The Onion

Certain vegetables like leeks get buried as they sprout to make the "shoot" part as long as possible.

Rhubarb is grown in near complete darkness, and it screams as it grows towards a light it'll never reach

Future generations will not look kindly upon this comment.

That's how it worked for my kids, too.

If it helps, in Argentina they are deforesting large swathes of land and pushing previous owners out at gunpoint just to plant more soy. That's not an Onion article.

This going to trigger so many >!cheeseflakes!< who have made eating cheese their whole personality.

And before any body starts screeching, I'm not even a vegan. I do mostly make vegan home at food, but you can pry my cold, dead hands out of my cheese, and I also occasionally eat fish or meat.

The people I know that are hard-core meat eaters are hunters who vastly prefer meat they've killed themselves (in a heavily regulated system that prioritizes sustaining the environment). I live in Alaska, though.

X Headline is going to trigger Y group

There is not really strong evidence of plant sentience. Here's one paper looking at it:

A. Plants do not show proactive behavior.

B. Classical learning does not indicate consciousness, so reports of such learning in plants are irrelevant.

C. The considerable differences between the electrical signals in plants and the animal nervous system speak against a functional equivalence. Unlike in animals, the action potentials of plants have many physiological roles that involve Ca2+ signaling and osmotic control; and plants’ variable potentials have properties that preclude any conscious perception of wounding as pain.

D. In plants, no evidence exists of reciprocal (recurrent) electrical signaling for integrating information, which is a prerequisite for consciousness.

E. Most proponents of plant consciousness also say that all cells are conscious, a speculative theory plagued with counterevidence.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8052213/

Though something interesting and perhaps counter intuitive to note is that even if we realized plants were sentient, a plant-based diet actually involved killing fewer plants due to the lessened need to grow feed (of which most of the energy is lost)

Well, the first step to this question is the ever infuriating "define cruelty". It's easy enough with complex vertebrates who have evolved to socially signal pain, which is almost everything we eat. It's even easy to extend it to complex vertebrates which hide pain. But it's hard enough to rigorously say whether something like an invertebrate insect or crustacean even feels pain at all. They certainly have pain responses, but is the qualia of that response in theory internal space recognizable?

It's not an easy question to approach, but it is an important one broadly.

Let's say that plants do have some kind of sentience, which is probably very limited due to the evidence we do have. Animals still have more advanced sentience that is closer to our own so it would still be the lesser evil to eat plants. Like why would you eat other people or chimps when there are other options available?

It takes a lot of mental gymnastics to be able to say that plants suffer the same way as animals. I know you're not saying this, but you do hear stuff like this based on this premise.

It's funny because this would actually sell. And it's funny because it hurts too much to feel how disturbing it is.