A philosophical Planty blog conundrum: So the other day I was having this moral dilemma in my head and this realization occurred to me… Has anyone ever seen the old 1970s movie called The Secret Life of Plants, about plants and the study where they attach plants to electrical meters similar to ones you would put on a human for brain waves, with energetic response, to see if plants had “feelings”. Well, if you have seen it, you'll remember that they performed some interesting experiments and that they found the plants had wild electro responses to individual human beings. The video showed a person hacking up a head of cabbage into pieces right next to the plant hooked up to a meter and then left and came back the next day. As soon as that person walked into the room, that plant that was still hooked up started to freak out electromagnetically. It somehow remembered which human was caring for it, and which human was a danger to it. Amazing movie. Who knows how real the “science” really was, but super fascinating none-the-less. I also watched a recent YouTube video called “Can This Plant /Actually/ See?” about a study they did on plants that shows a particular variety of plant that can shape-shift due to being able to see! They theorize about if plants can therefore see US! 😮 Pretty fascinating sciency video! Highly recommend watching if you want your mind 🤯! Anyways, this got me thinking… I have somehow acquired over 250 houseplants over the last few years, and have grown quite attached to most of them to the point where I set aside a lot of other things that I could be doing in my life, but I don't do them because I put my plants first as if they were my children. I know they are just plants, but since they are living beings, I know that if I don't water them and care for them, they will suffer and possibly die. I can't allow myself as a good plant parent to allow that to happen, so I choose to prioritize them first above a lot of other things. So the other day I was making a salad for dinner and it dawned on me that I wonder if my house plants got upset by watching me eat salad… 🤔😝 I then had this moment when I was researching a particular house plant of mine and it stated that the leaves were actually edible! I thought “oh my gosh, that's crazy, I would never chop up my house plant leaves and eat them!” Ha ha, hilarious given that I was just sitting there eating a salad, not quite connecting the fact that my house plants and plants we grow for food are really no different. Other than the fact that we put them on different pedestals, and one we keep for visual esthetics versus the other, we grow for sustenance. It was pretty funny in my mind when I realize this, because throughout my life, I have vacillated between being a vegetarian, pescatarian, vegan and carnivore. Currently, I found a good balance of nothing super strict or “everything in moderation”, about 80% vegetarian 10% pescatarian 5%, vegan and 5% carnivore. So this whole thought process about eating my house plants made me think about how we all put so much energy and care and love into our house plants, so much so that for a moment I questioned, “Is it any different than having a pet animal of some kind and then eating it?” My friends have chickens, and one of them got injured by a wild animal and they had to euthanize it so it wouldn't suffer and I asked them if they were going to eat it and they said, “no way, we are so attached to that chicken, she turned into our pet… we just can't bring our selves to do it!” Even though that's why they got the chickens in the first place was to eat the eggs, etc. etc. So there seems to be this thing that happens when any living thing becomes your pet, that like you can no longer eat them and I'm like, “well am I going to starve because I can't eat vegetables or salad anymore on top of other things i won’t eat?!” 😂 Yeah, so the Plant mom struggle has gotten to a whole new level of real. Then I ate my salad. 🤣
