"Is the wonderful scent of a fresh cut lawn the odor of plant genocide?" No, Michael Pollan assures us, pain would serve no useful purpose in the plant world, as there would be no way for plants to escape it, no way to remove their "hand" from a hot stove.
As to how they feel about us eating them, Pollan is less reassuring. He does point out that fruits, at least, are designed by the plants specifically to be eaten, to disperse their seeds.
I was affected by the resurgence of the natural health movement in the 1970s. Liberation from the normative structures of power (so much in style today) involves, then and now, not getting so sick that you need Big Medicine and Big Pharma.
Regarding naturism, back in the 70s (perhaps intuiting sentient plants), some health food fanatics went beyond vegetarianism to fruitarianism. The motivating factor, however, was not plants' rights. It was that cooked foods were thought to create acidity in the human body, which itself produces harmful, disease-causing mucous. The most vocal advocate of the only-ever tiny fruitarian movement was a man who called himself Johnny Lovewisdom.
A fruit-only diet requires a climate where you do not have to worry about staying warm. Johnny found his in a Peruvian Amazon commune he started, in addition to which he founded the International University of Natural Living and authored over 100 books focusing on fruitarianism, hygiene, and mystical Christianity.
The last I heard, also back in the 70s, was that Mr. Lovewisdom was denounced by some of his followers for eating cooked foods and even ("very, very acidic") meat; better to have tried and failed than never to have tried at all.
For seven years I dated a raw food fanatic, who existed, enjoying vibrant health, principally on a delicious pate of almond butter, frozen spinach, onion and cayenne pepper, that she made in a food processor. (Man, was that spicey... her and it.) I still start my day raw, with a first course of fruit and what the New York Times recently showcased in a recipe column as "Overnight Oats": My ex-wife wrote, "Look, the New York Times has published your breakfast!"
I eat a lot of fruit: ¡Viva México! In addition to apples and bananas (ingredients in my breakfast oats) my kitchen at the moment contains plums, pineapple, mango (no, I finished the mango yesterday), cantaloupe, papaya and watermelon. And then there is the dried fruit: dates, figs, kiwi... (Yes, there is a lot of sugar. But the secret to that, as with all sweets, is to eat slowly, to allow you insulin to do its work.)
Eating all that fruit there are a lot of skins, peels, rinds and seeds (sorry, plants) left over. These, along with all my other kitchen scraps (the pulp from my daily 12-ounce glass of carrot, cucumber, beet, ginger juice greatly adding to the whole), I feed to the earthworms who live in five five-gallon pails on my front patio under the lemon tree and now the two papaya trees that have grown from seeds rinsed out of my compost bucket, like they did at my last residence. And those little wriggling darlings turn it all into wondrously rich soil.
All of this fruit does attract fruit flies, especially as I have no screens on my windows. However, these are few as long as I am diligent about cleaning up after myself. Even so, the fact that I am feeding rotting vegetable matter (it decomposes in the bucket while waiting to be fed to them) to earthworms in my front yard does not help in the total elimination of those pests.
When there are many, I trap them inside a plastic bag using as lure a choice morsel of decomposing fruit. Few or many (tomatoes go bad), when they present themselves, flying around the kitchen, I hunt them individually, trying to clap them between my hands. Wet hands work best, because even if they survive the clap in the hollow between my palms, they get stuck in the wetness.
The other day, I saw out of the corner of my eye what I thought was one mid-flight. Turning, prepared to clap, I observed that, in fact, the movement had been outside my window, that of a bird flying across my back yard. Literary as I am, my mistake reminded me of one in an Edgar Allen Poe short story, The Sphinx. Spoiler alert:
