How does yeast survive without any food or water without dying for years in a pantry, then you just add water and sugar and it comes to life and creates air. Is it unetical to cook them alive? Do they feel pain? If people are mad about lobsters being cooked alive why do we still cook yeast alive?
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I think the difference between a lobster and yeast is that yeast is not an animal. We don’t really know that much about fungi to say if they feel pain or not.
Yeast is a mushroom, if someone is ethically vegan so much they object to eating mushrooms they can just starve and die I guess. Because every edible seed and fruit are at least as alive as yeast.
Fungi and plants don’t feel pain because they don’t have a nervous system. Yeast is cells of fungi, and each cell is a biochemical machine that balances thousands of complicated chemical reactions running at the same time in the presence of water. Absence of water means that the machine does not run, that is, yeast cells go into suspended animation mode. They are not damaged by drying because they have adaptations for this. When conditions become moist enough, the machine starts again, i.e. they come back to life.
Yeast are a single-celled fungi. They are very simple life forms that have no capacity for sentience. Plants are probably more likely to have a semblance of sentience than yeast are.
As for how they survive, like many single cellular life forms, they can go into a long term state of dormancy if there aren’t any nutrients and food available. And especially if dehydrated or frozen they can last essentially indefinitely, with pretty much *all* biochemical reactions on pause until the organism is rehydrated or unfrozen.
Yeast is a single celled fungus, and it lives through packaging etc. because it is in a dormant state, like a more extreme hibernation. Because of this, it does not need to eat until it is revived– usually with a bowl of warm water and a bit of sugar.
Baking will kill yeast. If you’re stuck on the ethics, consider the following:
-Vegetarians eat plants, even those where eating kills the plant (eating the roots/stalk/leaves) and not only those that don’t kill the plant. (Fruits/nuts/seeds)
-Vegetarians eat mushrooms, and fungus (corn smut is a delicacy)
-Growing crops actually kills massive amounts of insects and animals, but vegetarians still eat crops.
-Plants are actually way more complex life forms compared to single-celled organisms, much bigger difference than that between a bird and a fish. So theoretically, eating yeast is less cruel than eating plants.
-We eat and inhale billions of single celled organisms during normal life, yeast just happens to be a cultivar that we find particularly useful.
Bakers yeast is a type of fungi, yeast meaning they reproduce via budding. So do they feel anything? No, feeling pain is extremely advanced. Do they have consciousness? No they lack brains, ganglion. They are almost just a sack of chemicals. Like bacteria, they cannot have sentience, so it unethical to use them? No more than eating plants which are far more advanced life forms.
Yeast can live for years without food or water in the same way plant seeds can. Some organisms respond to getting dried out by going into a sort of suspended animation where they don’t grow and don’t need food. When you add water, the organism starts growing and needing food again.
People are uncomfortable cooking lobsters alive because lobsters have nerves, and we use our nerves to have feelings, so in principle lobsters might have feelings too. Yeast doesn’t have nerves, so they don’t feel pain and we don’t need to worry about it.
Pain is a way for a more complex organism to realize discomfort in one part of the body and translating that to the rest of the organism to elicit a reaction
Yeast is incredible simple. It has sensors to determine beneficial reproductive environments, and that’s about it. For most mushroom fungus, all it needs is to fruit, disseminate spores, and die. There’s no energy or benefit to feeling pain.
For yeast it’s even less complex. They are single celled organisms incable of discomfort, let alone pain. That’s just way too complex for them. Just like an egg couldn’t feel pain.
Long answer: First off, pain is just elevated levels of discomfort. Put more basically: a specific biological process to react (avoid) stimuli that is harmful. “Pain” is only known to exist in organisms that have some sort of ability to react to ( get away from) that stimulus. That’s way an itch requires a scratch, but a burning hot surface requires you to recoil. Plants and fungi will “,feel” a stimulus, and respond in a way that makes sense for their survivability. A tree responding by sealing the stump of a cut branch for instance.
Obviously we can’t account for every response to every stimulus in every irganism, but we have a pretty good idea that something that has developed motor response is going to have a stronger ability to sense discomfort. For example, there’s no biological benefit to a tree feeling pain due a wild fire, because it cannot move away. It’s damaging, yes, but it does not have “burn” temperature response like animals do because there has been no evolutionary benefit to developing such a thing, vs an animal can flee a fitey and survive to reproduce.
Pretty much all food has been alive at some point. Some food, especially most raw fruits and vegetables, is still alive when you eat it. But being a live is not the same thing as being *sentient*, i.e. having thoughts and feelings. Plants, for instance, have only rudimentary “decision-making” pathways regulated mainly by hormones that control things like which direction the plant grows into and how much. They can also signal when they are being damaged so that repair and damage control processes can be recruited to the site of the damage, or even chemicals that are noxious so as to deter animals from taking any further bites (if that was what caused the damage).
Yeast is a single-celled organism, meaning every individual organism consists only of a single cell. As far as thoughts and feelings go, it is even simpler than a (multicellular) plant. As far as we know, it has no thoughts and feelings at all. If you *are* concerned that it might have them, then you need to consider that single-celled organism everywhere, and you are constantly involved in both killing them by the billions (e.g. bad bacteria trying to invade your body are killed by your immune system, washing your hands kills loads of things living on your skin), as well as providing a home to billions of others (e.g. your gut harbors lots of good or neutral bacteria that help with digestion or just hang out).
As for how yeast can stay alive: lots of single-celled organisms have the ability to go into a suspended state where all their processes just halt, and so then they don’t need any food or water (but they also can’t do anything). You can argue philosophically whether they are still even alive while in that state. Once conditions improve (e.g. there is water & food again) they can pick up where they left off. We humans cannot do this because once all our bodily processes have stopped, other things start eating us, and our defenses against those things are now offline. Also, being a big multicellular organism with a central nervous system, the processes that run our body and brain are much more complicated and interlinked, so there is no true “off state” that we can reboot from. And it’s worth pointing out that not all of the yeast cells survive the process of being dried and then stored for ages either. Lots of them die, and the longer you store your yeast the more of it will perish. It’s just that, as long as you don’t wait too long to use it, enough of the cells survive that you can use them.
Yeast is alive. When it dries out it forms spores (like seeds), that “sprout” when they get wet again.
When you rehydrate the yeast, they wake up. They can eat sugar, which they break down into carbon dioxide (the bubbles you see).
I don’t know of any philosophy that considers it unethical to kill micro-organisms, or fungi more generally.
They are single-called organisms. They have no nervous system to sense something like pain.
People think differently about animals than they do about plants and fungi. Lobsters have brains and are thought to sense pain.
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