A better argument for vegans is not that their food does not require the killing of other living beings, but that some of the living beings that are killed for food, e.g. plants, fungi or even bivalves, have a life in culture conditions that is indistinguishable from the life of their free-living relatives, until the moment when they are killed.

On the other hand, most of the vertebrates that are now grown in industrial conditions, or even most of the arthropods, spend their life in conditions that are indistinguishable from intentional torture.

When I was a child and I was eating chicken that were grown in true free-range conditions (at my grandparents), I did not see any problem with that. Those chicken had a happy life, spending all their days roaming and searching for food through a great land area covered with varied vegetation and inhabited by many insects and worms. The only difference from wild chicken was that they could supplement the food that they were gathering themselves with maize grains and that they had a shelter for the night where they were protected from predators.

On the other hand, today I do not feel right if I buy some chicken meat from a supermarket and I imagine that a chicken like those with which I had played as a child would have had to spend all its life in the equivalent of a prison, then be slaughtered to procure me just one day of food.

So I would prefer food that is obtained from living beings whose original lifestyle before domestication was much more appropriate for the requirements of intensive food production, like plants, fungi or even immobile animals, instead of coercing originally mobile animals to live like immobile plants, in order to reduce the production costs.

False equivalence; generally disingenuous. You're a troll?

"Carrot Juice is Murder", Arrogant Worms

https://youtu.be/dII1gqGmyso?si=ZGtUy-LvpdZaqQ0N

That isn't entirely clear. There is a lot of context that is elided. Given the time frame, clonized 1000 years ago and this is the first ship ever to visit, transit costs can reasonably be assumed to be very high and the resources available to assist each colony may be low.

The lack of livestock when founding a colony is not unique to this colony but was ubiquitous at the time it was founded. Presumably the approach to lack of livestock is also not unique. It is an entirely plausible that the Solar Council has tried various approaches and reached the conclusion that attempting to change or assist such culures externally is a waste of limited resources and/or actively harmful.

The underlying issue is not the cannibalism, since the Solar Council agent ate the meal and presumably knew or at least suspected when the colony was established. The issue is the way those in power treat their subclass.

Attempting to fundamentally change a planetary scale civilization with limited resources is not something we can safely asssume is feasible.

I've never seen a placenta described as an "inch-thick steak" by people who have eaten steaks many times before. It is not a thick muscle, and none of the anthropological accounts of disposing placentas mention it tasting like a steak (it is usually prepared in a non-steak fashion), and checking now accounts of it like https://www.cosmopolitan.com/lifestyle/a8465402/american-aft... confirms that it tastes rather unlike a thick beefsteak.

Also, this question is a good example of irrationality in insisting on evaluating pieces of evidence in isolation, rather than as a whole. You see this kind of motivated reasoning a lot in scandals and coverups.

The point the story makes is that there are two possible worlds: one in which there is no slavery, and the various anomalies the visitors observe are simply anomalies (eg. those itinerant fieldworkers really did just happen to have moved on to the next town already); and one in which there is and the local authorities are making every effort to cover it up as part of a systematic, planned campaign of deception and lies. And the visitors are trying to figure out which world they live in.

If they lived in the first world, perhaps it really is just a human placenta, somehow (maybe there's a clever way to prepare it), and it is cannibalism of one of the most harmless sort, or it is some sort of very well-developed vegetarian meat substitute; but combine that with all the other anomalies, and it is immediately obvious they lived in the second world, where it is exactly what it seems - a thick meaty steak from the only adult mammal they have observed on the planet, indicative of an entire social structure gone horribly wrong for a millennium and unfixable without centuries of reconstruction, which is actively manipulating & deceiving them and everything from it should be regarded as further lies & attacks, and it is pointless to do any further inspections or reveal to them what the misteak was.

Insisting on interpreting each point in isolation will yield the wrong answer. "How do you know the fieldworkers are slaves? Can you prove it?" "How do you know it was a steak and not a placenta - prove it!" etc.

> The story is that they had quite the hard time surviving on their planet. If people die trying to survive and there is no other food. Should one chose to die from starvation? Should I be the one to judge here?

To point out the obvious, cannibalizing humans as a normal state of affairs cannot have starvation as an excuse - if you're a human. Because you could just eat what they were eating. You can starve to death in a field of cows because you can't eat grass, and have necessity as a justification, but not in a field of fellow humans eating grapes or wheat or all the other crops implied to be raised successfully and maintain a stable population there... And given trophic efficiency, if starvation were an actual concern, you would feed more humans by not raising any for cannibalism.