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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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.
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