I’ve said this before, but I think it bears repeating on the first day of spring: as a practice I would rather take what the yard gives me, welcome the violets and ignore the plantain than regulate it all into a placid green mediocrity. If that sounds like a prescription for public policy, maybe it is: if you won’t risk the weeds, you can’t have the wildflowers. Besides, there’s enough weeding to be done in the garden. Do I really need more in my life to manage?

I could plant flowers. I do plant flowers. (In theory, at least. There’s a flat of them on the sidewalk that’s been sitting there two weeks now waiting to be planted.) Somewhere in a patch of taller flowers I spared because I liked seeing that fuchsia haze from my window (and which a bumblebee was later appreciating, á la Frost’s butterfly) is a peony we planted years ago, amid straight grass and raised garden beds. I expect it will show its head and bloom as it does every year, and I’ll feel as I always do that I ought to dig it up and move it somewhere more prominent, and maybe this year I will, but more likely I’ll think the same thing next year.

A flower is a kind of gift, in a way, to anyone who sees it. But it seems to me even more a gift if blooms of its own accord: I can simply be grateful. The birds sing all morning without breaking for a pledge drive, the wildflowers bloom without a thought for me, and I needn’t feel that I owe any particular debt or responsibility to any of them — except, perhaps, to appreciate their beauty. I appreciate the tiny ones hidden in the grass and nestled in the green all the more so, because I have to look close to see them. You can see a peony from your car window: not so the violets. Nor the bluets on the roadside, nor the clumps of little lavender flowers that have sprung up along the edge of the woods. They’re there for anyone who looks, but only for those who look. And looking is the real gift.

So I think I’ll leave that peony where it is, among the dead nettle and daisies, where nobody will see it but us. If the neighbors with the neat green lawns don’t appreciate the wildflowers, they won’t really appreciate the peony either.

On its own, Brown’s “chicken” — produced to mimic boneless, skinless breast — looks like a decent imitation, and the way it shreds is amazing. It doesn’t taste much like chicken, but since most white meat chicken doesn’t taste like much anyway, that’s hardly a problem; both are about texture, chew and the ingredients you put on them or combine with them. When you take Brown’s product, cut it up and combine it with, say, chopped tomato and lettuce and mayonnaise with some seasoning in it, and wrap it in a burrito, you won’t know the difference between that and chicken.

Bittman’s uncritical acceptance of the way Americans consume chicken breast, moreover — which is to say, mechanically — is disappointing from a man who has done as much as anyone to teach Americans how to cook and eat real food in simple, practical ways. There’s no indication that the product tastes good, only that it isn’t terrible. Nor does it promoting it in this fashion aid the cause of good cooking or of thoughtful, intelligent consumption. To embrace the consumption of “meatlike stuff” produced by a “thingamajiggy” is, I believe, to embrace the error at the root of modern industrial agriculture, and therefore, in the long run, to worsen its effects.

Although Bittman suggests that we ought to take any opportunity to reduce suffering, he is not a vegetarian, and does not fully advocate vegetarianism. He advocates this new industrial substance, rather, because “it might be better to eat fake meat that harms no animals and causes less environmental damage than meat raised industrially.” He levies the familiar charges against industrial meat: not only the treatment of the animals but the overuse of antibiotics, prevalence of disease, pollution. All of these are, I believe (and have observed before) legitimate criticisms — of industrially produced meat and of “confinement animal feeding operations.” But they are not problems inherent to raising livestock or to eating meat, and Bittman knows that. They are artifacts of a system designed, as he says, to treat an animal as “a machine to produce meat.” And that is the core problem with the way livestock are treated in industrial confinement operations: that they are treated as machines when they are in fact living creatures. The willingness to see an animal as a machine obviates any debt we might feel to it as a fellow creature, any respect we might owe it as another life which we did not create and do not fully understand, any notion that the animal has value inherent to itself which we are bound to respect—and permits us, therefore, to ignore its suffering, as well as the fact that as a living creature it must inevitably suffer and die, whether or not at our hands. A machine, obviously, cannot suffer.

