Look, I'm not saying that I don't respect vegetarians and vegans to a certain extent. They have their convictions and they follow them. There's something to admire in that, at least in principle.

But you can't deny that the whole thing often takes some very weird twists and turns:

PETA's Vice President of Programmes, Elisa Allen, told MailOnline: 'The jury is still out on whether [plants] feel pain. If we discover that they can, we may all become fruitarians, eating only what falls from the tree.

It comes after a new study suggested the plant kingdom is able to produce alarm sounds while being cut - with distressed noises coming from tomato and tobacco plants, as well as corn and the grapevines used to make cabernet sauvignon.

PETA's Vice President of Programmes, Elisa Allen, told MailOnline: 'The jury is still out on whether [plants] feel pain. If we discover that they can, we may all become fruitarians, eating only what falls from the tree.

You just gotta marvel at the thought of it all: Hundreds of thousands of vegetarians, patiently waiting underneath fruit trees all day long for a wormy old apple to fall off so that they can, you know, feed themselves.

As to whether plants can "feel pain," there's been some speculation for a while now as to whether or not that's the case. My money's on "big fat nope." But as noted above, apparently scientists have observed plants emitting weird signatures of hypersonic activity when they're being plucked and/or eaten, as some researchers recently stipulated in a report in the journal Cell:

Here we show that stressed plants emit airborne sounds that can be recorded from a distance and classified.

PETA while eating their greens: