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?
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…
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.
Sounds more like a pescatarian
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?’
