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If it's anybody who is being "smug" over this latest food safety issue, it's omnivores like Mr. Lehrer. Obviously you can screw up any kind of edible substance; anyone ever hear of polluted water?
And while Ms. Dudley kept on emphasizing over and over again that she wasn't saying that plants have "feelings" the way that human beings or other sentient animals do, Mr. Lehrer kept on insisting that vegetarians were being hyprocrites for ignoring the "pain" of the plants we eat.
Mr. Lehrer: read "The Omnivore's Dilemma" and stop playing your silly games.

Robert,

Just eat fruit. The plants want you to eat the fruit just as long as you "deposit" the seeds in the woods when you're done.

What failed to be mentioned during your segment is that plants do not have a central nervous system and therefore can not perceive pain.

Okay, no more broccoli rape, no more tomatoes, no more cabbage, no more lettuce, spinach, potatoes, zucchini, string beens, artichokes, etc., it's time to grind up rocks to eat; they do contain minerals after all!

The reponse to the (fair) question about why the gov't should get involved in tomato safety when the tomato industry has an incentive to keep the tomatoes safe is that consumers lack all the information necessary to decide if the tomato they're thinking of buying is indeed safe. The grocery shopper cannot run lab tests on the produce, after all, and it's probably unreasonable to expect the grocery store to inspect every tomato as well. So the only reasonable way the consumer would know that the tomato was unsafe that is also independent of the gov't would be to learn that someone else bought the tomato, ate it, and got sick (or died) from it.

So this line of thinking that industry "x" has an incentive to keep its products safe shouldn't lead one to conclude that the gov't should stay completely out of the safety and inspection business because only gov't can cull all the information that consumers need to know in order to make an informed choice on product safety.

If you want the gov't to stay out of the inspection business, then you're going to have to tolerate a few illnesses or deaths (!) from plane crashes, car crashes, food poisoning, et cetera, because only then would consumers find out that such-and-such product is not reasonably safe.

Plants with "mothers"???
This is blatant anthropomorphizing!

Also, this is actually giving humans too much credit -- humans don't always recognize their OWN kin! They rely on being told who's their kin. If we could recognize our kin without prior knowledge, we wouldn't need DNA tests!

So weeds are murderers...

this is amazing...i have always wondered about the social lives of plants, thank you!

Just out of curiosity - Brian - when you say "react accordingly", do you mean, like "run away"? "Yell at them"? :)

We need government to intervene/regulate because industry has one raison d'etre - making money. This ethic rides roughshod over anything professional, artisinal or expert - ask any doctor, farmer, scientist waht this climate thinks of what they do.

Beware the attack of the shower curtains!!

no new taxes! i want small government!!

Nobody could have predicted that an agency controlled by the Bush administration would fail to protect us from BLTs and shower curtains.

I saw someone "abusing" a tree a few days ago and I felt empathy for it wondering if, in fact, it could feel pain or acknowledge it was being treated badly. I wondered then, "Am I sick?" But I'm not a tree, I'm not a plant, a one time in history no one thought other animals had feelings and we were wrong. Maybe they do feel physically and emotionally.

every time a "black" human says something about the state of this 'dis-union' a "white" perceives this as some form of racism agenda when you look at it at the statements core it is just a retort of the racism of 'non-human' white agenda.... your pendant guess...