Plants are smarter than we ever imagined. Eating them is no less cruel than eating a cow. And cows taste better.

I have always secretly hoped that someday we would discover that plants are just as sentient as animals, and as a result, the aggressively judgmental, overly proselytizing ethical vegans of the world would be forced to come to terms with the fact that when it comes to food, they are no less murderous than the cow and chicken-eating people like me.

It’s getting harder and harder to deny that plants are a hell of a lot smarter and more aware of their surroundings than we ever thought.

Plants have a sense of smell.

Plants can see.

Plants can hear.

Certain plants are capable of evading enemies and discerning friend from foe.

Plants can communicate with each other:

Plants respond to gravity. Light. Chemicals. They move. They network. They sleep. They play:

Michael Pollan writes a lengthy piece in The New Yorker about plant intelligence, including the distinct possibility that plants have feelings and memory.

Natalie Angier, writing for  the New York Times, points out that plants are chemical factories that are capable of calling for help. Warning their neighbors. Bait and trap their enemies. Plotting the demise of their attacker.

Angier challenges the moral high ground that ethical vegans have so righteously ascended. She writes: 

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.

I’ve said it before: It’s remarkably arrogant for us to think that we fully understand the true nature of any living thing, including plants. To simply assume that the carrot you are eating is incapable of experiencing thought or pain or existential suffering is foolish. As scientists are continuing to discover, plant life is capable of far more sentience than we could have ever imagined.

So eat up, my ethically vegan friends, while there is still time. It won’t be long before we discover that the acorn that smacked you on the head was purposely thrown by an oak tree getting revenge for it’s leafy brethren.

Worst super power ever

It turns out that I write about my super powers quite often.

First there was a post about my actual super hero persona: Mr. Indestructible.

I cannot be killed (having been brought back from death twice already) nor have I ever bruised, and I have not vomited since 1983, yet I tend to be hurt all the time. Golfer’s elbow. Bad knees. Separated shoulders. Frequent concussions.

Strength and weakness tied together. The classic superhero motif.

Then there were posts about some of my lesser super powers:

My ability to wake up in the middle of the night and accurately state the time within fifteen minutes of the actual time, and oftentimes much more accurately than that.

My ability to hold my breath underwater for an exceedingly long time.

My ability to sleep very little, fall asleep almost instantly and sleep almost anywhere, regardless of the discomfort associated with the location.

For a short period of time, I actually tried to bring a few of my friends together with similarly questionable super powers in order to form a band of super heroes.

At the time, I thought that if Elysha had wanted to join our team, she might use her ability to identify any song after listening to it for three seconds or less as her super power, but it turns out that she has a more legitimate and equally useless super power:

Her sense of smell is superior to any human being on the planet.

Unfortunately, this is the worst of the five senses to possess in super quantities. As far as I can  tell, this super power only allows her to smell the dog or similarly distasteful scents when no one else can.

Unless your sense of smell is superior enough to sniff out the chemical components of a bomb at an airport, a super sense of smell is an atrocious power to have.

It prevents you from sitting in the train car with the restroom.

It causes you to smell the dead skunk on the road for considerably longer than anyone else in the car.

And yes, it allows you to smell the dog when no one in the house can smell her unless she is in your lap.

On a positive note, her super power fits the classic motif of combining a super power with an associated weakness.

Now all I need is a name for her super heroine persona and she can be on the team. Suggestions?