The animal world seizes its food in masses little and big, and often gorges itself with it, but the vegetable, through the agency of the solvent power of water, absorbs its nourishment molecule by molecule.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Animals used for food are treated like unfeeling machinery.
The essential quality of an animal is that it seeks its own living, whereas a vegetable has its living brought to it.
The food we eat goes beyond its macronutrients of carbohydrates, fat and protein. It's information. It interacts with and instructs our genome with every mouthful, changing genetic expression.
Vegetables, which are the lowest in the scale of living things, are fed by roots, which, implanted in the native soil, select by the action of a peculiar mechanism, different subjects, which serve to increase and to nourish them.
Animals' taste systems are specialized for the niche they occupy in the environment. That includes us. As hunters and foragers of the dry savannah, our earliest forebears evolved a taste for important but scarce nutrients: salt and high-energy fats and sugars. That, in a nutshell, explains the widespread popularity of junk food.
When we seed millions of acres of land with these plants, what happens to foraging birds, to insects, to microbes, to the other animals, when they come in contact and digest plants that are producing materials ranging from plastics to vaccines to pharmaceutical products?
Animal substance seems to be the first food of all birds, even the granivorous tribes.
Vegetables are interesting but lack a sense of purpose when unaccompanied by a good cut of meat.
You could think of an ecosystem as a bunch of antagonistic arms races, almost: Everything that an animal depends upon for food is the body part of some other animal or plant who would just as soon keep that body part for itself.
Organisms sip energy, because they have to work or barter for every single bit that they get.