Chapter Seventeen – The Ethics of Eating Animals
Précis
People believe that we should treat animals as equals because we both have “not suffering” in our best interests. The slaughter of animals can only be justified when they live a happy life before the slaughtering.
Gems
“It may be that our moral enlightenment has advanced to the ponnit where the practice of eating animals – like our former practices of keeping slaves or treating women as inferior beings – can now be seen for the barbarity it is, a relic of an ignorant past that very soon will fill us with shame,” (p. 305).
“Half the dogs in America will receive Christmas presents this year, yet few of us ever pause to consider the life of the pig – an animal easily as intelligent as a dog – that becomes the Christmas ham,” (p. 307).
“If possessing a higher degree of intelligence does not entitle one human to use another for his or her own ends, how can it entitle humans to exploit non-humans for the same purpose?” (p. 307).
“But where their interests are the same, the principle of equality demands they receive the same consideration. And the one all-important interest humans share with pigs, as with all sentient creatures, is an interest in avoiding pain,” (p. 308).
“The proper measure of their suffering, in other words, is not their prior experiences but the unremitting daily frustration of their instincts,” (p. 310).
Thoughts
This idea makes sense: why should animals not be our equals? Obviously this does not mean inclusiveness in our political society, but that we should respect their social structure. Animals themselves have evolved to have their own set of rules and necessities that we need to respect. It is completely unfair of us to take away their habitats only for our benefit. I am not saying that vegetarianism is necessarily the way to go, but we need to give the animals their natural habitats in our industrialized farming. The cruelty really begins when nature becomes industry and the animals no longer are living beings but mere objects, which we consume.
Is there really any such thing as a vegetarian or vegan? There was a part of the chapter that talked about how the vegetables that vegans eat need protection. This protection involves killing any predators in the area. They therefore may not be eating the meat, but are still supporting the slaughter of animals. It seems that in our society there is no way of getting around the death of animals. But at least we can begin to justify it by treating them as humanely as possible.
Chapter Eighteen – Hunting: The Meat
Précis
Hunting is a natural process that humans have developed through evolution. Genetically, we have a sense of pride in killing an animal, but from a distance we notice its immorality.
Gems
“But this is not a passive or aesthetic attention; it is a hungry attention, reaching out into its surroundings like fingers, like nerves,” (p. 334).
“Predator and prey alike move according to their own maps of this ground, their own forms of attention, and their own systems of instinct, systems that evolved expressly to hasten or avert precisely this encounter...” (p. 336).
“A brain chemical that sharpens the senses, narrows your mental focus, allows you to forget everything extraneous to the task at hand (including physical discomfort and the passage of time), and makes you hungry would see to be the perfect pharmacological tool for man the hunter,” (p. 342).
“Only the hunter, imitating the perpetual alertness of the wild animal, for whom everything is danger, sees everything and sees each thing functioning as facility or difficulty, as risk or protection,” (p. 343).
“And although Ortega says one does not hunt in order to kill, he also says that one must kill in order to have hunted,” (p. 349).
Thoughts
I can perfectly understand Pollan’s mixed feelings about the death of the pig. Hunting used to dominate the human food chain hundreds of years ago; therefore it is only natural that we have developed a quality of pride. It is our society that creates the immoral views that now cause this ambiguity. I am not saying it is right to kill animals; it is only in our nature. At the end of the chapter he discusses how the sun feeds the tree, which provides the acorn, which the pig eats, and the humans in turn in the pigs. But then, the humans decompose back into the earth and nurture the soil, ultimately completing the cycle. Everything has served its purpose, then can we really call it inhumane to kill an animal?
He seems to be quite scared of actually shooting the pig. I would be too; to take another’s life seems intense. I believe his fear came from his desire to not kill the pig. He felt uncomfortable in the situation he was in and deep down did not really want to follow through with it. But once he shot the pig, this whoosh of adrenaline came in. Are these chemicals in our brain really adapted from the hunting days? It seems that the views of our society counteract these chemicals and deem hunting an “unworthy act”. But maybe that is again just going against the evolutionary path.
