feel pain anymore than chemical signals would. (And chemical signals are used by cells in your body, and that also isn't evidence for consciousness.)
That seems like a bit of a non sequitur. I thought we were discussing whether plants have feelings.
Killing animals painlessly is certainly better than killing them painfully. There are a lot more problems than just the killing though. From the Wikipedia article on slaughterhouses:
> Eiznitz interviewed slaughterhouse workers representing over two million hours of experience, who, without exception, told her that they have beaten, strangled, boiled and dismembered animals alive or have failed to report those who do. The workers described the effects the violence has had on their personal lives, with several admitting to being physically abusive or taking to alcohol and other drugs.
> The HFA alleges that workers are required to kill up to 1,100 hogs an hour and end up taking their frustration out on the animals. Eisnitz interviewed one worker, who had worked in ten slaughterhouses, about pig production. He told her:
> "Hogs get stressed out pretty easy. If you prod them too much, they have heart attacks. If you get a hog in the chute that's had the shit prodded out of him and has a heart attack or refuses to move, you take a meat hook and hook it into his bunghole. You try to do this by clipping the hipbone. Then you drag him backwards. You're dragging these hogs alive, and a lot of times the meat hook rips out of the bunghole. I've seen hams – thighs – completely ripped open. I've also seen intestines come out. If the hog collapses near the front of the chute, you shove the meat hook into his cheek and drag him forward."
Ozzy Osbourne's first job was working in a slaughterhouse. It had a big affect on him! Seriously, check out his book.
Also I have a friend who was vegetarian as a teenager, she wanted to become a vet and one of the things they do is suggest you go to a slaughterhouse and see how it works. She is no longer a vegetarian and loves eating meat, but she didn't become a vet either!
This is ridiculous. Consciousness may be mysterious, but the fact that something emits sound when you break it doesn’t bring it into the same ethical domain as cows and other mammals with brains and an obvious desire and ability to avoid pain and death.
The same reason anaesthesia doesn’t make it okay to kill humans. There’s lots more on this in chapter 4 (“What's Wrong with Killing?”) of Singer’s Practical Ethics, if you’re interested.
Well, if we are to follow the parent's mention of Peter Singer, you could go check out just about any source of preference utilitarianism. Briefly:
An animal has a conscious will to live on, a preference so to say, and those preferences are the basis of moral consideration.
A plant lacks those kinds of preferences (lacking any brain activity - what we can see are mostly just hormonal cell responses and such; things that all living cells have) and thus the plant in itself is not worthy of moral consideration.
The argument has never been that it's only ok for humans to live if we do zero harm. It's obvious that we can't do that. And that's fine. Human life is worth much more than anything else for us humans, so eating something to survive is necessary and ethical. Same logic applies also to vaccines that need animal products in production. I would prefer if they wouldn't, but I'm not judging anyone for taking it.
What we're talking about here is that simply because steak is s bit tastier than tofu or saitan isn't good enough reason to slaughter 50 billion animals per year and destroying a good amount of environment while doing it.
