1) They're unlikely to be sentient (few neurons, immobile)
2) If they are sentient, the farming practices look likely to be pretty humane
3) They're extremely nutritionally dense
Buying canned smoked oysters/mussels and eating them plain or on crackers is super easy and cheap.
It's an acquired taste for some, but I love them.
As a vegan woman of menstruating age who struggles to absorb non-heme iron (the kind found in plants) despite careful supplementation, I can say I wholeheartedly endorse Kat's recommendation! I've also heard that mussel farming may have positive impacts on ocean ecosystems, but I haven’t looked into it deeply - if anyone has good sources on that, please feel free to share :)
I think Diana Fleischman was one of the first people in EA to advocate for a “bivalvegan” diet, back in 2013 or so, and has written some blog posts about it (e.g.).
This is a good suggestion.
My (limited) understanding is that scallops might be even better than oysters and mussels as they are typically larger (so fewer are killed to obtain a given quantity of protein) and are possibly even less neurally developed (edit: this seems wrong - see below)
I also wonder about wider ecosystem impacts. As @Vasco Grilo🔸 has suggested, the impact on soil invertebrates may dominate the moral value of farming on the land - but there is huge uncertainty.
I'd be surprised if there is a similarly large population of aquatic organisms that are impacted by the farming of bivalves (scallops, oysters, mussels). If so, they may be a more morally robust option than any land-derived option, whether animal or plant. But I've not researched this at all (I've tagged Vasco in case this is something he wants to look into!)
Diana Fleischman believes scallops are not preferable because unlike oysters and mussels they are mobile rather than sessile,[1] and therefore have an evolutionary reason to be sentient because they are capable of moving away from painful stimuli.
Also, while oysters and mussels are usually farmed, scallops are sometimes dredged,[2] which probably has large effect on aquatic organisms. Here is a CGI represenation I found.
There's also footage of this and the barren-looking aftermath in the new David Attenborough film Ocean -- which is not on YouTube, although YouTube does have a separate clip from the film of bottom trawling of fish. Whereas "fishermen argue that on soft seabeds that have already been dredged the impact is far less and the effects of tides and waves may exceed the impact of fishing activities in some areas",[3] IIRC the film argues that the pre-dredging habitats recover quickly when dredging ceases.
Considering wild animal welfare, and assuming the welfare of the ocean animals is negative, I guess the question is whether dredging reduces net primary productivity (NPP) -- it looks like it does to me, based on the barren appearance of the ocean floor following dredging. So therefore, (wild-caught) scallops may be better than oysters or mussels for wild animal welfare? However, "aquaculture now dominates at 75-80% of production [of scallops], with wild dredging at 18-22% and hand-diving under 2%".[4]
(though there are some caveats to this explained in Fleischman's article)
This is a quote from Claude Sonnet 4's summary of its research report, which I have not double checked: https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/5164e7de-7ff4-4952-947a-163ef13ddab7
Thanks for tagging me, Matt! I think the most cost-effective way of increasing animal welfare through food is buying more beef. I estimate this is 63.8 % as cost-effective as the Shrimp Welfare Project (SWP) has been, for a cost of 6.32 $/meat-kg, due to increasing cropland, and therefore decreasing the animal-years of soil nematodes, mites, and springtails, which I guess have negative lives. In other words, I would think about buying beef as making very cost-effective donations. Eating lots of beef would not be healthy, but one can consume just a small amount in order not to eat fully plant-based (which may be one of the goals of eating mussels), and throw away the rest.
From the book "Dialogues on Ethical Vegetarianism.":
While philosopher Cheryl Abbate argues that it’s impermissible to consume sentient animals raised on either factory farms or “humane” farms, she defends ostroveganism, which holds that it’s permissible to eat the flesh of nonsentient animals, such as bivalves. Vegans who oppose the consumption of bivalves are guilty of what she calls “kingdomism” – the view that an animal is entitled to serious moral consideration just because of its membership in the animal kingdom.
David DeGrazia, “Moral Vegetarianism from a Very Broad Basis,” Journal of Moral Philosophy 6 (2009): 143–65.
This was the first time I read the words "kingdomism" and "ostroveganism", altough I already knew several people who made the choice of eating bivalves.
I found the word kingdomism, inspired by speciesism, as a very powerful reminder of the importance of sentience for moral consideration, rather than belonging to a particular species or kingdom. I would love to see a much bigger percentage of the population going ostrovegan, than a limited number of vegans.
I was always planning to but procrastinated because of the ick factor. I have this clam chowder sitting in my pantry for years.
Now that I'm finally reminded, maybe I'll just start. Because as they say, swallow the frog oyster. The ick factor is bad but probably will decrease pretty quickly, and it's a one time no-subscription health investment.
Thanks, this is helpful. I think I was wrong, and as you/Diana suggest scallops actually have a more developed nervous system than mussels