For anyone "carnivore curious" - this is a fun, thought-provoking video to watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1cqNDDG4aA&t=252
I had already been eating carnivore for a while when I first watched it, and it really made so much sense. It blew me away that I had never thought of this idea myself - the fact that plants are living creatures, just like animals. And they "want" to live. And when you eat them (except in situations where you eat the fruit, and those can be complex1), they die. So they MUST have some defenses.
Animals have teeth, claws, antlers, etc, or maybe are able to run away swiftly. Plants can't move, so (aside from things like spines, etc), their defenses must take the form of chemicals. And there's a LOT of them - toxic plant chemicals, that cause you damage - because they're DESIGNED to cause damage.
And we think plants are just yummy, nutritious, organisms that are happy to lay down their lives for us, because we should "eat the rainbow".
But no. Plants want to live, just like animals. They just go about defending themselves differently.
"Plants don’t want to be eaten—they can’t run, so they wage chemical warfare. Every bite of spinach is a trade-off between nutrients and poison."
Footnotes
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Many plants want only a specific animal to eat their fruit - for instance, many berries that birds are happy to eat are poisonous to humans. ↩