Did you know that according to the Swiss Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology, plants have basic rights?

I didn’t. And a piece in The Guardian and a BBC radio program, they have a point. Many scientists are arguing that plants are intelligent, may have emotions, and at least some philosophers believe that they have rights and are in a sense “people.”

So what are we supposed to eat? We can’t eat meat because doing so is cruel and unethical, and now killing plants is a bad thing. Even picking flowers unnecessarily hurts plants, so eating the poor things creates an ethical quandary.

If you were starting to polish your Veganuary halo, sorry, I have upsetting news, gleaned from a Radio 4 programme called Is Eating Plants Wrong?. Spoiler alert: maybe.

Plants, it explained, “can sense the world around them, learn, remember and engage in complex communication with the species around them”. Research suggests that pea seedlings can learn to associate a sound with the light they need and choose to grow in a particular direction as a result. They can also eavesdrop on each other and protect themselves based on what they “hear”. Sagebrush plants communicate to each other the risk of being chomped by insects and trees share nutrients through what Prof Suzanne Simard pleasingly calls the “wood wide web”; they do so more with trees they are related to than with “strangers”.

I have to admit, the science behind these assertions is fascinating, reminding me in a way of Nietzsche’s theory that the guiding principle of the universe is the Will to Power, or as a friend of mine in college argued, a “will to flower.” Nietzsche argued that there was an underlying principle to all things that impelled it to expand and master its environment, and that you see this at work in all living things. Clearly this “will to flower” manifests in plants as well as animals.

Just watch kudzu at work in the spring and summer. It will strangle anything around it in an effort to take over the world. The Will to Power is more than a survival instinct; it is what makes beings reshape their environment and strive to master it.

Well new discoveries indicate that plants “communicate” with each other. If not exactly like Ents, then in a something of a network that enables “decisions” to be made in order to thrive. Something more, it seems, than a simple stimulus/response by individual organisms. Some scientists see this as genuine communication, others as just the natural product of evolution.

Of course the same could be said of chimpanzees or humans, where brainpower is related to survival.

Do plants show intelligence? “Definitely, yes – I don’t see any problem with this,” replied one interviewee on the programme, putting me off my baked potato and raising fears about what the houseplants my son unwisely left in my care are saying about me behind my back.

It is a head-spinning indication of how much we still have to learn about the world. The really knotty question, though, is what is left for a would-be ethical eater’s lunch? Ethical fruitarianism – eating only the parts of plants that detach harmlessly, causing no damage – might meet the standards of the Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology (which has ruled that plants have the right to be protected from undue harm).

But what could we eat in the UK at this time of year under that regime: nuts? Wouldn’t we be depriving squirrels? Lab-created meat is still at the experimental stage and costs more than a Salt Bae gold-sprinkled steak, but is roadkill allowed? I would say breatharianism – only “eating” air – is due a revival, but it is mad, dangerous and probably a cult, so no. Alternatively, we could fly in the face of decades of medical advice and stick to stuff with no discernible relationship to anything living: the Irn-Bru diet?

My last option: learn to photosynthesise. If they are so clever, perhaps plants can teach us.

Now obviously for the Guardian columnist Emma Beddington the concern for eating plants is a bit tongue in cheek; at least I hope so. But not so much for some ethicists and philosophers, as was made clear in the BBC program. The issue of the ethics of eating plants came up at 27:25 in the podcast of the show, and a Spanish philosopher discussed the ethical problem of eating plants.

Perhaps, it is suggested, than it is more ethical to only take the less vital parts of plants such as fruit (which do fall off, although is taking them a form of abortion?), nuts, or leaves?

In explaining the Swiss determination that plants should be afforded dignity and some rights, Florianne Koechlin wrote:

Philosophers and experts on ethics, but also molecular biologists and scientists, sit in the ECNH. We have tried to work out the ethical basis for attributing dignity to plants. Many questions were controversial, but in one there was agreement: plants should not be treated in a completely arbitrary way. Plants are living beings and must be respected for their own sake. Arbitary injury or destruction of plants is not permissible. The Committee could not agree on the meaning of ‘arbitrary.’ For some, this was the senseless picking of roadside flowers, for others—I among them—the massive and total instrumentalisation and industrialisation of plants. In my view, the ‘terminator’ technology (GURT technologies) and other methods to produce sterility with the exclusive goal of making plants available for the maximizing of economic profit of humans, as well as the patenting of plants, violate their dignity.

What to say? It is easy to argue the absurdity of the position, but making fun of a proposition is not the same thing as disproving the thought.

Which gets me back to that point about Nietzsche and why I thought about his philosophical musings upon reading and listening to the arguments.

One of Nietzsche’s metaphor for the struggle of life was the rain forest, which is not only fecund, but mind-bogglingly violent and competitive. About 80% of the world’s documented species live in the rain forests, and there is nothing empathetic about their relationships to each other. It is “nature tooth and claw,” but the competition is between species of plants as well.

In other words, nature is not especially concerned with the ethics of killing and eating things. Ask a Venus Fly Trap or any of the over 600 species of carnivorous plants, not to mention all the animals eating each other. If eating plants and animals is murder, then the foundation of all life is murder. Only the most basic beings live entirely off inanimate chemicals and light. Should we worship their ethical purity?

We needn’t embrace wanton destruction to accept the inevitability that living involves killing, and we simply can’t avoid killing if we want to survive as individuals or a species.

Can you tell I studied philosophy in my youth? Perhaps the proper response to all this speculation is simply to utter “bovine excrement,” since you will arrive at the same conclusion I did after 1200 words and a couple hours thinking and reading about this.

But occasionally it makes sense to step back and ask “why, exactly, do I think this?” Just as thinking too deeply about some things can turn the simple into the complex, thinking too shallowly can make you dogmatic and shallow.

At least that is my justification for wasting time on this question.