Calling it racism kind of downplays the massive amount of genocide associated with actual racism.

What you explained is more like nepotism, which is rampant among the animal kingdom and beyond.

I just want to know how trees have any kind of bias that isn’t directly related to their needs for survival and growth.

I know, right? I really liked him until I ended up working at the institute where he regularly interfaced to get some of his ideas. I knew the guy who was the basis for the character of Ian Malcolm - Jeff Goldblum’s character. He was an economist rather than a biologist, but the cool thing is that if you’re working in complex systems theory it doesn’t really matter.

Anyway, I think the book that turned me off was called Prey. It was something about nanotechnology and complex systems. It was just so completely wrong in every scientific detail that it was jarring. I could deal with the suspension of disbelief for things like Jurassic Park, but the grey goo stuff was just so far outside of established science that it made me look at all of his other writings.

I can still enjoy some of his works and some of the films made from them, but there’s always this aftertaste like I’m enjoying something from L Ron Hubbard, you know?

There’s a type of vegetarianism/veganism that only eats plants that “want” to be eaten. Specifically, many plants produce fruits that hold seeds. They make the fruits bright and tasty (which tbh usually means “sweet” but you get the point) so that animals will come along and eat them.

Plants have a problem. They can t walk. That means that any of their offspring are going to grow up right next to them, competing with them for resources. There’s a lot of different ways of dealing with this phenomenon, but one common way is for the plant to bribe an animal to move its seeds further away by wrapping it in something delicious. This is what happens with plants that depend on pollinators like bees - which give pollen to get more mobile organisms to move their genes over there somewhere) and with ones who produce seeded fruits and berries which will pass through an animal’s digestive tract relatively unscathed and wind up in a nutrient rich environment far from itself. There’s also wind-based pollination and different lifecycles and so on, but the point is that being eaten is the entire point of producing fruit - for the most part.

Anyway, that class of people are called “fructarians.” It’s not actually a super healthy diet for a human and I do not recommend it. They intentionally steer away from plants like carrots because you can’t eat a carrot without killing the carrot plant, while you can eat an apple without killing an apple tree, if that makes sense.

In any case, while I respect the motivation, I think it’s going over the top. While I’ll always try to support people’s choices in things like diets and morality, it really doesn’t hold up to scrutiny after a point. I’ve read about religions that encourage people to sweep the road ahead of them as they walk so as to not step on an insect, and who strain their water so as not to accidentally consume what they consider to be a tiny animal. The truth is that you’re messing things up left and right while sweeping in front of you, and anything that does actually get caught in your filter is almost certainly going to die almost instantly.

There was an embarrassingly long time when we thought that animals (and even human children) could not feel pain. This was obviously wrong. At the same time, I don’t think we need to project an existential terror as being felt by a carrot.

Plants release VOCs which is basically their way of screaming. Once I learned about that I immediately looked up how to do photosynthesis.

Growing things are alive, that's how they grow.

If it makes you feel better, many plants want their seeds to be eaten so they can be spread. It's more like eating semen than eating a person.

https://www.sciencealert.com/plants-can-hear-themselves-being-eaten-researchers-have-discovered

https://daily.jstor.org/plants-know-when-they-are-being-eaten-and-they-fight-back/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hd-h_y1X4oA