I have a pet plant. I walk her, buy her Hanukah gifts, pet her, snuggle with her, and give her treats.
Oh wait, that’s my rescue dog. Her name is Rose. But for the purpose of this discussion, let’s just call her “Sentient.”
Sentient took a walk in the snow yesterday, and the salt on the ground from the NYC post-blizzard clean up made her squeal a little, so now she has little booties to protect her precious perfect paws.
My aloe plant — which I also adopted, incidentally — does not have booties. Nor does it have a central nervous system or a brain.
Perhaps before writing today’s New York Times article, “Sorry, Vegans: Brussels Sprouts Like to Live, Too,” writer Natalie Angier should have come over and met my dog and my plant. Maybe she would have noticed a difference.
One thing Angier observes is that food choices are “difficult to articulate yet strongly held.” Really? Funny, because I find my food choices pretty darn simple to articulate: I am vegan because I don’t believe in animal cruelty.
And though Angier would likely counter that by asking me if I believe in plant cruelty, I would then remind her that meat-eaters consume significantly more plants than vegans, since the animals they eat are — surprise! — fed plants. A lot of them, too.
There are studies citing that if everyone consumed animals the way Americans did, we’d need three earths in order to have enough land to feed the animals who then “feed” the people. Inefficiency at its finest.
Seems to me there’s a monumental distinction between a brainless, nervous system-less, plant instinctively reacting to its “predator” (insects, in the example Angier gave) by irritating it, compared with a sentient being (complete with a brain and nervous system) screaming as she or he is literally shoved into the slaughter line. If my dog was shoved into a slaughter line, she’d scream, too. If my plant was, it would just sit there.
I got into an email discussion about this with my friend and fellow activist, Casey Martinson, who continued: “If [Angier] really knew better, she would be vegan. Everyone would. Knowing isn’t just an intellectual state; it is an emotional state as well. And most people have been emotionally conditioned to override reason in order to keep eating animals.”
Last time I checked, the prerequisite for being published in the Science section of the New York Times was that the article has to be…scientific. I’m therefore surprised and disappointed that they published this hogwash (pardon any oppressive reference). Even just the title, “…Brussels Sprouts Like to Live, Too” sounds more like something an instigative and immature relative would mockingly say to you at a holiday gathering as a way to rationalize his dinner choices.
Now if you’ll excuse me, Sentient needs a belly rub.
December 22nd, 2009 at 4:46 pm
By analogy, consider a person in a state of surgical anesthesia. That person’s immune system will continue to actively fight off foreign (potentially disease causing) agents. And yet, you could cut that person’s finger off and they would not suffer one ounce of pain. Nor would they be consciously aware of having their finger cut off or worry about the consequences. Clearly, the fact that an organism has some active biological responses that may be triggered by external stimuli does not mean that those organisms are capable of feeling pain (emotional or physical).
December 22nd, 2009 at 4:51 pm
I miss Sentient
December 22nd, 2009 at 5:06 pm
Great response! I am VERY disppointed in the NYT!
December 22nd, 2009 at 5:53 pm
I’m pretty sure that Natalie Angier and Brussels Sprouts share about the same brain capacity.
December 29th, 2009 at 6:21 pm
LMAO! I was thinking the same thing.
December 22nd, 2009 at 6:16 pm
you tell ‘em jasmin! the NYT needs to get it together. what a crock!
December 22nd, 2009 at 6:30 pm
Well said! You have got to send this Natalie Angier.
December 22nd, 2009 at 6:35 pm
I couldn’t agree with this more. Angier’s article was absolutely ridiculous. Why was it even printed? Does Angier have a job? A social life even? It is almost as if she has nothing better to do with her time other than make up a stupid excuse about why she can continue to eat whatever she wants without any good reason. Things like this only contribute to the confusion and astounding ignorance about where our food comes from, as well as the insensitive and empty-headed remarks that are often made by people who have absolutely no understanding of the ethical reasons behind a vegan lifestyle.
December 22nd, 2009 at 6:38 pm
Great response, thank you! As a 19-yr happy, guilt-free vegan and vegan chef/author, I found the NYT article disturbing and offensive (and left a comment there as well). I think people who rationalize this strongly about eating meat just really want to eat meat deep down & want an excuse to do it without guilt.
And I would bet my buttons that if I came to your house I could make a very long list of differences between your dog & plant!
December 22nd, 2009 at 6:47 pm
Great job. Thank goodness someone responded to this travesty with the snark it deserves. As a daily–OK, hourly–NYT reader, I perused the piece with genuine incredulity…boy, did J. Safran Foer apparently mess with some people’s smug (& apparently previously unexamined) self-righteousness this year!
Ah, me. Happy holidays!
December 22nd, 2009 at 7:05 pm
well said, Jasmine!
