BON APPETIT ----------- After reading the post "Plants as Persons: A Philosophical Botany" I decided, as an experiment, to construct an ethical food pyramid. It descends from the most ethical to the least ethical ways to fill your pie-hole. Once you throw out sentience as a qualifier you get some interesting results: 1. Eating things that are meant for you to eat - This would be fruit in the broadest sense. The desirability of the fruit is the plant's strategy for distributing its seeds. Either the seed is large, hard and indigestible (olives, peaches, etc) and is meant to be discarded as a means of propagation, or the seeds are small, easily ingested (tomatoes, peppers, etc) and are meant to pass through the digestive tract and be deposited elsewhere in a pile of ready-made fertilizer. I am unaware of any animal that employs these strategies, although the invasive tactics of parasites, viruses and bacteria show some similarities. 2. Eating things that are meant to be eaten but not by you - Animal milks (with the exception of human milk which technically belongs in the first category) and their derivatives such as cheese and yogurt, are the primary members of this category. Another is honey, essentially an insect "milk" produced from nectar, a top category food for insects and birds. With proper care, this category can be collected without harming the producer or starving the offspring it is meant for. The Land of Milk and Honey takes on a new meaning. 3. Eating things that are not meant to be eaten but it is assumed they probably will be to some extent - These are mostly leaves. All leafy vegetables and herbs can be eaten without killing the plant although destruction of the source is common in large scale agricultural practice. Essentially we are functioning as really big leaf munching insects in this category. 4. Eating things that are not meant to be eaten, period, but without killing the source - This is the controlled draining of nutrition from a host, very much like a parasite. Maple syrup is a plant example. Those cultures that extract animal blood from their livestock for food is another. Yuck. 5. Eating and thereby killing things in an embryonic state - Seeds, nuts, legumes and eggs comprise this vast category. Technically the scrambled eggs and the whole wheat toast on your breakfast plate are one in the same. Both have snuffed out potential developed life. Soy milk is less "ethical" to drink than cow's milk by this accounting. 6. Eating and thereby killing things in a developed state - This is everything else we consume. Both the sliced onion and the ground up cow on your hamburger dwell in this least-ethical category. Chopping the head off a chicken and ripping a carrot out of the ground are functionally equivalent. Bon Appetit!