(no subject)

[seekingferret]

Another Immodest Proposals salon last night. The topic was "The Kosher Pig, and other Bioengineered Foods". This is a topic name I came up with while drunk at the last topic brainstorming night, and I've spent some time since then trying to convince freeradical42 that it was a mistake. The kosher pig itself is not an interesting topic, because there's very little to say about it if you are a Jew, and even less to say if you're not a Jew. freeradical42 thought it was an eyegrabbing title that could segue into a more general discussion of the future of GMO and other bioengineered food in terms of ethics, economic and environmental impact, and food culture.

The night proved us both right. We did get at least one Jewish first time participant who expected the conversation to revolve more around the kosher pig, and there were moments in the conversation where it felt to a degree like participants were a bit hamstrung by the topic. There were other food ethics-related things people wanted to talk about, but if they spent too much time on it they felt self-conscious about topic drift. The conversation was a little choppy, a little uneven. The roadmap felt off.

That didn't stop the discussion from being fascinating, though.

We began by playing around with ethical rules for food consumption. How do we weigh the importance of food being cheaply available to those in need against the importance of not doing harm to the environment, against concern for the welfare of food animals? We discussed different rubrics different kinds of vegetarians adopt for determining whether the pain of animals is a problem for them, from Peter Singer's "anything that experiences pain as much or more than a fish" to freeradical42's "anything that possesses the neuronal correlates of empirically observed empathy/theory of mind", neither of which I found entirely convincing. The former is completely arbitrary. The latter gets me because I'm not sure I understand what 'empathy' is and why we should prioritize it.

Nonetheless, these attempts at definition were important as we moved into later parts of the discussion. As we looked at present food technology and possible future food technology, it was useful though not conclusive to ask whether these technologies would meet the standards we had proposed earlier in the evening. So that when I drunkenly mooted the idea of the 'planimal', part part and part animal, to try to pin down where vegetarianism might draw the line between them, someone offered up the reduction "a plant that can demonstrate empathy".

The planimal sort of became a recurring conversational point for me, though I'm not entirely sure where I was heading with it. In the light of morning I offer these synopses with some structure, but the truth is these conversations are always messier than they appear in them. People are figuring out what they think as they talk, through back and forth, through socratic investigation, through thought experiments and argument. I think there's something interesting in this plant/animal line because there was considerable consensus that the ethical rules for the treatment of plants is very different from the ethical rules for the treatment of animals, notwithstanding a few jokes about triffids and "Carrot Juice is Murder".

For example, despite the fact that plants move away from negative stimuli, nobody considered this to be a pain impulse worth being considerate of. Our conversation on the ethics of eating and engineering plants talked about environmental impact, caloric and economic costs, taste, but when someone suggested that the Monsanto 'terminator gene' deprived plants of their biological imperative to procreate, this theory was dismissed very, very quickly. So where is the line, what amount of consciousness of sapience or sentience do we require to start thinking about a foodstuff in terms of their needs instead of merely on their impact?

My point with this, I believe now, is that whatever line we may have drawn in the past is going to need to be redrawn in light of bioengineering potentialities. We spent a lot of time talking about engineering lab-grown meat that wouldn't feel pain, but it seems possible to me that one might want to reengineer lifeforms that don't feel pain so that they now do: Pain serves as an important alarm system for higher lifeforms. It might be useful to create plants that sound such an alarm when they are attacked by bugs, or when they are low on nutrients. But I didn't quite reach this thesis last night.

We spent more time on the engineering tradeoffs involved in creating meat, and food generally, in industrial farming. Do you breed for richness of taste, or do you breed for mass production? Does grass-fed beef taste better, or is that a psychologically implanted illusion? How much animal suffering are we willing to tolerate if it means the hungry of humanity will eat well? How much tinkering with the genome will we tolerate if it means nutrient-rich rice to feed the starving?

I led us down a sidetrack once again as people started to explore the relationship of vegetarianism to 'progress' and a progress narrative. There were some appeals to ideas of primitivism ("Back in the day, people lived in tribes where eating or not eating that cow was the difference between living or dying.") that I wanted us to steer away from as much as possible, so I questioned the relevance of a progress narrative. I'm not sure I see how vegetarianism is more evolved, a representation in any way of a more perfected human ethics, and I wanted to see how people approached the idea. There were some interesting points made, about how reduction in scarcity has given people, particularly in the more affluent parts of society, freedom to make choices based on principles other than survival.

Um... we also talked about many other things. I probably ought to take notes if I want to accurately report what happened.

