Ripped bleeding and cereally condensed , ummm, sapping?, oozing?, from NY times online, By NATALIE ANGIER
(Our older sister was right! She can hear trees scream!)
OK, “
I stopped eating pork about eight years ago, A couple of years later, I gave up on all mammalian meat, period. Food choices are often like that: difficult to articulate yet strongly held. And lately, debates over food choices have flared with particular vehemence.
But before we cede the entire moral penthouse to “committed vegetarians” and “strong ethical vegans,” we might consider that plants no more aspire to being stir-fried in a wok than a hog aspires to being peppercorn-studded in my Christmas clay pot. This is not meant as a trite argument or a chuckled aside. Plants are lively and seek to keep it that way.
“Plants are not static or silly,” said Monika Hilker of the Institute of Biology at the Free University of Berlin. “They respond to tactile cues, they recognize different wavelengths of light, they listen to chemical signals, they can even talk” through chemical signals. Touch, sight, hearing, speech. “These are sensory modalities and abilities we normally think of as only being in animals,” Dr. Hilker said.
Just because we humans can’t hear them doesn’t mean plants don’t howl. Some of the compounds that plants generate in response to insect mastication — their feedback, you might say — are volatile chemicals that serve as cries for help. Such airborne alarm calls have been shown to attract both large predatory insects like dragon flies, which delight in caterpillar meat
Plants eavesdrop on one another benignly and malignly.
It’s a small daily tragedy that we animals must kill to stay alive. Plants are the ethical autotrophs here, the ones that wrest their meals from the sun. Don’t expect them to boast: they’re too busy fighting to survive.”
There’s much more detail, but basically, just because plants can’t run away doesn’t mean they aren’t feeling creatures with a will to survive, and perhaps with all that time sitting around, quite philosophical.
I guessed you’d have to be since animals might quit eating animals, but animals need to chomp on potatoes, cherries, walnuts, spinach, and properly prepared Brussel(s) Sprouts.
