test content
Logo
What is the Arc Client?
Install Arc
Vegetarians in the age of replication
rahmkota19
Member Posts: 1,929 Arc User
So, at first there was this.
And the question that is rather just indeed......
Can vegetarians in the Star Trek universe eat replicated meat?
(yes, they biologically can, but would it prevent them from being vegetarians?)
Not attempting to offend anybody or cause a debate about vegetarians anno 2014 (there are stupid sites for that), but about replicated stuff ONLY.
And the question that is rather just indeed......
Can vegetarians in the Star Trek universe eat replicated meat?
(yes, they biologically can, but would it prevent them from being vegetarians?)
Not attempting to offend anybody or cause a debate about vegetarians anno 2014 (there are stupid sites for that), but about replicated stuff ONLY.
Post edited by Unknown User on
0
Comments
If it is because you don't want to eat an animal, then replicated meat would be just fine, it was never an animal.
But I'd be interested to hear what an ethically motivated vegetarian/vegan world say.
So I would eat replicated meat as it does not concern me ethically or health wise.
Maybe the definition of vegetarian got changed to mean 'those will only grown eat plant based foods' rather than anything a replicator will throw out.
Still waiting to be able to use forum titles
I figure people with food allergies are non-existant in the Star Trek future.
Up until the plot of a Star Trek episode needs them to exist, of course.
starfleet medical has apparently solved a great number of issues and understood genetics significantly enough this stuff just doesnt happen, at least to a point simply because you look at admiral jameson who was crippled but you look at worf and his spine. so clearly still in the process of learning but from the way crusher mentioned to picard and the way the doctor mention to various crew members, that starfleet medical science is substantial.
as for the replication discussion, by eating this facade of what you call meat from a replicator but your a vegetarian, that in itself would be a sign you clearly dont think this vegan thing is a big deal, turning traitor on your own principles by cheating around the code because its "replicated".
any true veg and fruit purist wouldnt even consider the prospect even if the option existed.
Been around since Dec 2010 on STO and bought LTS in Apr 2013 for STO.
My impression of vegetarians and vegans (supported by many of the posts on the first page) is that one of the most common principles among these people is is not causing harm. They don't eat meat because eating meat requires subjecting animals to pain and death. Replicated (or even cloned) meat does not subject animals to pain and death, so eating it is in full agreement with their principles.
There are, of course, other principles, such as the relative healthiness of meat vs. plants. For people who are concerned with this, they probably still would not eat replicated meat. Of course, without throwing animal suffering into the mix, this blurs the line between being vegetarian and just being health-conscious. This assumes, of course, that replicated meat is functionally identical to real meat.
and if the original meat donor was an animal that suffered in pain so the real thing could be deconstructed in the replicator to get its patterns? how would you know?
Been around since Dec 2010 on STO and bought LTS in Apr 2013 for STO.
After all, nothing replicated was technically ever an animal or even a plant... It's basically food that was build from the ground up.
If a Veggie was opposed to replicated meat, it would be either because of the taste, or just to be difficult.
Given the amount of time it took to develop replicators, it's far more likely that it was synthetic meat to begin with.
Though considering what you've posted, I suspect you're one of those people who refuse to eat anything with "meat" in the name, regardless of whether it came from an animal or not... :rolleyes:
Infinite possibilities have implications that could not be completely understood if you turned this entire universe into a giant supercomputer.
Since the replicated meat is available and does not cause additional harm, it's not logical to refuse to eat meat based on the idea of it causing suffering, and it might also be argued that refusing to partake of that replicated meat may render the suffering of the original animal meaningless.
That said, if there is an ongoing process of inflicting suffering on animals who serve as donors for replicated meat, refusing to eat it may be logical if that will get the people doing the process to stop. If not, there's not much point. In either case, you'd be better off doing something like pushing for guidelines to allow for meat pattern donation to occur without suffering, or with minimal suffering.
presumption to know :P.
as a matter of interest, replicators require the original in order to replicate the same thing otherwise its signature isnt in the database so the replicator wouldnt know what it is. and your not answering the point :P
Been around since Dec 2010 on STO and bought LTS in Apr 2013 for STO.
Of course, there's the argument that transporters are really just cloning machines, but that's a separate argument altogether.
And they can make holographic organs, for crying out loud. If they can make organs from scans, surely they have the ability to get replicator patterns from scans.
point. +1 you got me.
Been around since Dec 2010 on STO and bought LTS in Apr 2013 for STO.
Yep. Rocks are not the only option mind.
http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Replicator
Same for NX-01 Protein Resequencers:
http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Protein_resequencer
This is why I don't understand vegetarians. The animal's already dead, eating it isn't going to change anything.
A vegetarian (on animal suffering grounds for clarification) is sitting in a restaurant. They've made their order, say for a salad. Now, when the waiter (or waitress, the gender is irrelevant...) arrives, it is actually... I don't know, Chilli con carne. Or Steak. Or something, doesn't matter as long as it is meat.
What do they do?
The animal is already dead - nothing the vegetarian can do, and it was an honest mistake. If they decline the meal, that creature's remains are now going to be wasted - surely it would be better to eat the meal as served to honour the creature's sacrifice, and then demand to see the manager for solid talking to about serving the right meal afterward?
