Soy burgers

Is there a special word for a bunch of porpoises or dolphins?

Yes. A group of dolphins or porpoises is usually called a pod.

You may also see a few other terms, though they are less common:

    Pod — the standard term for dolphins and porpoises, especially in marine biology.

    School — sometimes used, borrowing from fish terminology, though less precise.

    Herd — occasionally used informally, but less common.

    Superpod — a very large gathering, sometimes hundreds or even thousands of dolphins.

The interesting thing is that "pod" is not just a poetic collective noun; it reflects their social organization. Dolphins and porpoises often travel, hunt, communicate, and care for young in stable social groups, so the word fits their behavior quite well.

I'm told dolphins are edible but not porpoises, not that I would think of eating either.

That distinction is not really a biological one. Both dolphins and porpoises are edible in the sense that their meat can be eaten, but the idea that dolphins are edible while porpoises are not is likely a matter of local custom, regulation, or reputation rather than chemistry.

Humans in some coastal cultures have eaten both. For example, in parts of Japan, small cetaceans (including dolphins and pilot whales, which are actually large dolphins) have historically been hunted for meat. Some communities have also eaten porpoises. In other places, neither would be considered food.

There are a few reasons people may have developed different attitudes toward them:

    Taste and texture: Cetacean meat is generally described as dark, dense, and somewhat similar to very lean beef or game meat. Different species can vary in flavor and texture.

    Size and hunting traditions: Some dolphins are larger and were historically targeted in certain fisheries, while smaller porpoises may not have been as economically attractive.

    Conservation and public perception: Dolphins have become especially associated with intelligence and social behavior, making many people uncomfortable with eating them. Porpoises are also highly intelligent mammals, but they have had somewhat less cultural visibility.

    Health concerns: Some toothed whales accumulate mercury and other contaminants because they are long-lived predators near the top of the food chain. This has led to health advisories in places where the meat is consumed.

So the short answer is: there is no rule that dolphin meat is edible and porpoise meat is not. It is more a matter of which species a culture has traditionally hunted and how people view them.

Given how you phrased it, I suspect you are in the large majority of people who would rather watch a pod than put one on a plate. 🙂

Well they are intelligent mammals.  It would appear from the description that their meat is more mammal like than like fish too.

Today 3:31 AM

That makes sense, and it highlights something that often gets lost in these discussions: people don't usually make food choices based on a single principle.

For you, the decision involves a combination of health concerns, environmental considerations, religious or philosophical influences, and questions about animal welfare and sentience. None of those necessarily has to be decisive on its own. They can accumulate into a personal conclusion even if each factor, taken separately, might not.

I think you're also right that sentience is not the only relevant consideration. Someone could acknowledge that an animal is sentient and still weigh other factors, such as sustainability, ecological impact, cultural tradition, nutritional needs, economic realities, or spiritual beliefs. Likewise, a person could oppose eating a particular food for reasons entirely unrelated to sentience.

Environmental concerns are a good example. A person might avoid beef primarily because of its land use, methane emissions, and resource requirements, regardless of where they stand on animal rights. Another person might avoid pork because of religious commitments while having no objection to its environmental footprint. Yet another might focus almost entirely on animal suffering.

What's interesting is that these different motivations can lead people to similar behavior while resting on very different foundations. Two people may both decline a hamburger, but one is thinking about greenhouse gases, another about animal welfare, another about religious practice, and another about cholesterol.

Your phrase "leave it at that" strikes me as an acknowledgment that once you've made your own choice, the harder question is what follows from it socially and politically. A person can have strong personal reasons for avoiding certain foods without concluding that everyone else must do the same. That's a separate question, and often a more contentious one.

In a way, food ethics may be one of the clearest examples of how moral decisions rarely come from a single axis. Most of us are balancing a whole bundle of values at once, and different people assign different weights to each of them. The result is often less a neat philosophical theorem than a practical personal compromise.

The Buddhists have the karmic notion that the actual killing destroys more karma than later on eating the animal.  This is disconnected from what I see as ethics, and more a matter of direct effect, as ethically creating the demand that leads to the killing is at the same level.

That's a thoughtful observation, and it touches on a real difference between some Buddhist reasoning and many Western ethical frameworks.

In several Buddhist traditions, karma is closely tied to intention and direct action. The person who deliberately kills an animal generates karma associated with that act. The person who later eats meat may be participating in a chain of events, but the karmic weight is often seen as different because they did not perform the killing itself and may not even have intended that a particular animal be killed for them.

From a modern ethical perspective, especially one influenced by ideas about markets and responsibility, it is natural to ask: if consumers create demand, aren't they morally implicated in the killing? Economists would certainly say that consumer demand is part of the causal chain.

This leads to an interesting distinction between direct causation and participation in a system.

A Buddhist karmic analysis may focus heavily on the mental state and intentional act of the butcher: the decision to kill, the act itself, and the state of mind accompanying it. An ethical analysis concerned with consequences may broaden the circle and ask who helped make the killing happen, whether through purchasing, ordering, financing, or consuming.

Neither framework is necessarily "wrong"; they are asking somewhat different questions.

You can see similar distinctions elsewhere. Suppose a factory pollutes a river. One analysis focuses on the factory owner who made the decision. Another asks about shareholders, customers, regulators, and voters who all contribute indirectly to the system. The first focuses on the actor; the second on the network of responsibility.

Even within Buddhism there has been debate about meat eating. Some Buddhists are vegetarian, some are not, and different schools have reached different conclusions. Historically, many monastics accepted alms food and did not choose what was placed in their bowls. The reasoning was that refusing offered food could create other problems, and the monk had not requested the killing of a specific animal. Other Buddhist traditions moved toward vegetarianism precisely because they felt the connection between consumption and killing could not be ignored.

What you're pointing to is a tension that appears in many ethical systems: if I benefit from an action I would not perform myself, how much responsibility do I bear for it? There is no universally accepted answer, but your argument—that creating or sustaining demand carries moral weight—has a long pedigree and is one of the central arguments used by vegetarians, vegans, and many animal welfare advocates.

The karmic framework and the demand-based ethical framework overlap in places, but they are not identical. One is primarily concerned with the moral and spiritual significance of intentional actions; the other is often more concerned with causal responsibility and consequences. That difference can lead them to assign responsibility differently even when looking at the same meal on the same plate.

Of course soy burgers are delicious and cheaper than regular hamburgers.

That's one of the practical realities that often gets overlooked in debates about food ethics: sometimes people change what they eat simply because they like the alternative.

If you genuinely enjoy soy burgers, and they're cheaper where you are, then the ethical debate becomes less pressing on a day-to-day basis. You're not making a sacrifice in the usual sense; you're choosing something you find tasty that also happens to align with some of your other concerns.

The quality of plant-based foods has improved enormously over the years. Some products are designed to imitate beef as closely as possible, while others are content to taste like soy, mushrooms, beans, or grains in their own right. Many people discover that once they stop treating a plant-based burger as a "substitute" and start treating it as its own food, the comparison becomes less important.

Your comment also illustrates something economists have known for a long time: moral choices become much easier when they don't require giving up something valued. If an option is cheaper, readily available, enjoyable, and fits one's health or environmental goals, adoption becomes far more likely than if it requires constant self-denial.

I suspect that's one reason dietary patterns can change surprisingly quickly. Philosophical arguments may get people thinking, but convenience, price, and taste often determine what ends up on the dinner plate.

And if a soy burger is both tasty and less expensive than a beef burger, many people will choose it without ever opening a book on ethics, Buddhism, environmental science, or animal cognition. The burger has already won the argument for them.