No sympathy for screaming veggies

It is not enough to worry about the economy, the political impact of Sarah Palin’s wink on the voting population of Nebraska, and the planet melting away under our feet. Now I am told that vegetable plants love life, feel pain and scream when they are torn from the ground to be eaten. Oy vey!

I get this from one Roy Mankovitz, who has more academic initials after his name than I have letters in mine. He wrote to me, I suppose, to prepare me for his soon-to-be-published book, “A Rocket Scientist’s Blueprint for Health.”

It presumably includes elements of a long e-mail he sent me that aims to educate animal rights advocates on the rights of vegetables. It was in response to a column I wrote about the excesses of those who use violence against humans in order to save America’s lab rats.

Before getting into his theories on screaming broccoli, Mankovitz points out that vegetarian activists willing to kill researchers on behalf of rodents ought to consider the mass harvesting of vegetable crops that kill millions of ground-living animals.

Composed in the vernacular of an outraged purist, he writes that we are probably unaware that the veggies we are eating “are likely to have been smeared with the guts of field mice, gophers, rabbits and prairie dogs done in by the machinery of the vegetable-making industry.”

In addition to the scum that spinach and carrots might bring to our dinner tables, there is the pain they endure before even making it to the produce stands. “Vegetables,” Mankovitz declares, “have emotions.”

This is something I would rather not think about, but the man persists: “It is well documented that plants produce electrical signals (perhaps analogous to screams) when they are cut, and if they survive they can even identify the human that did the cutting!”

It sounds vaguely like a Stephen King story in which an elderly widow named Edna Moses, who believes in God and the First Presbyterian Church and keeps a vegetable garden for the poor, is jerked from bed one night and horribly tortured and eaten by a band of eggplants while crowds of squash and rutabagas cheer.

I have heard theories similar to Mankovitz’s around our neighborhood, which is why you see a lot of garden-lovers who appear to be praying as they tend their flowers. What they’re doing is talking to their fuchsias and their night-blooming jasmine, urging them to be more beautiful than those of their neighbors. The effort, as I see it, is relatively harmless until they begin to believe that the fuchsias are answering back, in which case we’ve got full-blooming psychos puttering in our gardens.

My initial impression upon reading the e-mail sent by Mankovitz was that he was probably just another disoriented macrobiologist who got lost in the forest years ago while searching for nuts and berries and was only now finding his way home. But I have since learned that in no way is he a loony who has wandered out of the woods.

He actually was a rocket scientist at one time as well as a lawyer, inventor, entrepreneur and most recently a “health strategist,” which is someone who is looking for ways to help humans live longer. Toward that end, he is the director of an organization called Montecito Wellness near Santa Barbara, involved in illness prevention research.

Most people automatically mistrust anyone who knows words like “anthropocentrism” and “ethnobotany” and can actually include them in conversations. I have learned over the years, however, that they are simply more polished versions of you and me, except that they are tall and bald and dream in color. Many of the more esoteric among them are also known to be students of human levitation and believe in past life regression.

While researching Mankovitz’s claim, I came across a paper written by one Dr. Frank Dainello, a “vegetable specialist” at Texas A&M; University. He agrees with Mankovitz in many ways and adds in passing that “plants such as the tomato also have been known to abort their young.”

Then he saunters off into an arena of spiritualism by declaring that no one has ever been able to document the soul or conscience of a tomato.

This is a subject which, if pursued, could easily escalate into a Tomato v. Wade court case and result in prayers, condemnations, riots and shouts of “murderers” directed at those, such as my daughter in Sacramento, who grow and eat tomatoes.

So before the armies of pro-life veggie marchers hit the streets, I will simply thank Dr. Mankovitz and professor Dainello for their input and ask them politely to hereafter remain completely out of my life.

I have too much to worry about already. I’m not going to add screaming beans and aborting tomatoes to that list. I’ll leave that to God and the U.S. Supreme Court.

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