Take, Eat...

Yes, the dominant culture really does turn the living world into dead things.

And yes, I eat living things, too.

But there is, you know, a difference between a living being eating other living beings as part of being a living being, and a culture taking living beings and turning them into dead objects for nothing more essential than bodily adornment, or a means of getting somewhere really fast, or plastic goodies to keep cutlery in.

And, in that vein, I really don't care very much what another living being eats to sustain hir status as a living being, as long as that's what the eating is for, and not to address some shadow issue s/he had with hir parents twenty years ago.

And so, considering the pie-ing of Lierre Keith by a bunch of vegans, apparently in a fit of revenge for her having written  The Vegetarian Myth , last year at an Anarchist Book Fair, I am deeply saddened to have come across this website.

Not because it critises Lierre's book - that's a legitimate part of open and honest dialogue - but because of some of the stances it takes on the plant realm.

In the section Plant Sentience we read that "While it is true that plants have fascinating, complex stimulus feedback systems, modern science knows that these are not sufficient to give rise to consciousness.."  That makes me very, very sad, as you can imagine if you've been following along in my plant communication series.
 
Even if you haven't been following my particular adventures, how hard is it to accept that the whole darned world is engaged in sacred communion with itself - eating and being eaten, killing and dying, absorbing food and being food?

This arbitrary drawing of a line in the sand, and declaring one side of it to be populated by conscious beings, and the other not, is appropriate only to the science of the Wetiko culture - which sees life not as a self-sustaining web, circle or sphere, but as a domain to be dominated and dissected, and turned into gold and diamond rings and toy guns for little boys.