If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason.
—Jack Handey

A friend forwarded me a provocatively-titled article by Natalie Angier in the science section of The New York Times: Sorry, Vegans: Brussels Sprouts Like to Live, Too. The premise is that plants are sophisticated organisms with complex defense mechanisms, and therefore have as much of a right to life as any other organism.

But before we cede the entire moral penthouse to “committed vegetarians” and “strong ethical vegans,” we might consider that 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.

There’s some really interesting information about the defense mechanisms of some plants in the article, but they should have left the editorializing to the op-ed page. Angier may say that she does not mean to offer “a trite argument or a chuckled aside,” but that’s exactly how it comes off to vegans. This question has been posed many times online, usually facetiously and antagonistically, and most of us have heard it in person by at least a few people who think they’re being clever. Lots of reasonable responses have been written, too, but since it still comes up, I’ll add my own summary.

I don’t think most vegans think of plants as static or passive. It’s pretty obvious that they react to their environment, and if they didn’t have defense mechanisms, they wouldn’t have survived as species. That’s not the point. The concern is whether the plants perceive suffering. I’m not speaking for all vegans here, but in my opinion the only relevant question is whether eating a plant-based diet results in more or less overall suffering than one that contains animals.

The part that really bugs me, though, is the unstated conclusion that this line of argument usually implies: assuming that plants do suffer, that means that we can’t eat without causing suffering, so we might as well not worry about it. If vegans are still making plants suffer, then making animals suffer isn’t really any worse. Or, to put it another way, if you can’t be perfectly “good” by some ethical standard (don’t cause suffering) then you can arbitrarily redefine your ethical standards to validate whatever it is you’re already doing.

The key phrase is “whatever it is you’re already doing,” because most people who make this argument don’t really want to accept the logical conclusion of the idea that one form of suffering is just as significant as another, which would be complete nihilism. Why not eat humans, then? There’s another unstated assumption that humans get some untouchable moral status, but usually there’s no real rationale given for this. I think nihilism is a legitimate interpretation of the world, or at least a logically consistent one, but that’s not what most of the animal suffering apologists are promoting. They’re saying it’s OK to eat animals because eating either plants or animals might cause suffering, but it’s not OK to eat humans or intentionally cause other human suffering because… well, just because. It’s a lazy form of morality that amounts to “do what you’re taught” or even “do whatever serves you, if you can get away with conveniently.” To justify this against the case for veganism, you need to convince yourself that there is a fundamental flaw in vegan reasoning, so you argue a position that you don’t actually believe yourself: that vegans are committing an injustice by killing plants.

It’s a pretty easy argument to counter. The goal of veganism, at least in its utilitarian form, is not to be a perfect being that never does anything that causes suffering (which not even all plants can claim to be) but to make choices that try to minimize the amount of suffering caused. Even if plants are capable of suffering, a plant-based diet would result in less suffering for the simple reason that raising animals for food requires the consumption of far more plant food than feeding it to humans directly.

It’s a restaurant and travel guide for vegetarians and vegans. It’s not the first one, but it has some interesting innovations.

Many existing vegetarian restaurant guides are limited to a single geographical area. They may provide a lot of information for one city, but can be hard to discover if you’re not a local, and often go for comprehensive coverage of all of the veggie options available, rather than highlighting the best ones. Veg Table was launched as a global site from day one, with a focus on travelers that may only be in town for a few days, as well as long-term residents.

Existing sites also tend to focus exclusively on major cities. Of course, as most vegetarians are well aware, getting food in a big city isn’t usually that tough — it’s the smaller towns and less-cosmopolitan places that you need to worry about. While Veg Table does cover big cities, it also tries to recognize the spaces in between that we often find ourselves in.

My favorite feature is its set of “Airport Survival Guides”, a great idea that I’m surprised nobody’s thought of before. Airports can be one of the worst places to be stuck as a vegan — you can’t really leave, you’re completely unfamiliar with your options, the facility is usually too big to fully explore, and you often only have a short amount of time between flights. Being able to rely on the knowledge of people who have been through the airport before will be a big help.

Finally, many previous attempts at restaurant and travel guides, both for vegetarians and in general, suffer from out-of-date and incomplete information. Often the people in charge of the site simply can’t cover enough area to make it worthwhile. Veg Table, however, is based on a wiki, so any member of the site can contribute information, perhaps about a city that they live in or recently visited, an update to a restaurant listing, or just a brief comment on one of the pages about their experience at a particular place. This removes the bottleneck of having all of the updates have to come from a single person or organization, and will help fill in a lot of areas that have gone neglected on other sites.

So, if you’re vegan, vegetarian, a fan of herbivorous cooking, or just curious, please sign up and feel free to start contributing.