Oh, man. This is bad. An article on Vice asks, Are Scallops Vegan?, and if you know the rule of questions in headlines, the answer should be “NO”, but this article actually plumps down on the side of “maybe?”
In the case of bivalves—that is, sea creatures with a hinged shell, such as oysters, clams, mussels, and scallops—the line between plant and animal, especially in regards to cooking and eating, remains unclear. “But, they’re alive,” someone may say who has seen the pulse of oyster flesh or the slow opening and closing of a scallop shell. But so are plants—every carrot you slice and every apple you bite into was once alive, and begins to die as it’s removed from its stem or roots. And while some bivalves, like scallops, open and close their shells by using an adductor muscle, plenty of plants can also independently move.
Being alive is not an adequate criterion — it doesn’t distinguish anything in biology. By definition, “life” is “alive”. But whether molluscs of any kind are animals or not is unambiguous — yes, they are animals. They are triploblastic, bilaterian protostomes, members of the lophotrochozoan clade in this diagram.
It’s always a good idea, O Journalist, that when you have a biology question you should ask a biologist, and not just a random layperson you meet at Whole Foods. Or at a local seafood restaurant.
I, a lapsed vegetarian, first heard the argument that scallops could be considered vegan during a recent lunch at Greenpoint Fish & Lobster Co., a Brooklyn seafood restaurant dedicated to sustainability. Though a spot with fish tacos and daily oyster selections may not seem like a vegan’s first pick for dinner, co-owner Vinny Milburn told me that the restaurant has numerous vegan regulars who visit to eat scallops and other bivalves, justifying their consumption, ethically and environmentally, with science. “They feel okay about it because it doesn’t have a central nervous system,” Peter Juusola, general manager at Greenpoint Fish told me.
Uh, they’re not vegans. They’re not even vegetarians. They’re pescatarians. Which is perfectly OK, I’m more of a pescatarian myself, because while I’ve been cutting back, I do eat seafood now and then. I’m not judging them, except to point out that mislabeling yourself because you’re pretending to be more ethical and environmentally sensitive than you actually are is dishonest and a bit yucky.
See that diagram above, with the colored bits labeled protostomes and deuterostomes? All of the members of those groups have nervous systems, every one. So do the ctenophores and cnidarians, although they tend to be more diffuse and lacking in specialized regions. Sponges do not have a nervous system, although their cells do communicate with one another using protein networks that have evolved into our nervous system. Arguing that vegans get to eat anything lacking a nervous system, a dubious claim, would mean you only get to eat sponges. If having localized collections of neurons that function as a kind of primitive “brain” qualifies as an exclusion, you also get to eat jellyfish.
Molluscs do have a central nervous system in the form of a couple of ganglia. Those count.
The killer counterargument, as far as I’m concerned, is that scallops have eyes. You’re not a vegan if you eat something that can look back at you. They’re even pretty blue eyes!
This does not seem to persuade some people, who ignore the physical evidence.
Conclusive evidence on whether bivalves, or even crustaceans, for that matter, feel pain, has yet to surface, but for starters, they “do not have a brain,” Juusola says, demonstrating with his fingers that when a scallop opens and closes, that’s a reaction due to a nervous system, not their nervous system calling out pain or danger.
They have multiple ganglia, which can be demonstrated anatomically, but apparently the argument from “opening and closing fingers” refutes the observable existence of coordinated, interacting sets of neurons.
I’m going to have to remember that one. When someone questions me on whether Trump has a brain, I’ll just wiggle my fingers and say, “Obviously, no. See my fingers?” In other good news, we can also legitimize the claim that the rich are brainless non-animals, allowing vegans to eat them.
So what are you waiting for, vegans of the world? Dig in!
This is journalism 2020 – if you have a scientific question, ask anybody except a scientist.
In this case a further point, asking the owner of a seafood restaurant whether seafood feels pain? Fishermen believe that teleost fish can’t feel pain and therefore it is fine, for sport to push a barbed hook through their mouths, drag them through the water, rip it it out, and then throw the fish onto the floor of the boat to die gasping for oxygen..
Potatoes have eyes!
The fish are just pretendin’ to feel pain.
They’re just fishing for sympathy.
Ideologues don’t care about pesky things like facts or evidence.