But he misses a related problem, even more serious, which is that we do not only treat livestock as machines; we treat ourselves as machines, even in the way we eat. We reflexively check nutrition facts before buying food (or are told to, anyway, by experts); we count calories; we consume products scientifically designed to maximize the stimulation of certain sensory perceptions; we down vitamin pills in a vain attempt to make up for the lack of health in what we then refer to as food. That the human body is a machine is not a new idea, nor is it an extension of the idea that animals are machines; it arose in the nineteenth century coexistent with the latter notion, and by the end of that century, home economists and government bulletins cheerily urged women to think of food simply as “fuel for the machine.” It took the better part of the twentieth century before Americans capitulated fully to their expertise, but most of us are now fully acclimated to consuming almost exclusively a collection of food-like products engineered to push our biochemical buttons, to satisfy (or further stimulate) our appetites, and (occasionally) to provide our bodies with important nutrients — products whose purveyors and consumers, in short, treat human beings as machines.

My own objection to fake meat is not, therefore, that it “lack[s] bite, chew, juiciness and flavor,” but that it is thoroughly and inherently an industrial product, and that it makes us one as well. Grocery-store chicken is an industrial product as well, and a highly unnatural one, but it carries at least the pretense of being natural, and an unwitting consumer could believe, or a willful one could pretend, that he were eating food. To remove that pretense, to lay bare and indeed to embrace the conception of “food” as a collection of chemicals unrelated to any living thing, is to conceive of ourselves as machines. And if it is bad to treat a chicken as a machine, it is surely worse to treat a human being as one. That we are not confined in industrial feeding operations is irrelevant to the philosophical and moral point (and may frankly be debatable). If we conceive of ourselves as machines, moreover, I see no hope that we could conceive of a chicken as anything more. It’s certainly true that if more people eat imitation meat made from vegetable protein, then fewer chickens will be (mis)treated as machines — in the short run. But the error at the root of that mistreatment will grow even deeper, and be harder than ever to dig out, and more animals — and humans — will suffer in the long run as a consequence.

“Meat raised industrially” must not be the standard against which meat — or meat-like products — is judged. The only standard worth setting is that of perfection, which means the meat of an animal that itself ate food rather than industrial by-products, that had the opportunity to live before it died, that was raised intelligently, killed with a minimum of trauma and processed sensibly and frugally — the meat of animals, in short, whose creaturehood has been respected, and of which we would by needs eat far less than we have become accustomed to. To accept any standard short of that, and in particular to accept the standard of mass-production and mechanical eating, diminishes all of us.

John Henry grabbed one end of that vine and started pulling, and up came that vine, and up it came all across the yard. But that honeysuckle vine was longer’n his yard, so he kept on pulling that vine and reeling it in and it kept on coming up out of the dirt, all through the neighbor’s yard and the next one and the next one after that. John Henry started walking and pulling and reeling, leaving a tangle of honeysuckle vine behind him. He walked all across the state, and all across the next one, pulling up that honeysuckle vine all the way. He walked all the way back east, all the way to the Carolinas, all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. John Henry walked so long and worked so hard that when he finally got to the end of that vine he was plumb tired out, and that last tangle of vine snagged his leg and tripped him. And John Henry fell down, all stretched out along the coast, with his head up by Virginia and his feet down by Cape Fear, and became the Outer Banks.

Back home Polly Ann finished digging that garden, and by July she had the loveliest stand of sunflowers you ever saw. But wouldn’t you know, John Henry missed a little bit of honeysuckle. And so every day Polly Ann picks up John Henry’s shovel and digs up that vine a little more. And she is still digging it up today.

Trade your house for a turtle, then set it free
In the woods, to find its way to water.
Rejoice in your hope.

Fall on your knees to see the wild flower
That grows in the ditch, its head erect
Among the paper cups and sandwich wrappers.

Then rise up. Go forth. Sing your song
As if you would make it so.
Work as if it mattered.