Chapter Nineteen – Gathering: The Fungi
Précis
Gathering is another activity that the human has adapted super senses for. It can, though, represent a greater dilemma for the omnivore because of the risks of false identification.
Gem
“The gardener is a confirmed dualist, dividing his world into crisp categories: cultivated land and wilderness, domestic and wild species, mine and theirs, home and away,” (p. 365).
“Wild mushrooms in general throw that dilemma into particularly sharp relief, since they confront us simultaneously with some of the world’s greatest rewards and gravest risks,” (p. 371).
“For the individual human, his community and culture successfully mediate the omnivore’s dilemma, telling him what other people have safely eaten in the past as well as how they ate it,” (p. 372).
“We don’t really know. All of which makes mushrooms seem autochthonous, arising seemingly from nowhere seemingly without cause,” (p. 374)>
“If the soil is the earth’s stomach, fungi supply its digestive enzymes – literally,” (p. 375/6).
Thoughts
I do not really like mushrooms that much, and cannot identify with his feelings of the hunt. I have never been gathering myself, but I guess it is something that I might attempt, to experience it. As fulfilling as he describes it, gathering does not seem very efficient. Our society could definitely not be based on a hunting/gathering food system anymore, but it does seem like a very natural process.
I never realized that mushrooms were so complicated. I find it interesting that they might have this “lunar energy”. Could this new type of energy actually be more beneficial? Is there any other organism that possibly takes in lunar energy? Mushrooms always seemed so simple; I thought they were just fungi that grew in forests. Apparently though there is so much that scientists have yet to find out about them. I wonder, if there will ever be a way in which we can study mushrooms to a greater extent. Maybe a machine will be invented and we will be able to extract their roots without damaging them. Mushrooms pose a difficult task not only in the omnivore’s dilemma, but also to scientists who want to further their research.
Chapter Twenty – The Perfect Meal
Précis
Creating all of the food for a meal first hand – through hunting and gathering – gives people a direct connection to the earth and their environment. The meal becomes a thanks and dedication to the nature that provided it.
Gems
“Reserving the historical trajectory of human eating, for this meal the forest would be feeding us again,” (p. 399).
“This one had done that, restoring my appetite for this meat after the disgust I’d felt cleaning the animal. I was reminded of what Paul Rozin had written about a traditional cuisine’s power to obviate the omnivore’s dilemma by clothing the exotic in familiar flavors,” (p. 401).
“Another thing cooking is, or can be, is a way to honor the things we’re eating, the animals and plants and fungi that have been sacrificed to gratify our needs and desires, as well as the places and the people that produced them,” (p. 404).
“...to preserve their life and form living things necessarily destroy life and form,” (405).
“I realized that in this particular case words of grace were unnecessary. Why? Because that’s what the meal itself had become, for me certainly, but I suspect for some of the others, too: a wordless way of saying grace,” (p. 407).
Thoughts
The meal he made sounded actually really delicious. He made so much but it cost so little. I guess you cannot really say that eating healthy is expensive; it really depends on your environment. He had the chance to go hunting, gather mushrooms, and pick cherries, but not every environment provides such a natural landscape. Maybe a solution could be to make natural environments more accessible to people, so that they too can experience such a meal.
No matter how we eat, something must die in order to provide life for another organism. A vegetarian is still taking a life of a plant, just as the carnivore that of the animal’s. It is only nature that organisms give up their life for that of another. We have just brought it to the extremities, creating these taboos around food. Once we learn to accept that to survive, other organisms must in some way give something up, we may be able to eat in peace. But before that happens, we must also learn that this process is an offering from the other organism, and that we should not exploit it as we do in slaughterhouses and industrial farming. Humans need to learn to coexist with nature and evolution.
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