By all means people should eat what they want to eat, however vegan is not the right word.
People asking me if I eat fish always scares me because what if someone serving me food just assumes vegetarians eat fish and doesn't think to ask.
I'm not a fan of people using those terms incorrectly because of that kind of misunderstanding
In France it's quite common to find all kinds of fish in the vegetarian section of the menu. I didn't see it classified as vegan yet though.
Yeah. As much as I dislike dogmatism, and vegans eating bivalves bothers me very little, I think there is an actual slippery slope issue here. If you accept that maybe some animals are OK to consume, how and where do you then set an arbitrary line?
I would probably dislike someone if they told me they were vegan and then tried to justify eating X animal because y
Don't mind if they just say they try to avoid eating meat, that's still commendable, but the moment they try to assign the label to themselves it really irks me
I came across this idea about twenty years ago, before I was even vegan, but still concerned with being an "ethical meat eater". At the time I found the arguments convincing. It's amazing the lies you will believe when you want to. When I became a vegan, I did not rely on my ability to determine the validity of the argument that bivalves don't suffer. I had seen time and time and time again as an "ethical meat eater" I had an incentive to lie to myself, and that if I wanted to, I would always find a way to excuse any bad behaviour. It didn't really matter to me in that moment whether or not bivalves might be a vegan loophole; my veganism exists not only to keep animals safe, but to keep ME safe from harming animals. It tells me, if there is doubt, don't fucking do it.
What I have learned about bivalve behaviour since then has made me think that this was always just a way for us to lie to ourselves. They are amazingly sophisticated compared to what a casual observer would assume. They have interests. There is no reason I need to exploit them for food, jewelry, or other personal uses.
Bivalves are exploited by humans in another way: to remediate ecological damage that we have caused. They are excellent at water filtration. They get to live out their natural life cycle, but we've taken autonomy from them and removed them from the selection pressures of reality, imposing instead our own self-interested selection pressures. This seems a bit more thorny to me.
According to medieval beliefs, fish are a naturally occurring phenomenon in waterways. They just manifest spontaneously in rivers and lakes, making them not an animal. It was convenient for Catholics to believe this, because they were prohibited from eating meat on Fridays. If fish aren't animals, then Catholics can eat them on Fridays. So, they were encouraged to continue thinking of fish as just a part of the lake, and that weird "fish are vegetarian" idea persists to this day...
I guess that's also the reason then, why mussels, fish etc. are considered sea fruit in many languages: Frutti di Mare, Meeresfrüchte, fruit de mer [...]
The original article. Bivalves' nervous systems can be summarized as follows:
The central nervous system (CNS) of bivalves is bilaterally symmetrical, of ganglion type. The nervous system consists of aggregations of nerve cells arranged into a chain of paired, sequentially connected ganglia. The paired ganglia are connected via commissures to each other and via connectives to neighboring ganglia. There are three pairs of ganglia in the nervous system of bivalves of the subclass Autobranchia: cerebro-pleural (cerebral), pedal, and visceral (viscero-parietal). The pedal and visceral ganglia communicate with the cerebro-pleural ganglia via the cerebro-pedal and cerebro(pleuro)-visceral connectives, which makes such a nervous system tetraneurous. The major difference between bivalves and other classes of mollusks is the reduction of the head region and, as a result, the absence of some structures: bivalves lack buccal ganglia like those in gastropods, while the cerebral ganglia merge with the pleural ones at the later stages of embryogenesis. The simplification of the nervous system in bivalves is suggested to be a consequence of a slow-moving lifestyle due to the filter-feeding on substrate.
It's first and foremost incorrect to call yourself vegan if you eat oysters; the commonly accepted definition by the Vegan Society is just objectively contravened here. But semantics aside, as noted in the article, the question becomes "is there something wrong with it?" I definitely think there is. Bivalves are still shown to proactively avoid noxious stimuli in the way a more developed nervous system might, and while the existing research is too sparse to definitively call it "pain", this feels like yet another step in a long, storied history where humans decided animals didn't feel pain until researchers stepped in and found out yes, they definitely do (see, e.g., fish). It's easy not to eat them, and it's pretty ridiculous to treat the waiting period for more robust scientific literature as a "grace period" instead of something that should be treated with caution. Getting it out of the way, because it's often presented in bad faith, the whole "plant pain" argument is absurd on its face, both because a basic understanding of entropy still means veganism would be the way to go even taking that asinine premise at face value (vastly more plants per calorie for meat than simply via directly eating plants), and more importantly, plants lack a nervous system at all. They don't feel pain, and the argument exists 5% to be sincerely believed by nutjobs and 95% to soothe cognitive dissonance felt by people who pay to have animals feel pain.
