Are vegans cruel to veggies?

My 21-year-old son Jamie told me the other day his friend Naas says he feels sorry for him because we don’t eat meat in our household. Naas also muttered darkly that “vegans kill plants, you know”.

Jamie, whose girlfriend is vegan, by the way, tells me he’s fine with our dietary arrangements at home. He says he knows there’s something odd about Naas’s killer-vegan comments but says he doesn’t know quite how to respond.

I confess that statements about vegans harming plants tend to stump me because they’re just so clearly motivated by the not-so-hidden agenda of making plant-eating out to be as violent and destructive as meat-eating.

Luckily for me, I had a chance recently to chat to a fellow vegan from Pretoria, Melissa Erasmus, whose views on the subject are pure and simple common sense.

First of all, she pointed out, plants would not survive if animals, insects and people (to a much lesser extent given our sewage systems and fondness for processed food) didn’t eat them.

Their seeds are spread far and wide after passing through the digestive tracts of, say, a deer or an elephant, enabling the plants to grow and flourish in new places.

What's more, eating plants may entail plucking, pruning or trimming but does not actually entail killing them.

Did that orange die for me?

Hmmm. I put this idea to the test by running through what I’d eaten that day: a couple of oranges and an apple (picked from presumably still-living trees), almonds (ditto), some sweet corn, beans, and spinach (the ear, pod and leaves of each)...

Then there were those carrots and potatoes… Hold it! Didn’t they have to die, cruelly ripped from the ground, roots and all, for me?

If something is dead, it doesn’t grow again, does it? Stick a carrot top in some soil and water it, and it’ll grow. I tried it once and it worked. The same goes with the eyes of potatoes and parts of other root vegetables. Put ‘em in the earth and they’ll grow (unless you cook them, of course).

Now try that with any body part of an animal. Whether it’s a hoof or a horn or the hide, flesh or bone, cooked or raw, it will not grow no matter how hard you try.

Look, it does worry me that modern commercial veggie farming is so destructive to small animals and insects and it’s high time I used my spacious garden to grow my own.

But it’s just not true that eating animals is somehow the same as eating plants.

As Melissa so neatly put it that day of our conversation: “If you trim a plant, it thrives. If you cut off a pig’s legs, the pig will not thrive.”

I’m ready for you, Naas.