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.