My journey through different dietary practices has led me to adopting what I call “My Shellfish Pledge” to you (the reader), and to those friends and family members who know I’m ‘out of the closet’ with my consumption of mussels and oysters.
In this dietary philosophy I combine the sometimes-competing factors integral to diet such as ethics, nutrition, politics, and even take into account food taste. This is a short snapshot of a book-project I’m currently working on called Reflexive Foodism.
The ethical backbone of my choosing and shopping consumption and subsequent ingestion of shellfish, is that shellfish do not consciously experience pain due to their lack of a central nervous system (‘CNS’) and brain: they have no pain receptors in their flesh and no neural circuitry networks to compute pain response into a conscious subjectivity.
Nutritional reflexivity I find in the complete proteins, iron richness, a source of omega 3 fatty acids (however not as much as in oily fish), vitamins b6, b12 and E (and niacin also known as b3), the minerals copper, phosphorus, potassium, zinc and magnesium found in shellfish.
This makes shellfish a good nutritional substitute for other kinds of animal and other invertebrate meats and organs.
The taste factor may be raised if one is mono-consuming shellfish as a replacement for all other kinds of meat from sentient animals. Is it not limiting the cuisine palate of other tasty meats of sentient animal and invertebrates? Perhaps so, but with every dietary choice and consumption of shellfish as substitute for beef, lamb, pork, duck, chicken (etcetera), you choose to prolong the life of a sentient animal or vertebrate not leading to their premature death and in some cases circumventing and avoiding the painful slaughtering of a sentient pain-conscious animal or invertebrate; especially concerning is the acutely inhumane killing of fish (a fellow sentient vertebrate) which typically suffocate to death in a very painful way after being caught by humans, whether by fishing rod or net(s).
A quick note for vegans (re ethical and political dietary choices/practices): be aware of particularly monocropping big business agriculture which not only bully small farmers in the global food market but is premised on something called ‘biotic cleansing’. Agricultural biotic cleansing is where entire ecosystems and prairies, right down to the microorganisms needed for healthy soils, are wiped out in order to procure an unsustainable agricultural yield, (using industrial fertilizers) replete with cruelty to the web of sentient life it decimates, including the non-sentient ecosystems which form the bedrock upon which sentient life depends for survival. Whilst a vegan will not see dead flesh of an animal on their plate from cruel forms of human agriculture such as in large-scale monocropping, I would encourage them to choose more poly-cropped and local sources of plants, vegetables and fruits.
So, it’s my pledge to you, to eat shellfish as a substitute for other kinds of meats, as much as I can!
Thanks for reading, and I hope it will aid you in your quest for the best all-around diet!
PS please see my other blog post on (human) diet called/entitled ‘Omnivorism, Vegetarianism, Veganism’ for more information important to (human) diet and dietary practices! Cheers!
Henry Willoughby's Social Justice Blog 