With the Omnivore’s Dilemma and How to Change Your Mind, Michael Pollan transformed our understanding of food and drugs. Can he do the same for our sense of self?

Several years ago, Michael Pollan had a disturbing encounter. The relentlessly curious journalist and author was at a conference on plant behaviour in Vancouver. There, he’d learned that when plants are damaged, they produce an anaesthetising chemical, ethylene. Was this a form of self-soothing, like the release of endorphins after an injury in humans? He asked František Baluška, a cell biologist, if it meant that plants might feel pain. Baluška paused, before answering: “Yes, they should feel pain. If you don’t feel pain, you ignore danger and you don’t survive.”

I imagine that Pollan gulped at that point. I certainly did when I read his account of the meeting in his latest book, A World Appears. Where does it leave our efforts at ethical consumption, if literally everybody hurts – including vegetables?