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Healthy Home Economist / Archives / Healthy Living / Plants Hear Themselves Being Eaten, React Defensively

Plants Hear Themselves Being Eaten, React Defensively

by Sarah Pope / Affiliate Links ✔

plants hear themselves being eaten

Writer, philosopher, and lecturer Joseph Campbell once famously joked that “a vegetarian is just a person who can’t hear a carrot scream.”

Campbell, who died in 1987, will never know how close to the truth he really was!

Research from the University of Missouri-Columbia has found via audio and chemical analysis that plants hear and actually respond to the sound of caterpillars munching their leaves.  Even more shocking, these same plants react to the munching sounds with built-in, biological defense mechanisms.

Heidi Appel, senior research scientist with the Division of Plant Sciences at Missouri-Columbia said, “We found that feeding vibrations signal changes in the plant cells’ metabolism, creating more defensive chemicals that can repel attacks from caterpillars.”

The researchers tested various sounds like gentle wind and the buzzing of nearby insects and compared this with the sound of caterpillars chewing leaves.  The surprising conclusion is that plants do indeed distinguish threatening from nonthreatening sounds and defend themselves accordingly by producing more mustard oils, which repel many species of caterpillar.

While this research likely won’t convince those that eschew meat that their way of eating is not really any sort of moral high ground (it certainly bequeaths no health benefit), it might give a few reason to pause.

At least meat generally tends to be already dead before you eat it.  When you eat a salad, the poor plants are still alive and know exactly the torture that is being inflicted upon them!

Bring on the bacon!

 

Sources and More Information

Most Vegetarians Return to Eating Meat

Vegetarians Have More Tooth Decay

Sorry Vegetarians, Plants Know When They are Being Eaten Too

Plants Know When They are Being Eaten

Picture Credit

 

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Category: Healthy Living
Sarah Pope

Sarah Pope MGA has been a Health and Nutrition Educator since 2002. She is a summa cum laude graduate in Economics from Furman University and holds a Master’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania.

She is the author of three books: the bestseller Get Your Fats Straight, Traditional Remedies for Modern Families, and Living Green in an Artificial World.

Her four eBooks Good Diet…Bad Diet, Real Food Fermentation, Ketonomics, and Ancestrally Inspired Dairy-Free Recipes are available for complimentary download via Healthy Home Plus.

Her mission is dedicated to helping families effectively incorporate the principles of ancestral diets within the modern household. She is a sought after lecturer around the world for conferences, summits, and podcasts.

Sarah was awarded Activist of the Year in 2010 at the International Wise Traditions Conference, subsequently serving on the Board of Directors of the nutrition nonprofit the Weston A. Price Foundation for seven years.

Her work has been covered by numerous independent and major media including USA Today, ABC, and NBC among many others.

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Reader Interactions

Comments (20)

  1. Pete

    Sep 9, 2014 at 10:31 am

    Man, people will say about anything to justify their meat eating!

    Reply
  2. Alexandra Kananis via Facebook

    Sep 6, 2014 at 8:47 pm

    Everything is alive! We’re all connected, we need life to sustain life!

    Reply
  3. Justin from Extreme Health Radio

    Sep 6, 2014 at 3:04 am

    Wow this is the kind of stuff that really gets me excited. It means so much! What if seemingly inanimate objects like wood, furniture etc is also somehow “conscious”? Life is truly amazing!

    Reply
  4. Pamela Duke-Goussy via Facebook

    Sep 5, 2014 at 7:52 pm

    Those cruel vegetarians, ignoring the cries of agony. Poor, poor veggies!!

    Reply
  5. Melanie H Charron via Facebook

    Sep 5, 2014 at 7:38 pm

    Thank God there’s still water. I bet the rocks would cry, too …. sigh….

    Reply
  6. Judy Simon via Facebook

    Sep 5, 2014 at 2:41 pm

    There is a documentary about it on Netflix…it was very fascinating!

    Reply
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