Strawman...
As a new-ish vegetarian, I can tell you this.
if I were to come about a freshly dead animal that died from natural causes outside of my sphere of influence, there is nothing preventing me from consuming it's flesh to sustain myself.
In fact that could be considered the moral thing to do, as i don't need to go out and destroy other life instead to keep alive for a little while anyway, even if it's a plant that could sustain some other lifeform now.
But, we have created an insidious system of meat consumation that is quiet pervers if you go down that rabbit hole deep enough (which is not that far really).
if you visit the supermarket to pick up an already dead animal to eat, you give the supermarket money for that.
The supermarket gives part of the money to their supplier, the supplier notes that his product sold and that the supermarket requires more supplies because you will come back the next day to buy more.
So, the supplier manufactores more meat, aka raising a lot of doomed animals, potentially treating it badly akin to life long torture with a death sentence at the end, just to feed you.
And i mean you as a single individual.
With a meat heavy diet you require many, many pigs and cows throughout your life to be tortured and killed. Now multiply that by billions of people.
For every single person there needs to be so much suffering to satisfy their life long demand.
So just by handing over money every day you bit by bit do you part to further that suffering and motivate the meat suppliers to kill and torture more animals.
And then there is the ecological damage that causes, because so much breeding stock needs room you need to destroy so much natural resources.
The same way you require hundreds of cows throughout your life, a single one of those cows requires tons of crops to get to the point where it can be harvested to feed you.
We are at a point where animal farms can't keep up with vegetarian food to feed their life stock, so they feed them waste from the meat production and turn them into cannibals essentially.
The chemicals they pump into those animals to make a better, more tastier (not a more nourishing) product has serious health implications, directly and indirectly and long term lasting bacterial immunities to antibiotika.
Those bacteria who came out immune cann and do kill humans unnecessarily.
Ecological damage to the oceans by overfishing them have lasting effects on the climate.
I could go on and on, you might want to educate yourself on that, even if you are a selfish prick who doesn't care one bit about the individual well being of one single animal and then decide if the nice taste of eating meat is worth all that.
or just stay ignorant and act surprise when you get hit by the cosequences someday.
Back to the OP topic.
If meat can be reproduced perfectly without any of the negative consequences there would be no reason not to eat it and it comes down just to taste really.
But then there would also be no need to replicate it in any way to remind us of the mistakes and suffering of the past.
they could make perfectly acceptable food in the shape of colored little cubes, which they DID back in TOS btw(!), and it would be just as well.
Eaing it woudl mean still being part of the consumer cycle of meat which is driven by /supply and demand really.
A lot of people would shift their diet to a vegetarian or vegan one of the supply would shift.
A lot of people live under the misconseption that a vegetarian diet is not as sustaining as meat or simply can never taste as good. This is rong, but they will never try out alternatives because meat is constantly shoved down there throats instead.
Go through a supermarket someday and just observe how it is structured, what you find there. How meat and vegetables is marketd.
What is cheap and what is expensive luxury items.
The reason for healthy, vegan bio food is expensive is because the cycle of misconeption has drived the market in a direction no one wants to change, because it is easier and cheaper in the short term to keep it as is, not because it could not be the other way around.
Sad reality, really.
In this reality, we're on the verge of making vat-grown cloned meat a commercially viable product. The meat is cloned from a sample that does not have to involve killing anything, as you need only a few cells to start with.
What ethical concerns, if any, may arise for a vegetarian in this instance? There's no animal suffering involved; the meat comes from completely non-sentient tissue, with no central nervous system whatsoever. Would this be a "permissible" meat? If not, why not?
(For myself, I look forward to it; one of the greatest contributors of methane, a greenhouse gas, in our atmosphere is cattle raised for their meat. When the job can be done in a building located in the middle of a city, there will be no need for all that methane release...)
Well no, because they ordered a salad, doing their bit to fiddle supply/demand curves perhaps - and instead the wrong meal is delivered.
Now, the manager is obviously going to be involved, (quite rightly) but the question of what to do with the meal? Assuming it cannot be given away, which just evades the whole philosophic point.
You make an interesting argument. At least one question remains: If replicated meat comes from patterns and not creature suffering, why do the Vulcans remain vegans?
I had a co-worker friend who chose vegetarianism (he'd occasionally eat fish) strictly for performance reasons. He was very much an outdoorsman: biking, hiking, skiing, etc. and felt the diet choice would benefit his physical performance. I could see such a choice continuing into a Trek future.
Pretty much this...^^^
I would say it's a peace of mind thing. Nothing else. Unless or until there is massive shift in our economy/food chain, meat will be on the menu, and I can't see enough converts to vegetarianism to actually make the meat industry financially unfeasable, because in addition to the edible meat, there is also the massively lucrative leather industry...
I would say that replicated meat (given replicators are based on transporter technology) is actual 'flesh', in the same way that a transported person is reassembled as meat, not as some kind of 'matter'. However, as the meals are invariably something like an MP3 copy, without a person customising and tweaking a dish, each dish will be exactly the same each time, but there would have been an original meal as the template which was likely taken from something...
:cool: