So it’s made of shit, right? And shit is an animal product. But barring a night of drinking or a particularly aggressive burrito, shitting does not harm the shitter; it’s beneficial and required. Also the animals in question can and do consent, does that make it vegan?
Moral veganism vs dietary veganism.
No animals are harmed so it is morally vegan but, regardless of the harmlessness of it’s procurement, it still contains animal products so it is not dietarily vegan.
Contrast this with a vegan meal prepared by slaves, which is dietarily vegan but not morally so.
It does? Assuming the replicator doesn’t get the matter it’s composing replicated “meat” from disassembled animals, what is it that makes replicated “meat” not dietarily vegan? Taste? Nutritional profile? Chemical indistinguishability?
Is real world Impossible meat dietarily vegan? Could Impossible meat be made not dietarily vegan without actually using animal products in its manufacture? Maybe with nutrient fortification of some sort or a more sophisticated chemical process that produces proteins more chemically similar to meat proteins? Shaping the vegitable-derived matter into little muscle cell shapes? Adding gristle and fat?
What about converting pure plant material into a whole living cow indistinguishable from a naturally bread/born cow, and then slaughtering, butchering, and griding it into ground “meat”?
I dunno. I’m no vegan and I’m not sure if you are. Maybe among vegans, it’s an accepted consensus that Impossible is not dietarily vegan (though maybe morally vegan? Not sure.)
I and a friend of mine were talking about the “paleo diet” at one point. The subject turned to paleo substitutes for dishes that were decidedly not paleo. Paleo breads, pastas, candy, etc. And he expressed a distaste for the entire idea of eating foods that approximate very not-paleo dishes, calling them “faileo”. Heh. I suppose one could say such foods are paleo in one sense and not the other. (Though if one were to discuss “moral paleo-ness” and “dietary paleo-ness”, I’m not sure which one they’d qualify as and which one not.) Maybe Impossible is similarly morally vegan but not dietarily vegan.
It depends on why someone is a dietarily vegan. If someone is such because they need to avoid something in animal products, like cholesterol, or an allergen. Impossible meat would be fine. If they are “whole foods, plant based” then they probably aren’t going to eat an impossible burger unless they don’t have better options. There’s a whole spectrum of reasons people go vegan, and most of the ones I know have a combination of moral, health, and environmental reasons.
It’s also important to note that things like heart disease and cancer, of which red meat consumption increases the risks, are solved by the time replicators are widespread.
I wouldn’t be surprised if anytime you get teleported arterial plaque and cancer and bacteria gets filtered out in a pattern buffer
Unless you’re the protagonist of the week, in which case you suddenly develop a baffling resistance to teleportation.
I remember hearing that cultivated red meat already delivers less risk, although it’s still not commercially viable
What if they’re wage slaves? I genuinely want to see your answer here.
Wage slavery is just slavery with extra steps.
The problem with hardline dietary veganism is that if extended to its logical conclusion, molecules are just molecules and they’re all by definition interchangeable with each other with no way to distinguish them. It’s unlikely that any vegan foodstuff does not contain a single molecule that was once part of an animal, no matter how distant or how long ago, and quite impossible to actually verify if this is or is not the case. I’d doubt there is much water on Earth by now that hasn’t been peed out by some animal at least once, be it a mammal, fish, dinosaur, trilobite, anemone, or prehistoric crypid deep sea monster.
Ultimately you have to draw a line somewhere, and in the case of Trek replicators it’s pretty clear that once matter is broken back down into its atomic or molecular form to be reassembled in the later replicator it is in no way related to what it used to be. And remember that not just human waste is used as feedstock for the replicators anyway; raw materials are also used.
The interchangability of atoms isn’t the concern, but whether the food contains the animal proteins or other substances which a dietary vegan is avoiding for whatever reason.
I mean, proteins are complex structures made up of atoms, so rearranging them into a different structure would make them no longer a protein molecule, animal or otherwise…