On Eating Intelligent Plants

It’s time for our midweek turnaround. a brief, gentle turning practice to orient you to what matters. It includes a prompt for a meditative activity for disentangling from the default American mindset and connecting more closely with yourself and your surroundings. You may find it helpful to have a journal at hand, but it’s not required. I hope these practices of body and heart bring you peace and connection in the middle of whatever storm is blowing around you at the moment. Today’s newsletter is part of my series about connecting with and learning from plants.

Note: I have been battling a cold and a frog in my throat, so there is no audio recording this week.

I don’t know about you, but the insight that plants are aware in ways that are new to our culture is disconcerting when it comes to food. It is troubling to think about eating a being that is aware, that can decide and communicate. I also eat meat, so it’s not a new issue for me. But it brings an old issue up in new ways. Part of me has always thought of switching to veganism or simply eating more plants as the route I could take toward more ethical eating habits. If plants are as aware as animals, however, that option is not helpful.

The hard fact is this: there is no path to survival as a human being that does not involve consuming other lives.

Phew. Let’s sit with that for a minute. The only creatures on our planet that don’t have to eat life to have life are plants, who live off of light and minerals and water. But, even plants rely on other lives for their nutrition. They just wait for us to die and decompose first.

There are two ways we can look at this. One is to use it as an excuse. All life eats life, so when I eat this cheeseburger, I’m just doing what I have to do to survive, like a lion taking down a gazelle. I do not owe anyone anything. I CAN consume, I MUST consume, so HOW I consume is not relevant.

The other way is to lean into the troubling question, to use it to connect to our world on a deeper level. (Remember, we all have one foot in a domination mentality and the other in an expansive connection mentality. It’s a matter of which foot we allow to carry our weight and set our direction.) So… living requires me to consume other lives. That’s inescapable. What do I do with that?

My first thought is to jump into the practical, figure out a way to do the least harm. For instance, if I eat a few leaves off of a head of lettuce, the plant itself will keep growing. For plants where I eat the fruit, I can leave some behind. In her celebrated book, Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer writes about honorable harvesting methods, about learning from her indigenous American ancestors how to not take the first plant you see, how to not take more than half of whatever you are gathering. These are more like exercises in seeing differently than they are practical suggestions for how to gather food: reality of our situation is a quagmire for practical application. Most of us don’t even know where the food we put in our mouths grew, let alone how it was harvested. That’s an immense problem, but not one I can tackle in a brief weekly exercise in seeing differently.

Instead, I invite you to see differently. Life as a human animal costs other lives. There is no escaping that call to gratitude for a debt we cannot repay. Not just the nebulous gratitude to a Creator who began it all, but gratitude toward the beings that sit neatly on our plates. Gratitude TO the lettuce and the beef and the milk cows and the grass that fed them. Gratitude TO the (often underpaid) hands that harvested the food and packaged it and put it on my grocery store shelf. With a subtle shift in perspective, the food chain looks less like a product flow chart and more like a great chain of beings, with my debt of life stringing each member together.

Who could ignore this call to humble gratitude, a posture of reciprocity that looks for ways to honor the sacrifice of living beings for our palate, through care for them and avoiding over consumption, through avoiding waste and not hoarding what is not ours to keep, through knowing what experiences led them to be part of our food chain and finding ways to eat that honor their contribution instead of treating them like products.

I don’t have practical advice, but I do always try to provide an act or exercise. We have been conversing with plants. This week, try saying thank you TO your food. Thank you, lettuce, for your crunch and your vitamins. Olives, avocado: Thanks for your long journey to my plate. I thank the trees you came from for fruiting year after year to provide food for humans…. 

(Robin Wall Kimmerer has a great example of such a prayer in Braiding Sweetgrass. Instead of quoting it, I encourage you to read it in the book for youself.)

I am excited to see where this gratitude carries you in the coming weeks and months. I hope that, if enough people focus on gratitude toward the beings that give us life, we can find practical applications that exceed my wildest dreams.

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We live in a divisive time. Many people are lonely, many people feel alienated from people and activities that are necessary for thriving, even survival. This isolation did not begin at this moment. The dominant culture has alienated those of us deeply invested in it from the things that matter for a long time—perhaps even generations. It has hijacked our connections to ourselves and the world around us for power and profit for so long that we don’t even realize something is wrong. One of my goals with this newsletter is to help us reconnect to what matters, and in doing that, to reconnect with one another. I design this weekly gentle turning as a moment for looking to the natural world to teach us to heal those connections. I hope it’s a moment that carries you into the rest of your day and week.

P.S. Want to learn more about plant intelligence or awareness? Here are some of my favorite books on the topic, all written for non-scientists like me:

The Mind of Plants: Narratives of Vegetal Intelligence, a collection of essays and poems edited by John C. Ryan, Patrícia Vieira, and Monica Gagliano

The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth by Zoe Schlanger

The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate--Discoveries from a Secret World by Peter Wohlleben

Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest by Suzanne Simard