veganism is about reducing suffering to a practical extend. no vegan is ditching transportation or plastic because it may contain by-products of the animal industry... thus if one day we can make food out of minerals, for sure that would be vegan; although i can't see ANY harm done to a fruit tree or a soybean/corn that dries out because of its short life cycle being a 'bad thing' but maybe minerals based food will avoid taking land of native species
> veganism is about reducing suffering to a practical extend
There is genuine debate around whether plants suffer. The answer seems to be “no,” at least not in a way we’d recognise as suffering. But that ambiguity is more than enough to spawn a movement. Ethically-harvested honey doesn’t harm bees, for instance, and family dairies can blur the line between animal husbandry and petkeeping.
"Ethically" harvested honey means not killing the bees in the process I guess, which is awesome, but there’s still stress induced by removing the food they make and stock for their hives, and the cage around the queen just to be sure she doesn’t go back to the wild. Im not sure how to define ethics anyway but surely I would’t like to be a farm bee, even an ethical one.
Familly diaries also comes with they own sets of abuse forgotten because "they love their cows". At the end it’s always a speechless being exploited to serve the dominant interest.
Sure. I’m not arguing that doesn’t exist. I’m saying it’s tough to argue someone couldn’t argue that plants suffer similarly if the option not to eat them existed.
Those are both sets of animals that are livestock. That is, animals that would not exist without their being kept for use by humans.
Which is just another data point to make the ethics tricky.
> veganism is about reducing suffering to a practical extend
I don’t think there are enough current or future vegans in the world to negate anything at all.