“I interviewed another scientist who did believe plants felt pain. When I said, so it hurts them when we eat them, he shrugged his shoulders and said, yeah, it's a dog-eat-dog world. We have to eat them and they feel pain, and that's just the way it is. … It may be for very self-interested reasons that I gravitate to the view that they don't feel pain, because I want to continue eating them with a clear conscience.”
Within Reason · Ideas & Essays · September 2026
Pollan's new book argues plants are far more capable than we assume — they sense, remember and signal without neurons — but he stops short of saying they feel pain. Alex O'Connor had just pressed him on why not. Pollan first answers that avoidance behaviour doesn't require pain, then volunteers the motive behind his own position, and adds that he could be wrong.
Transcript
guessing. There's a lot of guesswork involved, obviously. But do you
…like the ancient sort of single-celled organism, like the very first thing which motivates natural selection is that like one thing helps you survive and one thing doesn't. And this primal feeling of like no to that one and yes to that one seems so significant that why not implants, you know?
But you can do that without pain. You can do that based on, I mean, you know, chemotaxis, what single-celled creatures do, that, you know, they recognize that that's a toxin and that's food. And they move toward the food and away from the toxin. So you can do that without pain. Pain is a really good technique for it. And I, you know, I interviewed another scientist who did believe plants felt pain. And he, you know, when I said, so it hurts them when we eat them, he like shrugged his shoulders and say, yeah, you know, it's a dog-eat-dog world. We have to eat them and they feel pain. And that's just the way it is. So he was, so I did present that point of view. It may be for very self-interested reasons that I gravitate or they don't feel pain because I want to continue eating them with a clear conscience.
Yeah, sure.
But, you know, I could be wrong. I mean, it's, it's, it's, we can't say for sure. You know,
I want to talk about something a bit. I also, I've a fear that people who've sort of tuned into this, um, it might, it might be like a bit much, right? I, I, I, I'd, of course, recommend reading the book, but I don't think I want to be very clear at this juncture, just before I ask you something a…