This is some rationalization on the level of the Catholic Church when it comes to dietary restrictions:
http://www.kongeaastien.dk/en/content/barnacle-goose
The Catholic Church is bursting at the seems with illogical reasoning and redefining words simply to get the pre-ordained outcome. It is useful training for lawyers, maybe that is why we have so many on the Supreme Court?
If we’re going for eyes as the mark of non-vegan food, you can’t eat box jellyfish either. You, uh, probably shouldn’t anyway.
You’re not a vegan if you eat something that can look back at you.
My doctor was ernestly counselling me to eat a healthy diet and abjure meat, etc. Her rule was only to eat things without a face. Does a scallop have a face or am I save there? Seems I am okay with molluscs. Great.
I think I discouraged her a bit when I said I was not making butter tarts with wholewheat flour.
Re: whywhywhy @ #6…
My wife got a pretty good song out the barnacle goose/gooseneck barnacle.
Possibly a better example of strange thinking is that for purpose fish on Fridays and in Lent, the capybara was ruled to be a fish.
Um, you haven’t shown that such people are indeed less ethical and environmentally sensitive, compared to “vegans.” Your claim depends on that actually being true, although it’s very doubtful that it is. It seems like you’re the one who’s dishonestly pretending like you know this, just to score some kind of a point against the stupid vegan hippies, which is a bit yucky.
Anyway, for most, those things are the main reasons for being “vegan” or “vegetarian.” The names are misleading in that way, as it has nothing strictly and literally to do with whatever a “vegetable” is. We can just recognize that and move on to issues which are genuinely interesting/important/difficult. Or we could make a huge fuss about it and act as if this could somehow be a devastating blow to “veganism” and “vegetarianism.” I don’t know why you’d do the latter.
In any case, the veggie stuff is more or less that both plants and fungi are generally acceptable options, despite the fact that their biological classification as such is really not an important factor (much less the one, single, essential criterion that must be satisfied). Of course, even when we look at only plants, there are a bunch of options that may not be particularly good for the environment, for the people in the societies which produce them, etc. However, their status as a “veggie” is only supposed to be a way of expressing the issues at a certain level of generality anyway, not the precisely-defined one and only thing that is ever worth considering while we ignore everything else.
But look, people really shouldn’t be consulting taxonomists or those in similar biological fields to determine what their most ethical food choices are, because they have nothing special to contribute to that discussion. Other sorts of biologists may be able to provide some information about ecology and such — that’s certainly relevant and important. But for these purposes, nobody has any good reason to give a shit about the taxonomic classification of organisms, their genetics, their evolutionary history, and so forth.
That’s not the discussion anybody should be having. And the people who are thinking about this stuff seriously know this perfectly well. (Don’t want it to sound like I’m saying anything particularly new or insightful here, but for now, clearing the ground of all the horseshit seems to be where we are stuck in the conversation.)
Well …. okay. It’s a killer argument which sounds like it came from a creationist. Or a middle-schooler. Or a creationist middle-schooler. Is that really as far as you’re concerned, or do you have any other concerns that aren’t quite so ridiculous?
Many medieval scholars agreed that fish and sea molluscs were not animals in the same sense as the more familiar land animals, and the reason was that they did not reproduce sexually. The breeding habits of fish had not been widely observed and, working on Aristotle’s model, most fish were assumed to be among those creatures that spontaneously generated in water rather than arose from sexual union.
This is why they were permitted on fast days, when other meat was forbidden. The sexual origins of meat were the reason it was off the menu on these days – it was thought to contain the essence of sexuality and would enflame the lusts of those who ate it, which was inappropriate for penitential fast days.
Many years ago I was in Hong Kong and met up with a friend of a friend. She was a Buddhist nun who had travelled widely and who had lived in HK for many years, and she kindly showed me around the Jordan Street night market amongst several other places of interest. It was getting late so we looked for somewhere to eat and ended up in a place which offered only beef curry, chicken curry or crab curry — no vegetable curry. She went for the crab curry on the basis that crabs don’t have a brain. I didn’t feel it was right to disabuse her of this notion.
One of my first year undergraduate labs involved dissecting a mussel but we had to observe it first. I remember watching it slowly open up, then reach a maximum gape before getting nervous (yes, I anthropomorphised it) and slamming shut again, before slowly gaining the courage to start opening up again. How someone can think that shellfish aren’t animals is beyond me. Whether or not it’s ethical to eat shellfish is a question I can’t answer but if a vegan isn’t supposed to eat honey they I really don’t get why shellfish get a pass.