Comments

[zandperl]

It might be useful to create plants that sound such an alarm when they are attacked by bugs, or when they are low on nutrients.

This is why I think animal pets are much easier to care for than plants. If I forget to feed Kappa, she lets me know.

[seekingferret]

Right? This is useful for us as humans caring for other lifeforms. Yet is it ethical to create a form of a lifeform that didn't feel pain that now does? What threshold of pain is allowable?

Somebody noted that humans are probably in some senses the species least affected by pain, in that we can ignore pain in order to do something we judge more important than the pain, whereas for the majority of animals, pain and other behavioral stimuli drive behavior almost entirely. From that perspective, it might be worse to inflict pain on an animal than a human.

[zandperl]

Do we know unequivocally that animals do experience pain, as opposed to just responding to stimuli? Is there an objective way to measure pain, like have we determined a chemical in humans which corresponds to neural signals of pain? And even so, how much of pain is biological and how much mental? Just because a creature has ears doesn't mean it hears the same things that we do, or just because it has red cones in its eyes doesn't mean it experiences red the same way as us, and same goes for any biochemical markers of pain.

Just because we could bioengineer a plant to make keening noises when it needs water doesn't necessarily mean that it feels pain.

[seekingferret]

Absolutely. And there were some people who criticized ethical vegetarians on this ground last night. They considered the lack of rigorous understanding about what constitutes pain to be a flaw in an ethical system of vegetarianism, but I'm not as convinced. In the absence of a clear incontrovertible idea of what constitutes pain in an animal, everyone needs to make their own best guess based on the evidence we do have, or adopt someone else's best guess.

[teal_deer]

It's... probably a good thing that I wasn't there, because I think once you get into ethics of pain and your food it's like...

Look, animal every species on the planet eats other things, be they plants or animals. If we start worrying about whether we are causing broccoli pain, we will starve. Stop it. Sometimes you have to make sacrifices to survive.

It's easier for me to think of things in terms of environmental impact. I'm against cow farming because cows have horrifying impacts on ecology, they ruin things. I'm for chickens. And if we can reduce waste and save space and time with factory engineered meats? Cool.

[seekingferret]

Sometimes you have to make sacrifices to survive. That's not something that was at all in dispute last night. The question is where the line is drawn, and moreover, whether the line is moving. Several of the vegetarians in the room were asked point-blank if they would eat vat-grown/lab-grown beef and they said

At one point, Lee framed it this way. He asked everyone to raise their hand if they thought it was okay to boil ten year old human children alive. Nobody raised their hand. This is so elementary he really oughtn't to have bothered, I figured, but this is what he was trying to say. Obviously you have to make sacrifices to survive, but we draw the line somewhere that we're not willing to do some things. Or at least, most people do. I can't imagine interpreting your reductio ad broccoli as suggesting that because we have to survive, there ought to be no rules about what it's ethical to eat.

I'm not arguing that we should worry about causing broccoli pain. Nobody in the room thought we should.I just think that at some point it's worth asking what it is about broccoli that made it ideal as your examplar of a food that one needn't care about. Why is it that nobody in the room thought broccoli deserved that attention?

[seekingferret]

Eep... that sentence got cut off. Should have read

Several of the vegetarians in the room were asked point-blank if they would eat vat-grown/lab-grown beef and they said yes, almost without thinking. I thought that was very interesting, that a technology like that could entirely erase an ethical objection.

[teal_deer]

That IS pretty interesting

[zandperl]

I know a number of vegetarians who are so because of the taste/texture of meat, not the ethical reasons, and I presume these people would not eat vat meat. I also know some vegans-due-to-ethics who would be willing to eat animals that they raised themselves and slaughtered humanely near the ends of their natural lifespans. None of these individuals have actually done so due to living in a modern society where they do not have the time/space to raise their own animals. It is also not clear to me if in a post-apocalyptic world they would choose to raise meat animals as opposed to choosing to grow vegetables.

[seekingferret]

Right, there was someone there last night who was a mostly-vegetarian for taste reasons, and we in turn asked him if he would eat meat if it could be engineered to remove the 'meat smell' that he didn't like. He said yes. I think the whole conversation is really interesting, and ties back to the question of the 'kosher pig'- What is the value of circumventing an ethical objection through technological workarounds? Isn't part of the value of an ethical system that it imposes limitations on our behavior, limitations that are themselves beneficial to our spiritual/ethical/moral development even absent the way they help or protect others around us.