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”.
