Fair Deal Food?

When people talk about such things as "Fair Trade" coffee, we mean we are giving the coffee farmers a relatively more fair part of the total coffee dollar. The interests of the coffee plants of course don't enter into it. Typical of the usual human preoccupation with self, while some nice folks might be concerned about the conditions of humans in places where coffee or bananas or other commodities are grown, almost none of them think about the lives of the plants without which there would be no commodity at all.

I am going to put forth the scandalous idea that the interests of the plants should be our concern. That fundamental to the relationship we have with the plants that provide our food should be equity. They get a fair deal: we get a fair deal. In other words, I am suggesting treating plants as beings of ethical significance.

Now you may be thinking, "How is that possible, we have to eat plants (and animals) to live?" Firstly I have to say that if you need to eat anything to survive, you can certainly be excused for doing it. If you are in a situation where you need to eat people to survive, you should eat people. Preferably already dead, but if your choice is between starving to death and bonking your neighbor on the head and eating his liver, I am not going to judge. The key idea here is avoiding getting into such a situation to begin with. We can arrange our relationships with food plants so as to treat them properly as partners, not just prey.

And in fact there are a great many plants where we don't have to kill the plants to eat from them. Pluck a leaf off a spinach plant, the plant will probably manage to keep going just fine. The same with loose lettuces and many other vegetables. We don't eat tomato plants for instance, we eat tomatoes, their fruit. We don't eat squash plants, we eat squash. We don't generally eat corn stalks, we eat corn. Potatoes can be harvested long after the plants themselves are dead. In some cases, we might be killing them at the end of their lives when they are dying anyway, such as would be the case with peanut plants, where the sign that they are ready for harvest is that the plants start dying. I certainly don't think that prolonging their death is doing the plant any particular favors.

However, plants live by very different rules than ours, and one of those rules is that they almost always spam tons of seeds into the environment in order to reproduce, and the survival of all those seeds under most circumstances is a physical impossibility. It is as if we had to birth a million babies to get one human adult. It is not important, or possible, for all those seeds to survive but only that the plants reproduce into the next generation somehow, by those few seeds that either by random chance or human care survive to reproduce. Eating seeds then is fair game as long as some are planted to continue their parents' genetics, because the vast majority of seeds would never turn into adult plants.

What are the interests of plants? They want a rich soil, enough sun, assistance when they are under attack from bugs or herbivores or other environmental hazards, and to have a chance to reproduce. In return for our assistance in both nurturing the plants and ensuring a future for their progeny, we eat parts of the plant or the seeds or fruit. This mutual assistance is in fact what we were evolved to do: whether you accept it or not, we were in a sense designed to service plants. Why do we have color vision and opposable thumbs? So that we can see the color change when fruit is ripe and grasp it, and so spread the seeds of the fruit trees in our dung. Why do we have bipedal stance? So we can see over the grass to hunt herbivores which eat grass. Our move from a fruit-eating way of life to a hunting way of life meant a move to the grasslands, and we tamed fire and intentionally used fires to expand the realms of our grassy friends at the expense of trees. This was the beginning of a long and intimate relationship between humans and the grasses which has resulted in the reality that today the vast majority of all human calories consumed comes from grasses or the seeds of grasses. You evolved to work for the plants, and they evolved to help you do it. Plants formed us even more than we formed them. And they are not insensate beings, just very different beings from us.

There are some plants that we probably can't grow if we want to treat them ethically in this sense. Radishes and beets come to mind, since they involve harvesting the whole healthy plant, killing the plant at a time when it would not otherwise be dying. Most vegetables where the leaves are harvested can be harvested ethically if you do not harvest the whole plant but only a few leaves from each plant at a time. I know this is an alien viewpoint in a lot of ways, to take plants seriously as living things, but as far as I am aware there is no reason why one would ever have to kill healthy plants in order to have a full and nutritionally varied diet. My own belief is that the plants will understand your benevolence and respond accordingly.

So this is the essence of what I am saying, and I will grant you that it is an approach informed by my own particular spiritual beliefs. Treat the plants in your garden, and the beneficial insects that patrol them, as partners with you in a fair and mutually beneficial relationship. One in which you are not putting yourself above the plants but serving them just as much as you expect to be served yourself. I am growing my first garden this year so we will see if this approach bears fruit, but I believe it is the right approach ethically and also practically in many ways. 

Now one might think that it is impossible to have this sort of relationship with animals, the raising of any of which entails the deaths of some of them in order for us to benefit. I think that for the most part this is the case. There are however other considerations involving the larger ecosystem of which we are all a part. Some wild animals wreak great destruction in the environment, such as feral pigs and perhaps to a lesser extent deer, so I would say that hunting those animals where they are overpopulated is entirely fair game. Moreover, by hunting wild animals we are not adversely impacting their lives prior to their deaths: while they live they live entirely free. If rabbits start nomming on your garden vegetables, they are totally fair game and in fact if you depend on farming or gardening for some part of your food or income, eliminating them might be the only way to actually stop them from destroying your livelihood. Thus hunting can not only be helpful to the environment, but might actually be the only way you can keep the critters from eating you out of house and home. 

Feral Hogs: Almost As Bad As Humans

According to this rationale though, we should all be hunting humans, since they are the most damaging creature that exists. The personal consequences of that can be pretty harsh however, so I can't recommend it. ;)

Am I living completely in accordance with this Fair Deal Food viewpoint? Nope, because I don't have enough land to provide for my own food needs directly. This is however something I do wish to do as soon as I am able. As far as my limited garden goes however, I am attempting to abide by it. My spinach plants will not be inhibited from going to seed, they will only have leaves harvested from them, not the whole plant.  Same with my herbs. I am also growing corn, beans, squash, melons, cucumbers, sunflowers, various herbs, tomatoes and strawberries, none of which should require me to kill the plant in order to eat. I realize that to many people what I am saying sounds insane, but I would say that a sane man often sounds insane to an insane world. 

I also realize that almost no one will hear what I am saying here, but that ought not to keep me from saying it. I feel almost obligated by the kinship I feel with plants to say it. Plants are my teachers and my friends, as well as the means of continued existence for all animal life on this planet. They could get along fine without us. We would all die without them.