Honestly, bivalves were the last thing I gave up before becoming fully vegan, even after dairy and eggs, mainly, as you've pointed out, due to their very simple CNS. I found the "we don't know yet, and it's better to be safe" argument, as well as the fear of being purity checked by other vegans, convincing enough to stop eating them. Being vegan already makes you a bit of a social pariah, so I don't need the trouble from both sides.
However, I personally believe that sentience and consciousness exist on a spectrum which is also roughly correlated to CNS complexity. That spectrum dictates how much a living thing is capable of suffering, and hence how much moral consideration they should be afforded.
"Vegans" eating bivalves is so incredibly low on my list of things I care about, it might as well be nonexistent. Let anyone who only eats produce from a veganic farm throw the first insult.
Regarding your last paragraph, I broadly agree. I've said before that I could see this becoming a weird wedge issue in the far future where humans have finally reached a broad consensus against exploiting mammals, birds, fish, etc. for food but where maybe now the main ethical cause is against the exploitation of insects. And within those who oppose insect exploitation, you hypothetically have a split over whether the line is at animals or whether it's at having a CNS.
For right now, I think it's very low on the list of priorities because "Does a cheeseburger justify perpetuating unimaginable suffering on an unfathomable scale? Discuss, and if you say 'no', then you're an extremist weirdo." is where the Overton window is at right now. Nonetheless, going around telling a major newspaper to write a human interest story on you advocating the position that eating animals is vegan unambiguously deserves pushback.
As an aside, oysters are not bivalves, they are brachiopods. Brachiopods do have a nervous system - some even have eyes.
What's the difference and how do you tell a brachiopod from a bivalve? It's the plane of symmetry. In bivalves the plane of symmetry is where the shells (also known as valves) join. So bivalves have two identical shells. Whelks and razor shells are bivalves. Brachiopods also have two shells, but the shells are normally quite different. The oyster for example has one big concave shell and one small flat one on top. The big shell has a hole at the apex (just next to the hinge) and a root-like anchor grows from it to bind the brachiopod to the matrix on which it lives. Brachiopods have an axis of symmetry from this root/foot that vertically separates each shell into two mirrored parts.
I bet she eats other meat too and has some even less convincing loopholes to explain how its still vegan.
The title is presumptuous and does not encourage a healthy debate.
Historically, etymologically, are bivalves vegan? No, they are obviously not. But are you vegan because you are a linguist? Or are you vegan because you want to minimise the harm that you cause while continuing to live and thrive as a moral person? Limiting veganism to simplistic, poorly considered ideas such as what kingdom of organism they fall into is lazy and ill-considered. Like every other word in the English language, veganism is not bound to its original meaning.
I researched bivalves some time ago and decided, personally, that there just wasn't enough information (that I could interpret) available to me to determine whether they experienced pain, suffering, or any form of higher thought process. I decided that I would refrain from eating bivalves, as I just wasn't sure.
However, there are plants out there that are more sophisticated, and seemingly more intelligent, than organisms in the Animalia kingdom (e.g. most jellyfish).
I don't eat bivalves because I am unsure. I don't eat jellyfish because they taste like nothing. I don't eat honey, because bees clearly have some level of sentience. Idgaf about what some person in 1944 decided as the meaning of the word 'vegan' (though I respect the intent).
Many of the comments in this thread are criticising solely on the etymological basis of the word 'vegan' rather than the actual ethical consideration of the issue.
The question for these people, 'are you vegan because you genuinely care about the impact you have, or do you care more about rigid definitions with little consideration of the actual meaning?'
