Modern people have goofy, neurotic attitudes towards death and killing. These attitudes shape our relationship with food, government authority, religion, environment, etc. Changes in these institutions then reinforce our unhealthy attitudes.
This will be a series of posts, each post addressing a different topic and its relation with death. The first topic is food.
My beliefs are far from the norm and I'll try to acknowledge my various influences. This post borrows heavily from the book Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. I didn't learn anything new reading it, but synthesizes many of my beliefs wonderfully. Plot summary: Guy meets talking ape. Talking ape tells guy about human origins, how far modern humans are from normal, and why this is the case.
ReadIshmael.com pimps it harder than a preacher does his bible:
"Get a job, make some money, work till you're sixty, then move to Florida and die."
"Can I have been the only person in the world who was disillusioned by this?"
There must be more to life than this. No religion, no selling, no pills... just real answers
Michael Pollan is another author who has written extensively on our relationship with food. I haven't had a chance to read any of his work yet, but his book The Omnivore's Dilemma addresses this topic perfectly.
Fear of death influences our relationship with food. A primary way this occurs is by projecting our fear onto animals.
Killing animals
Killing is the only way in which most modern humans acquire food. Scavenging isn't too popular these days. Objections to killing animals have led many to adopt vegetarian diets. Some folks are even trying to figure out how to grow meat in vats.
As an aside, I'm not against vegetarianism, veganism, fruitarianism, or any other crazy-ass diet. If you want to eat some way, eat that way. It does not have to be justified. I think the justifications given for vegetarianism are wrong though. To quickly address justifications not related to killing:
- Animal Cruelty - Eating animals is not synonymous with eating factory farmed meat. I personally avoid factory farmed meat for nutritional reasons and because it's production is unnecessarily cruel. Chucking a spear into a dear or buffalo is not unnecessarily cruel. Nature is no better (and there are reasons for it).
- Nutrition - Historically and anatomically speaking, humans are adapted to eat animals. It's obviously not necessary, but anything near ideal nutrition includes eating animals.
- Sustainability - Eating meat is not sustainable? 6 billion people is not sustainable. Our single species is using 14-26% of the total photosynthetic production of the planet. If everybody eats beans and rice in a state of near-famine, we can support an even larger population. Is that a worthwhile goal?
Most people that consume meat do not kill their own meat. Most people who eat meat have not even seen someone else kill an animal for food. If I were to invite friends over and feed them braised rabbit, most would eat it and (I hope) enjoy it. Were I to mention that before they came over, I took a rabbit, whacked its head with a brick to stun it, cut its jugular, then gutted and skinned it, I would receive shocked looks. The modern food production system has abstracted us away from the concrete experience of killing an animal. Meat does not grow pre-cut in plastic-wrapped styrofoam containers, waiting to be harvested and labeled for sale by Meijer.
One result of this abstraction away from killing is that many people now frown upon hunting. It's ridiculous. Other species hunt. Paleolithic humans and earlier homonids lived as hunter-gatherers. That should be enough to justify hunting as a legitimate part of the human experience. Instead, people sneer at hunters as "uncivilized" and then go celebrate "progress" by spending huge portions of their lives at work to earn money to buy hormone-laden, tasteless, nutritionally deficient meat products (not meat, meat products). Just grab some friends, sharpen some sticks, and go kill the damn thing yourself.
Another result of abstraction away from killing is that vegetarianism and veganism have become popular in the last few decades. When killing is not understood to be a part of life, all life—not just human, then one can begin to explore the idea that it is normal to forgo it entirely. There have always been those that eschewed meat for religious reasons, but they were consciously trying to leave everyday experience of the world in search of the "divine". People spurn other forms of religious ascetism because they recognize how neurotic it is. The religious view is just as fucked up in this case.
