Having worked growing native plants for restoration efforts, I can say that this is 100% true. Our focus was on getting plants that will survive without any extra help after being put in the ground, so no fertilizer and limited water. A scraggly leaved plant with good roots would make it where something with lots of soft new growth would get eaten.
Survival of the most barely surviving
Well, that’s exactly what evolution optimizes for - the good enoughest of all good enough solutions.
I don’t feed my plants nitrogen exclusively. But I let them have a little now & then, as a treat.
I mean, yeah, that sucks, but what can we do about it? Grow less food?
Distributing it more efficiently would help.
I work at a warehouse during summers for a business that sells food on Amazon.
A good half of the inventory went to trash on certain days for reasons ranging from “packaging slightly bruised” to “there is not even air conditioning here and we sell ice cream.”
On that last note, I really want to ask people buying perishables from amazon during summer why they would such a thing.
…sells food on amazon
Oh no, this is going to suuuck
Permaculture and healthy living soil would be the utopia
Not live under capitalism where food needs to be min-maxed like that because the goal is profit over sustainable nutritious production (and yeah I know we can’t just decide that as individuals). There’s plenty of peoples around the world and throughout history who have done and continue to do that.
Ok, well, if I eat butter, I will be more delicious to bears and wolves. Doesn’t make butter somehow a problem.
Most people don’t live near hordes and hordes of hungry bears and wolves, and those that do are typically prepared to defend themselves or flee. Plants can do neither.
Plants took control of a species that now nurtures them, fights off their predators and weeds out the competition. That species even goes to the extent of damaging its own health to keep the plants happy with pesticides and other questionable chemicals. In return, the plant bribes the species with some edible part.
Plants have an amazing variety of ways to defend themselves. Thorns. Chemical warfare. Being really fucking big.
You think plants spent 1.2 billion years on earth and didnt adapt to predation?
Their most amazing survival trait is evolving to domesticate humans into protecting them and providing lush environments for them to thrive.
But on a serious note a lot of agricultural plants do not have any of those listed survival traits, not at least not to the extent that people will not use pesticides.
So cats are plants?
The problem is for us, not the plants. Nature will survive and adapt, but we make it difficult for ourselves foremost and the nature we try to preserve, whilst simultaneously doing everything to screw that over.
So our hypocrisy is the main culprit here.
Imagine losing the genetic lottery so bad that survival of the fittest means getting eaten and having your killer shit your reproductive material out somewhere for your line to continue.
Plenty of plants use this methods to spread their seeds tho. It’s just the fruit that gets eaten not the entire plant.
Will you though?
At some point, yeah.
