<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>null000</author><text>Suggesting that there&amp;#x27;s enough ambiguity for it to be reasonable to assume ferns exist on the same level of consciousness or understanding of the world around them as cows is a bit of a weak argument. There&amp;#x27;s a pretty obvious difference between the two, and even if you believe plants can experience pain or distress in a meaningful way, it still makes &lt;i&gt;way&lt;/i&gt; more sense to kill a carrot over a pig if you have the choice, making the two very clearly not morally equivalent.</text><parent_chain><item><author>white-flame</author><text>Consider that killing a living thing to eat its body is not unique to &amp;quot;meat&amp;quot;, nor is raising it in a controlled environment for the purpose of consumption.  Fish (as is sometimes classified separately) and vegetables are living things raised and killed for consumption of their bodies as well.&lt;p&gt;I believe reconciling all of these as ethically equal (including raising the ethical weight of killing a plant as equal to an animal) is important for sanely dealing with our natural ecosystem of food.  The &amp;quot;aliveness&amp;quot; of plants is continually researched and shown in a positive light, and it&amp;#x27;s hard to draw a clear and reasonable line between &amp;quot;life that is acceptable to eat&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;life that is not acceptable to eat&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;When you look at the spectrum of life and how ethically impactful killing it for food is, it tends to follow anthropomorphism and social compatibility with humans, which doesn&amp;#x27;t seem objective enough to be pursued for widely-accepted ethics, but merely for local cultural acceptability.</text></item><item><author>puranjay</author><text>I love meat but I&amp;#x27;ve always struggled to reconcile my love of eating it with my love of animals. I would be happy to pay a premium if it meant I could get meat-like taste without the guilt</text></item><item><author>nindalf</author><text>Congrats to that team for building a great product. I hope they see a lot of success. Long term, I hope plant based meat alternatives become commoditized. If there are a bunch of alternatives that taste just as good and importantly &lt;i&gt;are cheaper than meat&lt;/i&gt;, most people will switch. That&amp;#x27;s a huge win for the environment (and also animal rights), and I can&amp;#x27;t wait to see it happen.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Meat-free &apos;Impossible Burger 2.0&apos; tastes even closer to the real deal</title><url>https://www.engadget.com/2019/01/07/impossible-burger-2/</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>gbear605</author><text>Animals, or at least cows, pigs, and chicken, clearly show a level of consciousness that plants do not</text><parent_chain><item><author>white-flame</author><text>Consider that killing a living thing to eat its body is not unique to &amp;quot;meat&amp;quot;, nor is raising it in a controlled environment for the purpose of consumption.  Fish (as is sometimes classified separately) and vegetables are living things raised and killed for consumption of their bodies as well.&lt;p&gt;I believe reconciling all of these as ethically equal (including raising the ethical weight of killing a plant as equal to an animal) is important for sanely dealing with our natural ecosystem of food.  The &amp;quot;aliveness&amp;quot; of plants is continually researched and shown in a positive light, and it&amp;#x27;s hard to draw a clear and reasonable line between &amp;quot;life that is acceptable to eat&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;life that is not acceptable to eat&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;When you look at the spectrum of life and how ethically impactful killing it for food is, it tends to follow anthropomorphism and social compatibility with humans, which doesn&amp;#x27;t seem objective enough to be pursued for widely-accepted ethics, but merely for local cultural acceptability.</text></item><item><author>puranjay</author><text>I love meat but I&amp;#x27;ve always struggled to reconcile my love of eating it with my love of animals. I would be happy to pay a premium if it meant I could get meat-like taste without the guilt</text></item><item><author>nindalf</author><text>Congrats to that team for building a great product. I hope they see a lot of success. Long term, I hope plant based meat alternatives become commoditized. If there are a bunch of alternatives that taste just as good and importantly &lt;i&gt;are cheaper than meat&lt;/i&gt;, most people will switch. That&amp;#x27;s a huge win for the environment (and also animal rights), and I can&amp;#x27;t wait to see it happen.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Meat-free &apos;Impossible Burger 2.0&apos; tastes even closer to the real deal</title><url>https://www.engadget.com/2019/01/07/impossible-burger-2/</url></story>