On Dec 25, 6:13*am, DC > wrote:
> NY Times
>
> In his new book, “Eating Animals” (Amazon.com:http://snurl.com/EatAni), the novelist Jonathan Safran
> Foer describes his gradual transformation from omnivorous,
> oblivious slacker who “waffled among any number of diets”
> to “committed vegetarian.” Last month, Gary Steiner, a
> philosopher at Bucknell University, argued on the Op-Ed
> page of The New York Timeshttp://snurl.com/ttw8wthat
> people should strive to be “strict ethical vegans” like
> himself, avoiding all products derived from animals,
> including wool and silk. Killing animals for human food and
> finery is nothing less than “outright murder,” he said...
>
> But before we cede the entire moral penthouse to “committed
> vegetarians” and “strong ethical vegans,” we might consider
> that plants no more aspire to being stir-fried in a wok
> than a hog aspires to being peppercorn-studded in my
> Christmas clay pot. This is not meant as a trite argument
> or a chuckled aside.

That's very sad.

> Plants are lively and seek to keep it
> that way. The more that scientists learn about the
> complexity of plants — their keen sensitivity to the
> environment, the speed with which they react to changes in
> the environment, and the extraordinary number of tricks
> that plants will rally to fight off attackers and solicit
> help from afar — the more impressed researchers become, and
> the less easily we can dismiss plants as so much fiberfill
> backdrop...
>
> Continued:http://snurl.com/ttw97

There is no good evidence at all that plants have desires. But if you
do want to minimise the number of plants that are killed to produce
your food then you should go with plant-based agriculture, because
more plants need to be killed and fed to animals to produce the same
amount of animal protein as you would get from eating the plants
directly.