Sorry vegetarians, you’re all killers, too

Remember that old saw about people being vegetarians not because they love animals — but because they hate vegetables?

Well, now that could actually be true.

I just read a really interesting article about plants, which goes into incredible detail about how they struggle for life just as vigorously as animals do, and how it might not be any more ethical to eat plants than it is to eat meat:

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. The more that scientists learn about the complexity of plants — their keen sensitivity to the environment, the speed with which they react to changes in the environment, and the extraordinary number of tricks that plants will rally to fight off attackers and solicit help from afar — the more impressed researchers become, and the less easily we can dismiss plants as so much fiberfill backdrop, passive sunlight collectors on which deer, antelope and vegans can conveniently graze. It’s time for a green revolution, a reseeding of our stubborn animal minds.

…

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, and tiny parasitic insects, which can infect a caterpillar and destroy it from within.

There’s much more, and it really makes you think.

I remember reading, as a child, that scientists using ultrasonic microphones, could actually detect a very-high-pitched sound — like a scream — when you cut open an onion. That made a similar impression on me. Plants are living things, and we have to eat something to survive.

Mind you, I don’t have any issue with people who decide to be vegetarians, or even vegan. My mom, who was a Home Ec. teacher, exposed me to a very wide dietary variety growing up, and I’ll happily eat a meat-free diet for days on end. There are great environmental and health reasons to limit your meat intake anyway. But I like meat. And there are great health reasons to eat some animal products — especially fish and dairy.