“No chowder for you, cause clams have feelings too
Actually, they don’t have central nervousness
No Manhattan style, clams have the right to smile
Come to think about it they don’t have a face
They have no face, no place for ears
There’s no clam eyes to cry clam tears
No spinal cord, they must get bored
Might as well just put ’em out of misery”
—NOFX, “Clams Have Feelings Too”
Vegans have been abusing innocent tomatoes for so long, yet we’ve only just discovered how the plants that suffer at these moral degenerates’ hands express their suffering.
Via American Association for the Advancement of Science (emphasis added):
What does a stressed plant sound like? A bit like bubble-wrap being popped. Researchers in Israel report in the journal Cell on March 30 that tomato and tobacco plants that are stressed—from dehydration or having their stems severed—emit sounds that are comparable in volume to normal human conversation. The frequency of these noises is too high for our ears to detect, but they can probably be heard by insects, other mammals, and possibly other plants.
“Even in a quiet field, there are actually sounds that we don’t hear, and those sounds carry information,” says senior author Lilach Hadany, an evolutionary biologist and theoretician at Tel Aviv University. “There are animals that can hear these sounds, so there is the possibility that a lot of acoustic interaction is occurring…”
The team found that stressed plants emit more sounds than unstressed plants. The plant sounds resemble pops or clicks, and a single stressed plant emits around 30–50 of these clicks per hour at seemingly random intervals, but unstressed plants emit far fewer sounds. “When tomatoes are not stressed at all, they are very quiet,” says [volutionary biologist and theoretician at Tel Aviv University] Hadany.
The next time you sit down for a meal with a vegan activist, assuming you have the poor fortune to have vegan social acquaintances, and he smugly dives headfirst into a salad full of ripe, juicy tomatoes, remind him of the absolute suffering that his delicious tomatoes cost.
The tomatoes popping their sweet juice between his molars, remind him that the appendages of a living plant that died screaming to toss his precious salad were ripped unceremoniously from their plant’s embrace, tortured, and killed for his personal satisfaction.
At the very least, it will make good dinner conversation as you watch him squirm trying to excuse his own tomato sadism while still condemning you for your steak habit. Put them on the defense for a change.
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