" The author clearly yearns for food - for a life based on reciprocity, not exploitation, and he believes that plants count as partners, as participants.
Having included them in the "us" of sentience and agency, he can't just take. He needs to know that he is giving back, part of a circle of exchange, instead of a one-way extraction that he identifies as death.
This sentence embodies one of the impulses that is salutary in the vegetarian myth: the attempt to take humans down from our perch above and return us to our hones place in a circle.
But it also reflects the ignorance. He doesn't know that apples eat, and what they eat is animals, including us. They need our excrement - the nitrogen, the minerals, the microbes - and our flesh and bones. There is a reciprocal relationship between animals and plants: predator and prey, until the prey becomes predator. It is only our attempt to remove ourselves from that circle that destroys it. "

― , The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability