Deserving of death

Perhaps my vegan friends can leave the poor, defenseless plants alone and eat this instead, as Slate’s Nathan Thornburgh suggests. Do the world a favor and help eliminate an invasive species of fish and stop devouring the only living beings that are actively engaged in the battle over global warming. By removing and sequestering carbon from the atmosphere, plants help to reduce greenhouse gases as they have been doing for millions of years.

This is more than I can say about most Republican lawmakers.

Yet we continue to kill them at astonishing rates.

The plants, I mean. Not the lawmakers.

With this in mind, I suggested that a vegan friend consider switching from field greens, spinach and broccoli over to a plant like kudzu. If you’re going to kill and devour benevolent plant life, at least make it a point to murder an invasive species in the process.

“Is kudzu edible?” you may ask.

Apparently so.

Appalled by how much the government spends fighting kudzu, Juanitta Baldwin, author of Kudzu Cuisine, started looking for culinary solutions to the problem more than a decade ago.

"Kudzu is a hidden goldmine," says Baldwin, whose book includes innovative recipes for kudzu, including breads and jellies.

See? It’s practically an all-in-one plant. Throw in some peanut butter and you can use kudzu to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

Don’t get me wrong. As invasive a species as it may be, I still think it’s a shame to kill kudzu. It’s still a plant, and it’s still actively removing carbon from our atmosphere.

But if it’s a choice between benevolent broccoli and pacifist parsley or the plant that ate the South, why not try kudzu?

Not that any of this will matter. I fully expect that scientists will one day discover that plants are sentient beings, capable of thoughts and feelings, and all this kindness to living things fortunate enough to have feet and flippers will go right out the door. Vegans and carnivores alike will finally have to accept that no living being is more precious than another.

Either that or a plant-based species of alien life will visit Earth and become enraged upon discovering that there are human beings who have dedicated their entire lives to the consumption of their distant plant cousins.

And you just know that these leafy aliens will be armed with death rays and exploding tree nuts.