Plant Cruelty and the Concept of Reciprocity

 

I explore the complex world of seeds and germination in my book, The Nature of Plants: An Introduction To How Plants Work, published in both print and audible form by the University of Florida Press.  I am now teaching a short course on propagation and it reinforces to me, once again, how little most plant loving people know about seeds and plants in general - so I thought I'd share a bit here.

To start, seeds are not "inert".  They are quite alive and a lot is going on within them.  If I choose to be a vegetarian because I abhor the cruelty that the meat industry presents to animals. I might also say the same about what we do to plants.  In reality, why are plants any different from animals?  The more we know about them, the more we realize that they face the same challenges that animals do; they just express their feelings in ways that most of us cannot "hear".

This lima bean has sat in a jar - either at a store or storage locker likely for months or years before being packaged up, sent to a store and then put in a jar for some future consumption.  I happened to be the one who ended up with this one at the end of its long harvest-to-transporation route.  For the General Botany class that I was teaching, I chose not to eat this one, but to hydrate it on a moist paper towel in a closed plastic container.  As you can see, this lima bean is alive. It was simply waiting patiently for the right time to complete its metamorphosis - no different really from a caterpiller to a butterfly or moth.

Seeds contain three major parts.  The seed coat in for all practical purposes just like your outer skin; "dead" and present only to protect the living part inside.  The living part is the embryo and it is surrounded by the food source that will enable it to grow and establish itself before it's capable of living on its own through photosynthesis and roots to absorb water and nutrients.  The embryo is alive.  It detects conditions in the environment and monitors them. When these conditions are right,  it directs its development from "inert looking" seed to "living" seedling.  The truth is, in all stages this seed has been alive, waiting and watching.  

Two of the most significant things that the embryo does are:

1. To take in water and start to swell, and

2. Begin to feed on the stored nutrition present in the endosperm.

These actions are purposeful and directed by the embryo once it determines that the conditions around it are favorable for it to survive from the seedling stage to the adult one.  Some embryos can wait for decades or more for this to occur.  There are stories to be read of seeds found in an urn of some kind in a desert or recently thawed from permafrost that have spung to life (again the embryo was alive the whole time), but these stories are rare.  Some plants adapted to truly harsh environmental conditions have evolved an ability to have the embryos in their seeds wait for very long periods of time before sprouting or expiring.  Most embryos can't wait very long, however.  When confronted by a longer-than-"normal" wait time, they die.  We can extend it a bit artificially by storing seeds in cold temperatures (it slows down the embryo's metabolism), but we can't do that for long.  It's the reason why seed companies have an expiration date on the package of when last to sow them.  

So, back to my original topic.  We have recently learned how complex plants are in tems of their communication skills.  They communicate rather complex information to each other in a variety of ways; both through the air and underground.  Some even make audible noises that can be "heard" with sensitive listening equipment.  Because of all this, we have to realize that when I throw a living seed, like this dried lima, into a boiling pot of water we are condemning the embryo to death - likely with added excruciating pain. It is likely screaming in pain. We just can't hear it. When we cut the top off a cabbage, broccoli or Brussel's sprout we are also causing it pain.  We can smell that pain in plants as the knife severs it from its roots.  When we pull a ripe or nearly ripe fruit off its parent plant, we are crushing the promise of future life from it.

To live, requires us to kill.  We cannot live on air.  What we can do, if we care, is to live with the concept of reciprocity in the way so eloquently outlined by Robin Wall Kimmerer in her book Braiding Sweetgrass and followed up again in her recent book The Serviceberry.  In it's most simplicity, it means that we acknowledge and give thanks to the life we have taken, animal or vegetable, and that we give back to the earth in some meaningful way for what we have taken.  Maybe we take some of the seeds and we nuture them to adult plants or maybe we purposely plant plants in a landscape where they can be allowed to mature to produce other offspring.  We can work to restore landscapes or maybe we could even write a blog......

Give thanks to all the life on this planet and treat it as sacred.