Dear Science,
I recently became a vegetarian. While I was at Whole Foods buying
my protein powder, I found the perfect apartment companion: a Venus
flytrap. My question is, assuming I do not have enough bugs in my
apartment to feed this carnivorous plant, can I keep my new-found pet
alive on a vegetarian diet? Can I feed it tofu and rice? Thank you for
your help,
Vegetarian Venus Lover
Dear VVL,
Science has been vegetarian, well mostly vegetarian, since
age 2. So, congratulations for the switch; the environment thanks you
for your much lower carbon impact. As omnivores, we can get away with a
vegan diet so long as we include enough balanced protein
sources—like the combination of tofu and rice—to keep our
eyes bright, our coats shiny, and our tails bushy.
Your carnivorous plant isn’t so lucky. Here’s why: Most plants need
nitrogen and mineral-packed soil to grow, goodies that generally come
from decaying plants and animals. The problem is, in places with an
abundance of everything plants need—air, sun, water, nitrogen,
and minerals—vicious competition ensues. Carnivorous plants get
away from the crowd by growing in soil too crappy for other plants and
instead grab the iron, calcium, phosphates, and nitrogen they need from
living insects. In places where water and sun are abundant, but the
soil nitrogen and nutrient poor—like the Carolina
coast—carnivorous plants have a huge advantage. Yet another
reason to avoid South Carolina.
The specialized skill of capturing insects makes most carnivorous
plants fussy, so keeping a Venus flytrap alive is a tricky business.
You’ll need copious amounts of acidified water, a terrarium to keep
things humid, plenty of sunlight, and some nutrient-poor soil. Dump in
a bunch of fertilizer and the plant will promptly die; in the acidic
water, the fixed nitrogen in the fertilizer becomes toxic ammonium.
That’ll kill your plant. Your flytrap wants what it evolved to consume:
insects. Your new studio must have some pests you don’t like.
Cockroaches? Check under the fridge. If not, buy some crickets or
mealworms from the pet store. Just think of it this way: You’re
outsourcing the meat eating in your apartment.
As for tofu—well, tofu is not made from insect viscera,
despite appearances. So, no tofu and rice. Put the wrong foods in the
flytrap and they’ll rot, and your poor plant will kick it. It would be
like feeding spinach to a cat; no good can come of it. Even bits of
hamburger aren’t right. If feeding prey to your carnivorous plant is
too abhorrent for you, don’t feed it anything. It has a better chance
of living with just sunlight and water.
Even for an omnivore, becoming vegetarian is tricky. Your
carnivorous flytrap is even fussier than you are. Good luck with your
Venus flytrap, and with your vegetarianism. Do you know about the Society for DNA Free Food?
Karmically Yours,
Science
Send your scientific questions to dearscience@thestranger.com.
Venus flytraps are retarded.
Venus flytraps are cool.
we’re not omnivores. we can’t eat raw food because we’re not meant to be predators. true predators have the enzymes necessary to kill the bacteria colonizing raw meat. we get sick. additionally, we’re not fast enough to hunt without artificial tools and our teeth match herbivores more closely.
finally, protein is the least of a vegan’s worry. protein is very easy to come by. this myth that it is difficult to get protein comes from the popularization of vegetarianism in the 1800s when people were getting sick and everyone assumed it was a lack of protein when it was most likely a lack of b12. b12 and omega 3 fatty acids are nutrients that need to be watched, but these are pretty easy to come by as well.
Oh hai, some notes on what we’re “meant” to be:
Both of the species we are most closely related to, chimpanzees and bonobos, regularly consume raw meat. We come from omnivores, and likely evolved as omnivores in the 6 million years since we split from these lineages. Much of what prevents illness from consuming raw meat is immune response from previous exposure to such things and the community of microbes that symbiotically chill out in our guts, eating stuff so we don’t have to. By cooking our food we reduce our immune exposure and don’t foster happy homes for all the same microbes. But, lucky for us, our morphological adaptations correlate well with behavioral adaptations! Just because we need tools to do something, or need to cook something doesn’t mean we’re not adapted to eat it; we just might be adapted to both process it both outside and inside our bodies! We’ve been cooking meat for millennia, if not longer, and the morphological consequences (small mouths and guts from reduced internal processing needs) are pretty obvious.
Also, there are many different types of meat-eating. Humans are certainly fast enough to scavenge food others kill. What’s more, a prominent argument by human evolutionary biologists is that humans actually evolved to run over long distances, possibly to run prey to exhaustion. See this paper from the journal Nature: http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~skeleton/pdf…
This is not to say that vegetarianism isn’t a great social and moral philosophy, but lets not act as though you’re somehow returning to nature. What we do adaptively is not necessarily what ought to do morally. Hell, I might be “meant” in an evolutionary sense to try and sneak copulations behind my spouse’s back and kill off my enemies, but that doesn’t make it moral.