Why plants are my moral dilemma

This is what I would look like if I were a plant

Plants are people too. I’ve never considered it, but there it is – and apparently, it’s a fact. Now that I’m informed, I’m afraid I don’t know what to eat.
I’ve always loved animals and this love of animals has translated into feeling guilty about not being a vegetarian. And upon attempting vegetarianism on a number of occasions, I was only able to get through a couple of months at a time on whole wheat pitas and hummus. Now my yo-yo veggie binges seem like a massacre.
My self-awareness as a murderous herbivore began with a seemingly harmless get-together with a friend over lunch. Munching a large bowl of leafy greens on a sun-drenched patio one summer day in August, my friend, or rather my bearer of bad news as it were, asked with a slight smirk, “You’ve heard about that wacky experiment they did back in the ‘60s about plants having feelings?”

"No, I hadn’t," I replied in between bites. I naturally think it’s a joke; she’s just playing with my acute sense of guilty conscience. As a 5 year-old, my mother could bribe me into eating everything on my dinner plate by telling me that the leftover broccoli would feel sad because it would be torn apart from the food that was already in my stomach. It didn’t only work, it worked every time. Avoiding the issue for a couple of days, the nagging curiosity set in and I looked it up on the internet. I was sure the only thing I would find would be Chia Pet fan sites. But no: “Happy plants,” “The Secret Life of Plants” – the information was all there, I just wasn’t sure I could stomach it.
The information I found was this: Cleve Backster, a lie-detector expert who ran a school on lie-detection for policemen and security agents in New York City, rather accidentally detected primary perception in plants in 1968. While at work one day, he hooked his polygraph up to a tropical plant on his desk, just to see what would happen. After watering it, he was surprised to see that it produced a pattern on the graph very similar to that of a person after receiving an emotional stimulus. After further testing, he found that, somehow, the very thought of setting fire to its leaves drastically changed the pattern of the graph. It seemed as though the plant could not only feel, but also read his mind.
So now it seems that I should either give in or starve. Natural selection has forced me to opt for the former. I must come to terms with the fact that I will always be a morally corrupt human being and live with it. Nature is nature – I can’t fight it. But the next time I walk by a tree, with leaves coloured bright hues of red, orange and yellow, I can’t help but feel a little sad and a lot less hungry.