I wonder if anyone could explain the exact difference. Surely pain is also “a reaction due to a nervous system.”
Now I want to go to Greenpoint Fish, pretend I am vegan, and order the vegan whale meat steak that I presume they carry, as a non-brain restaurant. Good grief.
cartomancer @11: Was it because they didn’t reproduce sexually or because they didn’t breathe in an identifiable way? I’ve seen different sources claim both, citing that it was widely believed that breathing was the thing that really determined life and as plants, insects, and fish did not “breathe” they weren’t considered to be alive in the same sense as mammals or birds.
But are they sentient? No, not sapient, but sentient. I have a thing about sentience and what I might eat. (I will eat clams, but will not touch octopus.)
The author clearly hasn’t listened to enough NOFX, or else they wouldn’t have made such a rookie mistake.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IRbv518eJbs
microraptor, #16,
There were, of course, many speculations on the topic. To say there was one monolithic Medieval answer to these sorts of questions is to misunderstand the intellectual landscape of the Middle Ages.
The most widespread paradigm for understanding the nature of life, certainly after the Renaissance of the Twelfth Century when the libri naturales of Aristotle were recovered and translated into Latin, was the Aristotelian one. Aristotle posits that life exists in three distinct grades – the vegetative, animal and rational – which correspond to increasingly sophisticated kinds of souls with distinctively different properties. Vegetative life has the capacity to take in nourishment and reproduce, animal life has sensation and motion on top of this (in many variations motion includes a kind of inner sense of instinct), while human life adds the capacity for rational thought. According to this model, respiration is just another kind of nutritive activity, so while plants don’t appear to do it per se, they do have equivalent processes which mean you can call them alive.
The sexual dimension of the fasting prohibitions seems to be corroborated by the fact that the Cathars were described as forbidding the eating of sexually reproducing animals entirely. Whether the sect really did believe that is uncertain – they may well have done – but all our information about them comes from mainstream, orthodox, theologians, and this was their explanation for it. So the theory held a good deal of explanatory weight. Most monasteries which included abstinence from meat on fast days in their monastic rule tended to make an exception for sick and elderly monks, who were thought to need the vigour meat carried. This fits much better with the sexual connotations, given how medieval medics tended to view the vigour of the body as intimately connected to such matters. It’s certainly a topos I have come across more often in connection with medieval medical thought than the breathing one.
I’m a vegetarian twice removed; I eat vegetables, things that eat vegetables and things that eat things that eat vegetables.
Whatever justifies the cause, I guess. Looking at it too deeply, the response of plants to external stimuli might lead one to stop eating, well, everything. (Hello breatharians.) Carrot Juice is Murder!
I am never sure if fungi are supposed to be included in a vegan diet.
I am reminded of a joke about an old Jewish man and a deli but I am terrible at telling jokes so i wont try to repeat it here
reporters are “sometimes” dumb and funny as are people looking for loop holes in self imposed rules.
uncle frogy
#17 @Autobot Silverwynde,
Clams are indeed sentient in that they sense light and touch and they have a nervous system to respond to their senses.
From a college biology textbook:
People have wonky and arbitrary rules for what they choose to eat, assuming that they are privileged enough to have a choice. My favorite so far is from an acquaintance who will only eat meat if it’s eyes are bigger than it’s brain. Also sea food, for reasons. Everyone, even she, knows that there is no justified reason for setting that limit, but she’s committed to it and feels like it makes her a better person.
@consciousness razor – As the article frames the question about whether scallops are vegan, i.e. plants, it’s fair to criticize it on a biological basis. Stupid questions about people’s area of expertise are annoying. Granted, the article was more about rationale for food choices than taxonomy, but that’s not the way the click-bait framed it.
I once had this idea of an ecology-themed fast food restaurant chain, called The Food Chain. All menu items would have a pre-calculated trophic level value and scrupulous listing of involved plant, animal, fungal etc. species.
I can understand being confused by sea cucumbers. They sound like some kind of aquatic plant, like kelp or nori. Not everyone wants to pull out their phone at the restaurant and check out all of the ingredients. There is less of an excuse for scallops.