Article 7573 of alt.humor.best-of-usenet:
From: David Kastrup 
Date: 14 Jul 1997 16:34:02 GMT

Subject: Re: Which Vegetable is the Smartest: was Re: Abandon meat production! 
From: rsrodger@wam.umd.edu (Rob Rodgers) 
Newsgroups: sci.bio.ecology, sci.chem, sci.energy, sci.environment, 
 sci.geo.geology, sci.math, sci.physics


Voodoo  wrote:
>> Now, corn -- there is a dumb vegetable.  It can't survive for even a season
>> without human help.  It's like a chicken or cow trying to survive in the wild.
>> It comes on a convenient holder to make it easier to eat.  You don't even have
>> to bend over to pick it.  That is one dumb veggie!

If we're raking the non-meats in terms of stupidity, it's hard to beat
the bannana.  Here is a plant that reproduces by vegetative
propagation yet which expends enormous amounts of energy and effort to
produce giant, freak, mutant, oversized gonads which are sterile.  

Corn really has a leg up over the bannana in the smarts department.

[...]

>As for the smartest Vegetable, I'd say that it's the cactus.  It makes
>it really hard for you to get to, and eat the meat out of it.

How smart could a plant that lives in the middle of the desert be?  

Cactus is a bottom feeder.  No, the braniac of the vegetative kingdom
is obviously the rutabaga.  This foul tasting, gritty tuber contains
few nutrients and, like human beings, can grow and survive pretty much
anywhere, and somehow it has domesticated a mammalian species to
service it's every need.


-----


alt.humor.best-of-usenet (moderated) #7922 (1 more)
From: mjd@plover.com

Subject: Which Vegetable is the Smartest: was Re: Abandon meat production! 
From: wpenrose@interaccess.com (William R. Penrose)
Newsgroups: sci.bio.ecology, sci.chem, sci.energy, sci.environment, 
 sci.geo.geology, sci.math, sci.physics

In article <01bc8caa$bd43d700$2fa8469c@uswr250.zeneca.com> "Western Research Cen
ter"  writes:
>> > >Haven't you heard the broccoli screams as you cut off their heads?
>> > >David

>> > I don't eat vegtables. I leave that for those cruel
>> > unsportsmanlike people who are too lazy or cowardly to take on
>> > animals.
>> > 
>> You mean you hunt all the meat that you consume?
>> 
>> Or that you let butchers murder it for you, and you drop by the store and
>> pick out a haunch you like?

If we are forced to eat nothing but vegetables, it behooves us to choose ones 
that are very low down on the intelligence ladder.  I suspect cauliflower is 
probably the smartest vegetable, since it looks like a brain.  Therefore, I 
don't eat cauliflower.  Likewise, parsnip is clever enough to contain a 
carcinogenic chemical within its cells, so it is probably pretty smart, too.

Now, corn -- there is a dumb vegetable.  It can't survive for even a season 
without human help.  It's like a chicken or cow trying to survive in the wild. 
It comes on a convenient holder to make it easier to eat.  You don't even have 
to bend over to pick it.  That is one dumb veggie!

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