Speaking of religion, through schooling and everyday experience of the modern world we are inculcated with the idea that humans are somehow different than the rest of the living world. This idea originated in religious traditions—go read Genesis. Our species is the one made in god's image? What hubris. Darwinian evolution is rejected by the Catholic church to this day because it implies that humans are just another animal. What's funny is that even the secular world has adopted it, witness the soccer-moms gossiping about how horrible hunting is. Those who object to meat consumption often brush off other animals doing so stating that it is the carnivore's nature or that it cannot consciously choose, while we can. What arrogance! Perhaps the animals simply eat what works best instead of restricting their diet and then getting their rocks off on a sense of superiority over the rest of existence.
Killing plants
People seem to be very into arbitrary divisions. Humans vs. non-conscious life (Michael Pollan has a good 20 min. talk on this). Plants vs. animals. Many people say I should eat plants and not animals. It's interesting that people believe that plants do not suffer when dying. Perhaps we're just too biologically distant to have our empathy triggered or to project our own fears of death onto an ear of corn or a tomato. Aspargus doesn't scream when you cut off its roots. An blog post worth reading entitled Plants are People, Too at Anthropik discusses biological markers of stress in plants:
Researchers have even discovered the chemical markers of stress in plants, just like they have identified the chemical markers of stress in humans. Such evidence suggests that plants might even experience some analogue of emotion.
Koussevitzky, looking at the end of the signaling pathway, found the corresponding binding factor known that ABI4, a known plant transcription factor. It prevents light-induced regulatory factors from activating gene expression. Additional work in the project had determined that the chloroplast-localized, nuclear-encoded protein GUN1 is required for integrating multiple stress-derived signals within the chloroplast. This work was conducted by the first co-author of the article, Ajit Nott, who was a research associate in Dr. Chory’s lab.
Many of the nuclear genes that encode chloroplast proteins are regulated by a “master switch” in response to environmental conditions. This “master switch,” like a binary computer, can activate or de-activate certain sets of genes based on stress signaling processes.
“One of our suggestions in the paper is that ABI4 seems like a prime candidate to be the ‘master switch,’” Koussevitzky said. “ABI4 binds to a newly identified sequence motif, and by doing so prevents light-induced regulatory factors from activating gene expression. It has a role in so many signaling processes in the plant, it might actually be the ‘master switch’ that researchers have been looking for.” (Trent, 2007)
Plants might even experience some analog of emotion? How could they not? Every organism that responds to the outside world occupies a certain perceptual universe, an umwelt. This umwelt combines sensory experiences pertinent to the organism's survival and reproduction with the salience of the perception to produce "the world" for that animal. If plant cells are producing chemical stress signals then they occupy an umwelt as surely as humans do.
Recoil
A butterfly flaps its wings in Tokyo—err, a human tries to assure its survival and then dies as result. Practices that seem like they make our lives more secure often do not:
- First-worlders often insist on neurotically clean surroundings and food to ward off disease, bleach a contemporary talisman. This leads to weakened immune systems and the surge in autoimmune diseases.
- Animal domestication ensures our survival via a meat supply. Regular, close contact with animals also ensures the emergence of zoonotic diseases. Eventually some bacterium has mutations appropriate to infect a human. Often the human immune system is not ready for it and the disease is virulent. A laundry list of diseases are transplants from the animal world. A real bird flu is gonna suck.
- Humans started large scale agriculture with cereal-grain monocropping to ensure a regular food supply. Stored grains draw pests like rats however, which spread disease. The back breaking labor required of farmers took a great toll on them. Cereal-grains are also a poor nutritional staple further weakening them (and us). Now that we have petroleum powered machines do the work, sedentary lifestyles are killing us. Large scale agriculture also depletes soil nutrients so that our descendants will have trouble feeding themselves.
(Nearly) Everything is food
One morning a month or two ago, I sat down on my back porch to have breakfast (on mushrooms). I brought the plate to my mouth and began to eat my omelette using my fork shovel-style. As I looked at the spinach on my plate and then at the leaves of the trees surrounding me, it dawned on me that (nearly) everything is food. Why the qualification? Well, here's how salience of a new object is determined in my umvelt:
- Is it attractive enough to try to have sex with?
- If not, can I eat it?
:-D
