this post was submitted on 06 May 2026
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Memes of Production
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Literally no. And neither do you. The only place you will see a plants rights advocate is on the Internet under a comment by a vegan. Get your head out of your ass.
I'm not trolling, this is how I look at it from my more incrementalist point of view. It's totally fine if you disagree. I wouldn't post my comment to a vegan community as that would be seen as trolling. But since this is not a vegan community, and the OP post is "you're not a leftist unless you're vegan and against animal exploitation", I did.
I already said there's no shame with being vegan and encouraging people to join them, I applaud people taking a stand. However if you want to post a gatekeepy opinion on a meme community, you can expect gatekeepiness taken to a logical conclusion. And unlike trolls I offer a constructive alternative.
Your house is on fire. As you run out the door of the collapsing structure, do you rescue your dog or your aloe? Does it even cross your mind to wonder which? Of course it doesn't.
Trying to elevate plants to the moral level of sentient animals is such a classic misdirect, vegans have decades of memes about it. Even if you believed plants have the same moral value as animals, YOU WOULD NOT EAT ANIMALS, because that results in even greater total plant deaths than just EATING THE FUCKING PLANTS. It's nonsense top to bottom and anyone willing to think seriously instead of looking for rationalizations to comfort themselves will see that.
I'm looking at this from leftist principles, not vegan principles, due to the post title conflating the two. To answer your question, I personally only permit spiders and humans in my house and the practical ability to evacuate would affect what I could save other than myself from a fire. I understand the energy efficiency from consuming lower in the food chain, I'm not disputing that. I am offering a genuine alternative in lab grown meat that would avoid both. I'm saying that we as a society could do better, I'm not strawmanning saying you must be perfect to be a true vegan, or that makes your choices not good enough. Each person reducing meat consumption does add up to real benefits, and I'd agree we should abolish cattle industry subsidies, ag-gag laws, and restrict factory farming, common goals for leftists and vegans. But all that doesn't mean that it's necessary, as OP's title suggests, to be vegan to be leftist or vice versa.
Homie. Thinking that cutting a pigs throat and cutting the stem of a tomato are morally equivalent is something to talk about with a therapist or a trusted friend. It’s not an interesting moral position.
I'm bringing a thought that sounds absurd to you in response to an absurd idea to me that veganism = leftism. It has commonalities but one does not require or imply the other.
I think moral comparisons are arbitrary and differ from person to person, I think there are positive and negative directions that can be aligned or askew between people. I get all the benefits from environment health and societal welfare by choosing plant over animal products, but each person should draw the line where they want initially, then continue to improve where they feel like they can after constructive discussion. Shaming or strawmanning people's choices is not my intent, I'm suggesting how as a society we can further improve and reduce impact from agriculture while still being able to sustain a healthy life for ourselves. The one, single, solitary thing I push back on is the gatekeeping aspect of it from OP.
"Vats of meat are living things too that we raise, exploit, systematically molest and slaughter, do straw men not care about that?"
To give you an example: If you cut off my arm, and then manage to keep that arm growing skin cells forever to harvest, it was originally part of me but not really a being anymore and reduces the need to cut off anyone else's arm. It's analogous to that.
Its not a plants rights argument. Its just pointing out hypocrisy.
Plants are alive. As best we can tell, they want to keep being alive. They communicate danger to each other. They make sound when they are harmed. People who don't eat honey because of bees' rights should unironically be taking plants rights seriously. They don't because they'd have to come to the logical conclusion that there currently is no way to eat that doesn't deprive another living being of its rights. I mean, I suppose you could have an entirely fruit-based diet as plants want you to eat their fruits, but I don't think a human can survive long term on fruit alone.
First: Everyone already knows that there’s no way to consume anything without causing harm to something else. It’s why the definition of veganism includes the phrase “as much as possible” not “entirely”
Second: even if we considered a plant’s life as equally valuable as a pig/chicken/cow’s— eating a vegan diet STILL causes less suffering. When you stop eating animals, you can stop murdering all the plants needed to feed those animals.
So the argument of “what if plants suffer?!?” Is bullshit, and already solved by veganism.
The other user’s thought experiment about lab grown meat is more interesting, but it’s not reality yet, and you’d need to understand the specific process for growing said meat to accurately estimate the potential avenues of suffering.
Yes, a vegan diet reduces harm. So does biking instead of driving. So does making your own clothes instead of buying sweatshop clothes. There are LOTS of ways to reduce the amount of suffering your life causes. I wouldn't exclude anyone from being a leftist because they don't do all of those things.
If you're not doing absolutely everything you can to reduce your impact on the planet to the bare minimum, regardless of your happiness, then you can stop shitting on the rest of us for not adopting your particular form of harm reduction. And to be clear, I'm using "the royal you" here - I don't know how you, Lemmee, treat the "carnists" in your life. But I certainly can guess how the person who made this meme does - and that person is a hypocrite.
Not necessarily, they want to spread they're seed. Cereal grains will go into senescence at the end of the season, basically accepting it's going to die and putting all of its energy into its seed so it can come back next season. Like a fruit at that point the grain "wants" to be harvested and spread. They don't really care if they survive another week before winter sets in, they care about there seeds having everything they need for the next season, which humans provide.
To make the case that plant farming is unethical you'd have to prove the plant doesn't want to live on a farm. That's pretty easy with animals, open the cage and see if they leave, but plants can't do that. Up until that point of harvest though the plant is probably living an optimal life, free from pests and competition from other plants so I'd guess it would choose the well manicured field over the wild.
More or less. I'm not trying to debate why eating plants is better than eating animals, it's about specifically the conflation of leftism with veganism. A leftist's opinions of solidarity can apply to humans alone, allowing exploitation of animals. It can apply to animals but not plants, as would most vegans. It can apply to plants and all living things as well, in an effort to minimize the ecological impact of all human behaviour including agricultural impacts of harvesting plants and animals, as some environmentalists would (an example is the degrowth movement to show these aren't imaginary arguments), and so I offered what could be a more positive alternative. Leftism is inclusive of all these things both broader and narrower than veganism. So my core argument is specifically that equating the two, as OP's title and image has, is wrong. I think I'd agree with most that eating plants is more moral than eating animals, but to reiterate, I'm not trying to debate what constitutes sufficiently moral consumption, because I believe that varies based on each person's judgement.