a weird web of unwieldy logic

A friend recently pointed me to a New York Times article from last month titled, “Sorry, Vegans: Brussels Sprouts Like to Live, Too.”  In this article,  Natalie Angier discusses some little known capacities that plant life has; namely, the ability to react defensively in response to damage or the threat of damage. These aspects of the article are interesting and worth sharing. The pointless part of the article is what I want to address here.

In this article about the wonders of plant life, Angier takes tangential jabs at vegans. She points out that she too can be an “ethical” eater if (and only if) she has an affinity toward a particular animal. (She will eat ducks but not lambs, chickens but not pigs). Apparently her inability to go totally veg* leaves her with some guilt and she feels the need to justify it by wagging her finger at vegans and taking the heat off of herself.  She tells us that plants matter too, and vegans eat plants so apparently vegans don’t actually eat morally. This line of argument is complete bullshit and I am exhausted from hearing it so often. If a Jainist gave me some argument about not eating plants, I would listen closely; however, this is a meat eater spewing bullshit to try to somehow create a circular logic in which, if she makes a vegan diet seem unethical, then her flesh-based diet will cease to be unethical.

I hear this weird sort of babble all the time when people find out that I’m vegan. I am just surprised the New York Times published it.  The only people who ever give me this line of crap are people who eat dead animals. The logic seems to be that if I don’t eat animals because they are sentient, then I shouldn’t eat plants because they are alive and can react to their environment.  Further, Angier’s logic implies that if one is willing to eat plants, then one should also be willing to eat animals.  How does Angier get from screaming at us about how a vegan diet isn’t moral enough to using plants’ abilities to react to stimuli as good logic for her to eat dead animals?

This article randomly jumps from vegan-hating, to research on plants back to vegan-hating.   Angier doesn’t discuss WHY vegans don’t eat animals and how these reasons might make eating animals different from eating plants. The reasons vary, though for me it is a reasonable expectation of sentience. I don’t believe plants feel pain. However, if they did, I wouldn’t interpret that as a sign I should cause more pain by starting to eat animals as well. Rather, I would be more conscientious about how often I ate plants and which plants I ate and I would continue to keep my diet flesh-free.   Further, Angier does not discuss any relevant facts about plants that DO want to be eaten. Many plants produce fruits they hope to be eaten so that the seeds can later be pooped out by animals–human and non-human animals alike. (This is advantageous for the plant because the poop serves as fertilizer for the seed.) And finally, if Angier really cared about plants she would not be a champion for “meat.” We feed farmed animals grains. Their bodies are not equipped to digest this sort of food and they absorb fewer nutrients and less protein from it than do humans .  This means that more grain needs to be grown to feed non-human animals so that we can eat their meat than would need to be grown if we subsided off of plant life alone. In fact, the amount of grain produced to feed cattle in the US alone, could solve hunger WORLDWIDE if it went to humans directly, instead of going to human bodies by way of cow bodies. (Mark Hawthorne has a wonderful and brief article on this last issue.)

If there is anyone out there who would use an argument similar to Angier’s  because they actually believe that it is unethical to eat plants, please explain yourself. I am eager to understand. But if you just thrust about the idea of “plant rights” to be an ass to those of us who refuse to be complicit in animal slaughter, please shut up. Your argument is silly, it is not unique, and I am sick and tired of hearing it.