When I heard on the news that President Trump was going to pardon “peas” and “carrots” for Thanksgiving, given our surreal historical moment, I thought, “It has finally come to this!”
After all, the concept of “plant rights” is a real thing. Not long ago the New York Times published a piece — by a PhD. no less — arguing seriously that peas are persons, too. From the article “If Peas can Talk, Should We Eat Them?” by Michael Marder:
When it comes to a plant, it turns out to be not only a what but also a who — an agent in its milieu, with its own intrinsic value or version of the good. Inquiring into justifications for consuming vegetal beings thus reconceived, we reach one of the final frontiers of dietary ethics.
Marder argued that we should not eat peas and instead reserve our plant eating for perennials:
The “renewable” aspects of perennial plants may be accepted by humans as a gift of vegetal being and integrated into their diets. But it would be harder to justify the cultivation of peas and other annual plants, the entire being of which humans devote to externally imposed ends.
No, it wasn’t satire. Marder even wrote a book on the subject.
As I continued to ponder the pardoning of “peas” and “carrots,” I recalled that Switzerland’s government granted intrinsic dignity to individual plants and then assigned a big-brained bioethics committee to figure out why they were right to do it. The report, entitled, “Dignity of Living Beings with Regard to Plants,” concluded that it is morally wrong to “decapitate a wildflower” and, among other reasons, that plants deserve individual dignity because:
A further group felt that there were particular situations in which people should refrain from something for the sake of a plant, unless there are sufficient grounds to the contrary. This opinion was justified either by arguing that plants strive after something, which should not be blocked without good reason, or that recent findings in natural science, such as the many commonalities between plants, animals and humans at molecular and cellular level, remove the reasons for excluding plants in principle from the moral community.
In other words, we are made of carbon molecules and so are plants, hence they — like us — have individual dignity. Well, then, why not pardon peas and carrots?
I was going to next describe how a New York Times science writer Natalie Angier once explained to readers that plants are the most ethical life form. But then I found out that the president isn’t actually pardoning peas and carrots, but rather Peas and Carrots, two turkeys that will now spend the rest of their lives in a petting zoo instead of stuffed and roasted for the feast table.
Phew. We have not (yet) completely lost our minds.
But, Wesley! PETA believes that our Thanksgiving turkey repast is akin to genocide.
Yes, I know. But let’s not go there now. Each day has enough trouble of its own.
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!