Full disclosure, I am not a vegan.

However, I do know that not all plants we eat die as a result of being eaten, for example, eating apples from an apple tree does not kill anything - I suppose I can see that this is like eating eggs from a chicken.

Another example could be eating the leaves of rocket lettuce (but choosing not to uproot it), or the stalks of celery or rhubarb is another example, in both cases the plant can return to complete health over time.

Then there are some plants, such as grasses that require the ends of their blades to be eaten in order to be healthy.

As I've stated above, even if we found plants to be sentient, you'd be killing less sentient beings by eating them directly rather than feeding them to other animals and eating these animals. Just because lives must end for us to live does not mean you have to maximize the suffering caused.

I'm clearly making a judgement on which life is more important, because something non sentient literally cannot have a judgement on life and thus cannot miss its life or be wronged when its life is taken.

I don't know why all the downvotes. This is at least partly true! Plant senses and communication research had been a taboo among scientists for many decades, but there was a breakthrough recently and we finally have some interesting results. It was proven that plants can sense soundwaves (like insect buzzing, they don't care about music), light of different colors, carnivorous plants can taste (and decide whether they really caught their prey and should start digesting), they sense when they are harmed (a sense that serves the same purpose as our pain), they smell other plants and they have a sense of time and rythm. They can react to signals from other plants. Whether they think and feel pain depends on your definition of thinking and feeling pain (and to what degree your definition is anthropomorphic).

And communicate. You know that smell of a fresh cut lawn? Yeah, that's grass screaming about being cut.

Thanks for the excellent reply.

Lemmy would be 1000x better if people understood this. Honestly I genuinely feel like reddit was less toxic on the whole because people on Lemmy tend to be elitist assholes. Including myself on occasion.

If you think about it, it makes sense - we were all the ones who left due to a sense of duty, an awareness of the problems at hand. We need more normies.

To be fair, given the amount of suffering that mimes inflict on the population at large, making a mime suffer in return would probably be considered a good thing.

How marbled is the back strap? Mimes usually seem to be pretty fit, I think they would be mostly chewy.

Lol. I guess eating talking creatures seems uncomfortable because it makes them obviously sentient probably? 🤷

Sentient: able to perceive or feel things.

Sapient: 1. wise or wanting to appear wise 2. relating to the human species, of the species Homo sapiens.

For a while. Because the planet is a sphere and sometimes people sleep, or go to work. And then they stop doing those things and it gets loud again.