You walk into a celebrated high class restaurant, and at the bottom of the menu, it reads “Human meat steak. $10,000”. You ask the waiter who fetches the chef. The chef comes out and explains that after decades honing his craft, he feels like he’s a master of his craft, and now he’d love the honour of cooking a steak taken from his own body. If anyone purchases the steak, a skilled surgeon will remove half a pound of meat safely from the chef, who will then prepare it for you, and the chef is visibly keen to serve this.
As a vegetarian, I honestly don’t feel that this would bother me, if I had money to spend, the only reason I wouldn’t go for it is that I’d worry the chef would come to regret giving up chunk of his ass or leg or whatever, and I’d be partially to blame, or that the chef was not thinking straight otherwise.
This situation kinda reminds me of John Locke talking about slavery. He says that for some rights to be truly inalienable, that people themselves should not have the ability to willingly surrender them, such as by willingly selling themselves into slavery. Now, yes, John Locke owned stock in a slave trading company, so he’s a hypocrite in that regard, but I digress. I feel like this is one of those things where people shouldn’t be allowed to physically sell parts of their body for consumption, as “not being eaten by other people” is one of those inalienable rights we should have as a society.
but to a degree I agree. in that chef example, at any point the chef could revoke consent and stop at any time. Likewise, somebody shouldn’t be able to sell themselves into slavery but it would be fine to agree to do work for free or under slavery conditions as long as you can revoke consent at any time. But the right should be inalienable such that nobody should be in a position where they could be coerced into doing that, it would have to be 100% voluntary and enthusiastic. Like if somebody was in a position where it was either agree to being a slave or be homeless or starve or otherwise suffer, then I would argue society has failed them, we didn’t protect their rights adequately
Right, but there’s no more harm that could come to you after you’re dead, so being an organ donor wouldn’t really qualify in this context. Your organs being donated after death diminishes you in no way and also potentially enriches the lives of others.
It actually gets worse… i saw this post here on lemmy.
When someone replied to her exactly that, she said she “didn’t always consent because she doesn’t always feel like it but she does it for her baby, is that still vegan??”.
Only if you define vegan as to strictly avoid any animal product (and define humans as animals). A somewhat looser Definition says to avoid animal exploitation.
So a product made by a non-domesticised animal in a natural way - e.g. Penguin guano - could be seen as vegan. The animal produces it anyway and the product isn’t won through keeping the animal captive and / or “stealing” from it.
After all I wouldn’t be too strict with definitions here.
Most honey wouldn’t be vegan but perhaps an abandoned hive could be harvested. Or infertile eggs from an abandoned nest? Bits of sheep’s wool collected from a spiky bush?
Yeah sure. Maybe you could make the argument that humans should leave stuff like that for other scavengers who need the nutrients to survive, and instead opt for plant foods. But at those edge scenarios you would then also have to take into account the impact that plant agriculture has on wildlife. It’s quite possible that scavenging and gathering is the most vegan option, but seeing how it’s neither viable for a lot of people nor something that often comes up in daily life, it’s easier to just generalize vegan food as plant based.
Technically yes. But of course they would (and can’t really) do that. But you could also eat stuff like roadkill and it’s vegan. Veganism as a moral philosophy has nothing to do with food, it’s about respecting and granting animals the same rights as humans (as far as applicable, not stuff like voting).
Depends on the uses. Food Theory did a great video about this very thing, covering preferred taste, consistency, price, protein / fat content, and bake-ability: youtu.be/df8FRfVtVNw
Lactose is simply the kind of sugar/ starch in the milk.
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