... In other news... A livestock breakthrough using CRISPR grows cattle with a complete lack of pain. Tune in for the full story, "Vegan Beef," on Fox News at eleven!...
...I don't know about you Karen, but between the vegan human brains, and disposable painless laborers subscriptions from Monsteranto, neo ethics are amazing... ^said^ ^to^ ^cohost^ ^nervously^ /s
Wasn't crispr the name of that microwave weapon that was considered a war crime to use?
Also don't know about anyone else but personally I'm 100% still not touching meat grown in a lab
CRISPR is possibly one of the most significant technologies invented this century lmao. It's a technique for inserting base sequences into DNA at targetable sites, the idea being that you can attach their expression to the expression of another sequence.
It enables making transgenic organisms reliably. You can actually like order sequences and do it at home with a little knowhow.
Have a read about it, it's truly one of the most exciting things of our lifetime.
Yes, but you'd have to be really strict about the word "consenting". Human breast milk is vegan as long as it's given freely with consent and not as a form of exploitation, and so we could probably engineer a convoluted scenario where human meat is technically vegan. Let's run through some possible ones with the understanding that all of it is still nasty as fuck, unethical in every circumstance that could plausibly happen in the real world, and will probably give you a prion disease:
TL;DR: Not in the real world, no.
I can tell you right now with 100% sincerity, if you want to eat me after I’m dead, feel free!
I’d never thought about it before, but now I genuinely want to find a way for people who want to try human to get a part of me before they burn me.
I’m gonna be dead, wtf do I care?
My only regrets are that I will never know how I taste and that I don’t get to personally tell people to bite my ass.
Simple. Just record yourself saying it and make listening to it a stipulation for eating you. It sucks you won’t be able to see the reaction though. I bet they’d chuckle.
I don't think there are any vegans in The British Miracle Meat but I could be wrong. It says a lot about the state of everything that people actually thought it was real!
Is it an animal? Is it, it's by products or the products of it's abuse in this food? Yes? Not vegan.
Vegans who decided that eating murdered animals that and up looking like boogers is legit cause they have a different form of living, are just doing the smae thing that vegetarians do about milk and eggs. Which believe a something to feel good about their chocies that are made solely for their pleasure.
Okay, let me be clearer since you took this to the obviously ridicules extreme.
"As long as you have a choice" this is the missing part. You can argue about what constitutes as a choice, but at the end of the day no one can truly do no harm, we can make the best choices we can to reduce harm.
Eating an oyster is probably a choice, which could have been avoided easily.
Eating vegetables is not something you can avoid while reducing harm.
It's okay. We know. You're good, he's just trying to rationalize his own behaviour. He can do it elsewhere.
So a person who agrees with you 100% 353 days a year and only agrees with you 99.999999% on 12 days a year should be completely cast out? Should they just go back to eating meat or something because they're 'no true vegan'? This really feels like a 'let perfect be the enemy of good' sort of situation.
This isn't quite as black and white as you make it out to be. Severity is an issue here. If you apply the same concept to human life, a similar argument would quickly fall apart. (Oh it was just one human life, so it's OK, you don't kill anyone 99.9999% of the time.)
I personally think that whom you kill and for what reason matters greatly. If you accidentally step on a bug, that's not the same as intentionally killing a rodent, which is not the same as intentionally torturing monkey. Just how killing in humans, intent and state of mind matters, so it does with animals.
I'm not saying that your conclusion is wrong, by the way, just that the reasoning by which you've arrived at it is suspect.
It isn't a matter of "casting people out". Most vegans don't even have a vegan community to be cast out of. It's not a helpful lens to be viewing this from.
Veganism isn't a club. It's a moral philosophy and the ethical consequences of that philosophy. Whether or not you are a vegan doesn't depend on what other people think of your conduct, it depends on whether you accept and believe the axioms of veganism.
If someone thinks that all women should be allowed to own property... except for his wife, he is not 99.99999% a feminist. He's not a feminist at all, he's just someone with preferences that coincidentally align with the philosophy most of the time. But clearly he does not believe and accept the principles of that philosophy, so he is in no way a feminist.
I don't think that's the case here. IMO it's more about wanting to use the term "vegan" while not abiding by the rules this includes.
