If plants have rights, what is a vegan to do?

Is this where a consideration of plant ontology and personhood leads us? We have to eat something, so the best response is to be as aware as we can when we decide what to eat, including when we decide to eat animals.

I like Michael Marder's answer to the question. Eat plants, as you must, but do so in a way that entwines your life with theirs as much as possible, so that when you eat them, you do so mindfully, fully aware of what you are eating and what impacts your choice has on all entities concerned.

He recommends eating rhizomatically, a term that has received a great deal of attention in academia over the past twenty years or so, especially from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Their emphasis seems to be on the capacity of plants to reproduce asexually by sending out roots and shoots in various directions, while Marder seems most interested in the ability of these growths to engage everything in their proximity: soil, water, stones, and other plants, for example. For both Deleuze and Guattari and Marder, plants are the great translators or the world, a capacity that is made possible or enhanced by their ontology that is neither that of habitat nor habitant, but existing somewhere in between, or simultaneously in, these two realms. In addition, plants perform the great act of translation, in the sense that Michel Serres uses it when discussing parasites, when converting sunlight into chemical energy that fuels their cellular growth, the single most important process that occurs in our environment.

Let me give you a live example. In the garden of the house where I live, under the soil, exists a root that is the diameter of a coffee can and ten or twenty meters long. It might lie in a more or less single line but I suspect that it is in fact a system of branching roots of a more complex configuration. It used to be attached to a tree that was a good fifteen to twenty meters tall that stood at the back of the property. When that fell over one day several years ago, I had someone come in, cut it up, and haul it away.

I thought I was done with bay laurels at that point - sadly, because I liked them. It was tall and leafy, and the leaves were of a pleasant shade of green, abundant, and nicely shaped, as was the tree itself. Little did I understand at the time that the tree was only a product of the root, that the plant, the real plant in a sense, was what was underground. The enormous tree that had fallen down was merely an offshoot, something that was secondary to the root itself.

Over the past decade, the root has sent up a constant line of replacements, popping up sometimes in the yard in front of the house, in the middle of a concrete planter, sometimes on the side of the house, just in front of a dining room window. Each time one pops up, I take it down, fearing that if I leave it alone, a manageable sapling will become a giant tree in a few years, in a place where the property just cannot accommodate it.

I remember returning home one evening to find that a six-foot tree had sprouted, seemingly overnight, just to the right of the steps leading to my front door. As busy and stressed as I was at that time, I simply reached out, grabbed the tree by its trunk, and yanked it out as if it were a stalk of corn. I was surprised how easily I was able to do it. Others have proven to be much hardier, requiring digging and chopping to extract them from the soil. But no matter how thorough my local interventions have been, the root itself never dies.

While doing work in the garden that required digging a hole about two feet deep, I actually came across the root itself. I dug around it to see if I could eventually free it from the soil. My ax merely bounced off of it, as if it were made of a particularly hard and resilient type of rubber. I put an iron bar under it and tried to pry it out, encouraged by my success with the one sapling, but I might as well have been trying to lift a car by its bumper, and even that comparison does not do justice to the force with which this plant clung to its place in the earth. In fact, and here is where rhizome-as-translator becomes clear, I could not tell where the root ended and the soil began, so entwined were the main root and its countless subroots in the surrounding medium.

So what does all of this have to do with eating? Bay laurels are not edible, at least not by human beings, so we should be thankful for the relative hand full of plants that are, particularly because in addition to being edible they are also easily domesticated. The rhizomatic ontology of some plants is so different from human experience as to seem alien. So it is by recognizing this difference that we come to respect plants, as Peter Singer says of animals, 'as strange people'. They are like us in some ways (more on that later) but also unlike us in other ways, and it is this unlikeness that makes them such precious parts of the world in which we live.

So when we eat plants, we are sustaining ourselves with a life form that is so vastly superior to us in so many ways that we should find the act humbling, and it is this humility that should supply the prevailing tenor to our understanding of who we are in the grand system of life on Earth.