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So it's made of shit, right? And shit is an animal product.
...Maybe? Usually, people are referring to nutritional things animals produce for themselves or their offspring, like milk, eggs, or honey. But shit is just the byproduct, not a product. It's what's leftover when your body is done extracting nutrition. Like, if a vegan was composting, they wouldn't refuse to put dog shit in it, would they?
No, it is not vegan. Much like for example cultured meat, real animals had to be harmed to create the original specimen that is being cloned. For the purposes of veganism, animals are assumed to lack the capacity to consent to exploitation, in much the same way that children are assumed to lack the capacity to consent to various things.
By extension, you say human meat would be the only moral cloned/replicated meat because the original sample person can consent? What if it's to be reproduced via a scan and element systhesis or something, leaving the initial animal unharmed? I'm also completely unserious about this
Close family eating the placenta is common in many cultures. I would consider it vegan and an important part of culture and family.
Veganism has nothing to say directly about human/human interactions, but it is based on the principles of compassion, empathy, and respect for life, and a person with those values is not likely to be interested in exploring brand new avenues of human exploitation. Lets say this develops a market of people with a taste for human flesh. But it's cheaper to get it off a poor person than out of a vat... Let's just not even explore this.
Veganism isn't concerned about animal harm but about animal exploitation. This is a difficult thing for many people to grasp and then accept. For example, from a strict point of view (that I take), owning pets is not vegan because it is the ownership and exploitation of an animal for emotional gratification and companionship. As soon as you are getting something out of it, things change in your head. You start lying to yourself in subtle and not so subtle ways. We all have basically the same stupid brain, and it cannot be trusted when it wants something.
So no, even if the animal is not obviously harmed, it's still not vegan to exploit an animal. However, most people are not this diligent in their conduct, and I suspect a near majority of vegans own animals.
Moral veganism vs dietary veganism.
No animals are harmed so it is morally vegan but, regardless of the harmlessness of it's procurement, it still contains animal products so it is not dietarily vegan.
Contrast this with a vegan meal prepared by slaves, which is dietarily vegan but not morally so.
it still contains animal products
It does? Assuming the replicator doesn't get the matter it's composing replicated "meat" from disassembled animals, what is it that makes replicated "meat" not dietarily vegan? Taste? Nutritional profile? Chemical indistinguishability?
Is real world Impossible meat dietarily vegan? Could Impossible meat be made not dietarily vegan without actually using animal products in its manufacture? Maybe with nutrient fortification of some sort or a more sophisticated chemical process that produces proteins more chemically similar to meat proteins? Shaping the vegitable-derived matter into little muscle cell shapes? Adding gristle and fat?
What about converting pure plant material into a whole living cow indistinguishable from a naturally bread/born cow, and then slaughtering, butchering, and griding it into ground "meat"?
I dunno. I'm no vegan and I'm not sure if you are. Maybe among vegans, it's an accepted consensus that Impossible is not dietarily vegan (though maybe morally vegan? Not sure.)
I and a friend of mine were talking about the "paleo diet" at one point. The subject turned to paleo substitutes for dishes that were decidedly not paleo. Paleo breads, pastas, candy, etc. And he expressed a distaste for the entire idea of eating foods that approximate very not-paleo dishes, calling them "faileo". Heh. I suppose one could say such foods are paleo in one sense and not the other. (Though if one were to discuss "moral paleo-ness" and "dietary paleo-ness", I'm not sure which one they'd qualify as and which one not.) Maybe Impossible is similarly morally vegan but not dietarily vegan.
It depends on why someone is a dietarily vegan. If someone is such because they need to avoid something in animal products, like cholesterol, or an allergen. Impossible meat would be fine. If they are "whole foods, plant based" then they probably aren't going to eat an impossible burger unless they don't have better options. There's a whole spectrum of reasons people go vegan, and most of the ones I know have a combination of moral, health, and environmental reasons.
It's also important to note that things like heart disease and cancer, of which red meat consumption increases the risks, are solved by the time replicators are widespread.
I wouldn't be surprised if anytime you get teleported arterial plaque and cancer and bacteria gets filtered out in a pattern buffer
I remember hearing that cultivated red meat already delivers less risk, although it's still not commercially viable
What if they're wage slaves? I genuinely want to see your answer here.
Wage slavery is just slavery with extra steps.
The problem with hardline dietary veganism is that if extended to its logical conclusion, molecules are just molecules and they're all by definition interchangeable with each other with no way to distinguish them. It's unlikely that any vegan foodstuff does not contain a single molecule that was once part of an animal, no matter how distant or how long ago, and quite impossible to actually verify if this is or is not the case. I'd doubt there is much water on Earth by now that hasn't been peed out by some animal at least once, be it a mammal, fish, dinosaur, trilobite, anemone, or prehistoric crypid deep sea monster.
