Food and Love, Plants and Compassion

 “The living must not be fed with the living” (177).  Reading about Jainism and Eastern spirituality reminds me so much of my uncle.  He would order veggie-burgers at Mothers Café—hold everything but tomatoes.  When I was young, he tried to explain to me the logic of not eating carrots, onions, beats, potatoes—everything I never thought of as being alive.  Those things were my food, right?  Eat your carrots; they’re good for your eyes.  But his unconventional eating habits and philosophies were not the only things that made him a compassionate human being (or, as 5-year-old me would have said, a weirdo).  He would talk about how love was the remedy for the suffering of every living being.  Love in the Greek sense (Agape): love of the soul.  Looking up the Definition of Agape on wikipedia, something catches my eyes.  It reads:  “Agape is also used in ancient texts to denote feelings for a good meal….” (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_words_for_love).  Perhaps if no other conclusion can be drawn as to the most ethical, compassionate, and loving relationship one could have with food (often other living beings), we cannot ignore that there indeed exists a relationship.  Love (and compassion) is connected to food (often plants and animals). 

Agape Feast: Love and Food Connection
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When anything was wrong with our pets, he was the one to call.  And not because he was a veterinarian but because he treated animals and plants as humans (basically with the same respect).  A self-taught genius, he decided when he was in his twenties that he would rather die of starvation than kill an animal for food. “Oh Nickey, you’re such a tree-hugging hippie [literally]” I would tell him.  And as unfamiliar as I was with his idea of trees as our “asexual siblings,” I cannot help but think about how so much should have made sense to me.

Hopkins and Nickey kinda got it.  Trees and plants are just as worthy of our love
and care and respect as anything else.
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It should come as no surprise, then, that he began his own tree tending service, with a motto: “In a nutshell, we climb trees to do what is necessary to help the trees.”  (quote from The Tree Tender website: http://www.thetreetender.com/Austin%20Certified%20Arborist%20Tree%20Service )  Parts of his website read: “we take extra measures to prevent injury to other plants” and “I believe all things must be done right to the smallest detail, especially when they are done to a sacred living being as venerable as a tree. So, I am always eager to meet new trees and their owners.”  Even the way that he talks about trees as having a soul and a spirit—by virtue of the fact that they are living beings—astounds me.  He, no doubt, would agree with Professor Bump’s assertion that Hopkins was “expanding the definition of speciesism to plants as well as animals” (187) by tracing the feeling of love towards trees.  Nickey taught me the power of love for plants (for a time, I wanted to study botany) but also simply the power of compassion for things that do not bleed.  He would likely also agree with this statement (as do I): “Pollution, extinction of species, and destruction of forests and wild life are crimes against the earth and against humanity.” (178)