It emboldens me to run a bit farther with the whole idea. This sounds like a tautology, and it is. But this proposition, tautological though it may be, is the irrefutable basis for the principle of natural selection, and explains why, over many generations, living things evolve. Natural selection, when it has enough time to work itself out, enables plants and animals to get bigger and better, ie more complex and more functional in terms of their environments, in defiance of the second law of thermodynamics. That law says that things run down.
Complexity degenerates into simplicity and ultimately into randomness.
So we have natural selection and the second law of thermodynamics as the yin and yang of the universe as we know it. Shiva and Vishnu. The principles of destruction and regeneration. The general idea has been around for a long time. Similar approaches led not only to other vegetable foods, but to domestic animals.