December 22nd, 2009 at 9:57 pm
I was astonished by this article. I love the concept that plants don’t want to be eaten, even though many plants are evolved so that animals will eat them and then carry their seeds to other areas, “deposit them” and use the natural fertilizer as a way of keeping the plant species alive.
I don’t know of many people that eat cows and baby cows grow out of their poop.
December 22nd, 2009 at 10:25 pm
The title of that piece was confrontational and immature and the article itself was full of quotation marks around terms like “ethical vegans” and “killing” animals- as if the concepts themselves are invalid. Ultimately, there was so little said about about her supposed main point that I barely made it through the article. I think it was a useless piece meant only to aim snark toward vegans. Not worth squat!
December 23rd, 2009 at 1:03 am
Maybe the article’s a good thing? Its currently THE most emailed article on NYT.com. This must be all the meat eaters emailing their vegan friends to say nanny nanny poo poo. If we can all just hold our tongues a little, and respond with the simple logic that shows why this argument is silly, lots of people might have a new understanding!
December 23rd, 2009 at 8:04 am
Kudos to you, Jasmin, for your brilliant response!
December 23rd, 2009 at 3:12 pm
Thank you. Angier may have written valid points about male and female biology, but she seriously missed the boat with this one, putting a pseudoscientific twist on the “what about the plaaaaaannnnts” excuse.
December 25th, 2009 at 11:09 am
Some points:
1) we need plants to survive but eating animals is unnecessary luxury that damages others and the planet.
2) plants can only react to stimuli without processing it through central nervous system, it is very different from what we call pain. Some materials can do the same thing.
3) if they wrote that animals can think, it would make a conflict in media but when it is claimed that plants think, it seems common. Why? Because they don’t make it as rational argument but rather as an emotional attack.
4) it is much more easier to go vegan than make sure that the animal is “humanely” raised and slaughtered.
Please send your responce to NYT because people who are not vegans yet don’t read vegan websites. We should all write and be descriptive and friendly – thee are people who do care about animals have the right to know and those who don’t care won’t listen anyway.
December 26th, 2009 at 2:10 am
Casey - ‘By analogy, consider a person in a state of surgical anesthesia.’
The situation is not analogous. A person would expect to wake up from surgery.
A more apt analogy would be the *harvesting* of human organs and tissues. Which people do, without ethical qualms, on a daily basis.
December 26th, 2009 at 7:05 am
Written from ‘animalist’ and ‘blindly vegan’ perspective.
Flaw in the logic as I see it:
What is your principle argument for being vegan?
- Being sensitive to the sentient OR Saving the earth ?
You may gleefully say ‘both’, however u need to understand that the two are principally different.
Just showing respect to the nervous system because we can relate to it doesn’t make sense. You have to look at it from a higher level of abstraction.
Level at which you are considering different mechanisms of defense used by an organism in order to protect itself from external threats.
At this levels you can not stop at where ‘your’ senses (human, limited to 5 senses) can sense its opposition.
This point is completely missed by the author.
The comments below too are rather naive.
And if you read this… You may think something about farming of other species from a different perspective.
http://scienceblogs.com/notrocketscience/2009/09/ants_herd_aphids_with_tranquilisers_in_their_footsteps.php
January 2nd, 2010 at 12:11 pm
Very well said. The article is absurd and it’s pretty obvious that her intellectual level is the same as the sprouts’s she’s talking about. Maybe someone should eat her too…lol
January 3rd, 2010 at 7:30 pm
To be fair, the NYT article is very informative about the life and intelligence of plants. If the author finds herself unable to explain her food choices then that is her cross to bear is it not? For many it’s as simple as ‘I’m vegan/vegetarian out of respect for animals and to place less of a burden on the planet’, but for many more it is a struggle to counter what has been inbred from birth. To break away from your upbringing is no easy trick as we all know.
Based on experience, part of the reason many meat eaters resist vegetarian meals, much less the lifestyle, is the constant ‘tsk-tsk, pooh-pooh’ attitude of many vegan/vegetarians. Why must we all make how, what, and why we eat what we do such an issue at the table?
Vegans and Vegetarians alike should set an example that others want to follow. Arguing with someone as they cut into their steak surely does not accomplish what we think it will.
January 7th, 2010 at 9:33 pm
This entire discussion is a waste of time. The state of being a vegan is irrelevant to anyone other than oneself and so is any argument defending it against other bullshit.
February 12th, 2010 at 12:33 pm
Great response! This is a very important discussion.
I happen to be a (vegan) Brazilian translator who’s translating into Portuguese Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Eating Animals”. Since he’s a very well known author in Brazil, newspapers are beginning to publish articles about the translation of book, forthcoming this year. A certain journalist interviewed, besides me and other vegans and vegetarians, a person who works for the meat industry and stated that “killing animals is a process identical to the decapitation of a lettuce - and the lettuce, let’s not forget it, it’s also a living being.”
Oh, boy.