It’s been a heckuva snow job, but with winter finally making a break for it, it’s just about time to dig up some dirt.
To wit: I’m going to spill the beans on myself.
Indeed, I’ve often spilled a mess of beans into myself... but that, aside from being a de facto confession, as you soon shall see, is a whole other story.
Truth is, I’m a murderer. And I have waged my sins on my fellow sentient beings on a massive scale.
Don’t bother bringing out the hoes and forks to weed out the monster on the hill, though. You’re as guilty as I am – directly, if you’re a gardener, and by proxy if you’ve ever eaten a vegetable. The jury is still out on fruits.
We’ve long known that many plants can physically react to sunlight. The sunflower’s daily twisting and turning is an obvious testament to the enlightening truth of it.
But I’ve just read a research article that strongly suggests plants can see – that higher plants, like the ones that create a row in your vegetable garden, actually have “eyelike structures.”
(I’ve also just finished reading an abstract on how the right and left brain work together – or more precisely, against each other – to perceive and translate puns into understanding... which explains why, reading this, you might feel caught in the middle.)
Research is ongoing to determine how plants process what their eyes are telling them. The ramifications are earthshaking – particularly for many vegetarians who eschew chewing meat because they know animals think (some more than some of us, I submit), and they can’t countenance the thought of killing and devouring fellow sentient creatures, practices that some of them characterize as murder and cannibalism.
If the line of research continues where the researchers believe it’s taking them, it will prove beyond the doubt of a sunflower’s shadow that plants think. Vegans will be reduced to living on mushrooms.
Nobody is suggesting that even the brightest of flowers are thinking on the level of an Einstein... really, something more like a Trump. Indeed, calling the Americans’ 45th president a “pumpkin head” may prove to be more of an insult than anyone knew... and we should apologize to the pumpkins.
Otherwise, perhaps the pumpkins will rise up and declare that all pies are fake, and ban all boarders from having tarts over.