Why it’s impossible to actually be a vegetarian
Plants make up the base of every food chain of the food web (also called the food cycle). Plants use available sunlight to convert water from the soil and carbon dioxide from the air into glucose, which gives them the energy they need to live. Unlike plants, animals can t synthesize their own food. They survive by eating plants or other animals.
Clearly, animals eat plants. What s not so clear from this picture is that plants also eat animals. They thrive on them, in fact (just Google fish emulsion ). In my new book, A Critique of the Moral Defense of Vegetarianism, I call it the transitivity of eating. And I argue that this means one can t be a vegetarian.
An in-law of an in-law of mine has a startup (recently did a B round for $95M or some such) that is interested in artificial meat (though that’s not what it’s doing now). Now that would be not exactly vegetarian, but it would not involve eating meat. However, there are all the dead plants in the coal that powers the big vats that boil up the meat gruel or whatever it is. But! Those could be powered by solar or nuclear I suppose.