LET US EAT PLANTS
Let Us Eat Plants
Vegetarians must inevitably defend against
an onslaught of detractors, pessimists, naysayers, and staunch advocates of the
dietary status quo. George Bernard Shaw once referred to the unrepentant
legions as "the outside anti-vegetarian world." When questioned about
his standard fare of fruits, grains, nuts, seeds, and plants, Shaw fired back,
"Why do you call me to account for eating decently?"
For the most part the debate rages in the
spirit of enlightenment and information sharing. The questions, if naïve, are
reasonable: How do you get enough protein? What else do you eat besides tofu?
Don’t you miss turkey at Thanksgiving? Why are you a vegetarian, after all?
On hearing ethical considerations, entrenched
flesh-eaters tend to scoff and trivialize the issue, forcing vegetarians to fend
off variations of a seriously posed question: If one is so opposed to killing
animals, how can one justify "killing" plants? Flesh-eaters, it
seems, are trying to turn the moral tables on vegetarians with their guilt-tripping
"plants have feelings, too" line.
How can vegetarians tread moral high
ground when their diet, too, kills and destroys living things? And not just
plants, heaven forbid, but microbes and bugs slaughtered by the billions during
organic agricultural processes. Up against such sophistry, how many vegetarians
have felt taken to the philosophical cleaners?
The objection that "plants feel pain,
too, and if all things feel pain, what difference does it make?" initially
seems like a rational line of thinking, but consider: is harvesting garden
vegetables or picking ripe cherries tantamount to enslaving, torturing and
slaughtering, say, a chicken that shares 65% of it DNA with humans?
No scientific evidence exists to document
that plants can feel physical pain. Plants do not have central nervous systems,
the only physiological mechanism known which would enable them to suffer the
emotional pain inherent in a discomforting, joyless existence, or experience the
physical pain of agonizing sensations being electrocuted, stabbed, dismembered or
suffocated to death.
Many point to The Secret Life of Plants
as proof positive that plants are sentient. No argument from this corner that
plants are amazing biological entities able to take cues from their environment
to stimulate growth, communicate with one another in mysterious ways, and
ensure the survival of their species through strategies of natural selection.
But as to plants’ capacity to experience
pain? Even if plants could feel pain in a way that animals most definitely can,
only a callous person could equate the experiences as similar in magnitude.
Animal cruelty is a harsh, sad reality.
The notion of “plant cruelty” - that one can abuse, enslave, and torture plants
is ludicrous. One cannot inflict cruelty on a plant, nor deprive it of a
fulfilling life. The only duty we have towards plants in using them as a food resource
is to water them regularly and let them grow healthily without toxifying them
with chemicals and pesticides. (On this count, we fail morally.)
Unlike animals, plants are naturally
immobile and immutably rooted to one small space in the earth for their entire
cycle of existence - "to draw nutrition, propagate and rot," as
Alexander Pope observed. Non-roaming plants are not forced to conform to cages
or be jam-packed in holding pens, but confining and immobilizing animals is in
opposition to their natural free-roaming natures.
Furthermore, animals are social beings. They
raise and nurture offspring, mate and bond for life in some cases, perform
collective activities, travel and move about in groups, flocks, herds - even
schools. They have personalities, we give them names, we commune with them. Unless
you happen to be rare individual with psychically attuned frequencies to plants’
modalities, you don’t pet or cuddle up with, smooch or otherwise engage in
intimate, oxytocin-producing moments with plants.
Finally, unlike animals forced into
unnatural aggregations, plants do not pollute and defile the earth in great
numbers; rather, they sustain and revitalize the earth in great numbers.
Plants, it must be concluded, do not enjoy the sort of communicative
interaction that animals do. It’s therefore absurd to compare the unethical
exploitation of animals with the harvesting and eating of plants.
Peter Singer, author of the seminal Animal
Liberation, long ago pointed out the ridiculous logic of those who accuse
vegetarians of ethical breaches by killing and eating plants. He makes the
point that we must eat something, so if there is even a shred of reason to this
argument, then we must perforce choose the lesser of two evils - eating plants.
A meat-based diet is responsible for the deaths of ten times as many plants as
a vegetarian-based diet. Plant-eaters 1, meat-eaters 0!
Undeniably, plants are living entities.
They play a vital role in maintaining the delicate balance of Gaia’s ecosystem.
But do they feel pain and emotional trauma? Has anyone ever seriously
considered giving up “plants” because of a moral, environmental or health-based
reason? Doubtful.
As Gabriel Cousens, MD, author of Conscious
Eating, points out, "Our very existence causes some sort of pain on
the planet, but there is a relativity to it." It’s not quite a “get out of
jail free” card, but it does free us from a putative burden of guilt when we
take a plant’s life as opposed to a presumed (unacknowledged) guilt involved in
stripping a mother animal of her liberty or brutally disposing of a cow or turkey.
Recognizing the dilemma and acknowledging
the contradictions of this life allows us to venture forth into an imperfect
world with compassion. We can begin to make choices that bring us back into a
state of harmony and grace with the earth, ourselves, and all living beings - "the-spirit-that-moves-through-all-things.”
Once we begin to base our food choices on
the principle of least harm and minimal destruction, then we will know, as
Tolstoy realized, that humanity is on the right path, that the vegetarian ethic
is the genuine and sincere pursuit of moral perfection on the part of our
species.
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