NY Times

In his new book, “Eating Animals” (Amazon.com:
http://snurl.com/EatAni ), the novelist Jonathan Safran
Foer describes his gradual transformation from omnivorous,
oblivious slacker who “waffled among any number of diets”
to “committed vegetarian.” Last month, Gary Steiner, a
philosopher at Bucknell University, argued on the Op-Ed
page of The New York Times http://snurl.com/ttw8w that
people should strive to be “strict ethical vegans” like
himself, avoiding all products derived from animals,
including wool and silk. Killing animals for human food and
finery is nothing less than “outright murder,” he said...

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...

Continued: http://snurl.com/ttw97