Ultimately you have to draw a line somewhere, and in the case of Trek replicators it's pretty clear that once matter is broken back down into its atomic or molecular form to be reassembled in the later replicator it is in no way related to what it used to be. And remember that not just human waste is used as feedstock for the replicators anyway; raw materials are also used.
The interchangability of atoms isn't the concern, but whether the food contains the animal proteins or other substances which a dietary vegan is avoiding for whatever reason.
I mean, proteins are complex structures made up of atoms, so rearranging them into a different structure would make them no longer a protein molecule, animal or otherwise...
Are tomatoes from tomato plants fertilized with manure vegan? It depends on how picky you want to be. The replicators just do it faster.
The replicators use human waste, so I don’t think the ethics of an animal consenting comes into it.
Not just human, to be fair. And they're still animals. Could I opt my poo out of being recycled on a Federation starship, you think?
But if you do that, what happens to that shit?
They make you keep it in one of those cylindrical luggage bags and take it with you when you leave.
I'm sure they just get an ensign to do it.
"Do people really use it for that?"
"Yeah, it's mostly that."
Hah. True, plenty of nonhuman creatures too. But primarily sapient beings.
Maybe, but you’d have to find a way to manage it yourself.
Yes. No sentient being had to suffer and die to provide that product. So replicated meat, leather, or other "animal products" are vegan imo. But I also think concepts like vegan and vegetarian will have evolved in the replicator era.
What about wool and eggs and milk though? These are not vegan but the animal does not die to produce them.
Fun fact: Like humans, other mammals like cows do not constantly produce milk year round. They only produce milk after having been pregnant. So, to keep cows producing, they are forcibly artificially inseminated year round. After giving birth each time, it is not financially viable to raise the constant stream of offspring, so the calves are simply slaughtered. So, while the animal producing the milk does not die, in a roundabout way, death is still a byproduct.
Fuck, wouldn’t want to hear the unfun facts
This isn’t even true. Lactation can be induced in humans without pregnancy. Read a book.
"They only produce milk after having been pregnant" is just a dumbed down way of saying "pregnancy is what releases the hormones that stimulate lactation". The point still stands that mammals do not lactate at all times.
those are vegetarian.
It's a bit tenuous to me to say that it's "made of shit". Made from shit yes, but it's no longer shit at that point. It's made from atoms that were originally part of molecules that comprised shit.
Fertilizer is often (most often?) made from shit. Would you say the plants that grow from shit are "made of shit"?
Modern fertilizer is generally made through chemical processes. It's why we don't harvest guano islands anymore. Nowadays they use the haber bosch process to make ammonia from atmospheric nitrogen.
Yes.
~~Vegan cheese/yogurt (made from human breastmilk iirc) is the perfect example.~~
~~Edit: for those down voting, are you assuming I'm saying all began yogurt and cheese is made with breastmilk?~~
~~Because I'm not, I'm saying some brands are. So I'm assuming I wrote that in a confusing way.~~
Nope, bad rememberer thingie.
To the best of my knowledge, there are no mass market breast milk products, and that would be weird and ethically questionable if there were. Commercial vegan cheese and yogurt is made from plants, I've got cashew milk yogurt in my fridge right now. Maybe there's some weirdo making breast milk yogurt out there but largely that's not a thing.
I read that thinking that it's gotta be an April fools joke... and it is. See the editors note at the end.
Well, guess my memory goofed that one up. I had remembered it being a thing (and I thought I remembered something in shoprite).
But hey, thats why you can't always trust what you remember!
You're talking about sentient beings capable of making informed consent then as a vegan i would have no problem with the feces being used. Veganism is aimed to eliminate animal suffering and here we have a naturally occurring byproducts in which an animal is making informed consent and not being taken advantage of.
However, I'm not a big enough trekkie to know how the replicated food is programmed to begin with. Ive talked about this with my SO before but when you have lab grown meat then it still would've been result of a nonconsenting animal at some point and not strictly vegan. Replicated meat products are in the same category i believe. Also perhaps the food programming process used non-meat foods that didn't derive from animal suffering to begin with (like a vegan burger that is deceptively convincing).
Great shitpost ;)
Replicated food is made of recycled organic molecules, same as regular food.
Once you start worrying about what something was in a previous existence, you realize tap water is recycled dinosaur pee and molecules have no identity.
[off topic?]
The Ophiuchi Hotline by John Varley. Great science fiction novel. It comes to mind because the protagonist is a scientist who was arrested for using human DNA for flavoring her bananameat trees.
At which point in nature is an animal product not an animal product anymore?
When have fungi destructed enough structure for plants to rebuild with the abiotic nutrients?
Where is the difference in creation and destruction in nature versus the replicator?