April 3, 2007

• Food Issues

  You have left me a marvelous mixed bag of comments on my recent “taboo” entries.  I would probably want to write more on the topic even if you hadn’t been giving me additional food for thought.  Last night, Doug and I were discussing which of our fifteen or so cats (The “dozen or so” population diminished by one during the winter when the beat-up old stray, Potemkin, stopped coming around.  Then it rose by four when Doug and I found semi-feral Alice’s new litter nestled in fiberglas insulation, and brought them all in.) …we were discussing which of our cats we would slaughter first to feed to the rest of them if we became unable to sustain them otherwise.

  Given that we are surrounded here by nature’s bounty, it is a far-fetched scenario, similar to the “lifeboat” or “fallout shelter” exercises teachers of philosophy use to demonstrate cultural bias and unconscious stereotypes to undergrad students.  We don’t hunt or trap, but we have eaten road kill and fed it to our pets.  I would fish if supermarket provisions were not available, and I would probably trap or snare small game in preference to hunting moose or bear, if those were my only options.  Doug lacks the patience to stand on a riverbank and wait for a fish to strike, or to stalk a land animal, but he might resort to netting fish or snaring hares if he was hungry enough.  If he was hungry, and a moose walked through the yard, he’d shoot it, no doubt.

  After his experience with butchering the moose in our front yard, his only such experience, Doug thinks he would probably feel squeamish even about gutting a fish or a hare.  He would have no problem with killing a wild animal for meat.  It’s the messy part, the skinning, gutting, and butchering that he doesn’t like.  He will also generally snack on a carrot even though he’d prefer a steak, if he’d have to cook the steak himself.  Maybe this is a male/female thing.  Cooking is enjoyable to me, and I don’t mind the mucking about in gore and guts, but I don’t like killing.  I can do it, but I have to force myself, and I can force myself because I think that any carnivorous person who is unwilling to kill for meat is a hypocrite.

  I hesitate to make assumptions and generalizations about my readers, but if in the aggregate you represent a cross-section of the technologically advanced cultures, most of you probably never have gone hungry.  Most of you never have raised your own livestock nor stalked your own game, much less slaughtered and butchered the animals you have eaten.  The farmers, ranchers, feedlot crews, slaughterhouse workers and meat packers who feed the rest of us are a small minority.  In the entire civilized world, the vast majority of people are so insulated from the sources of their food that they gag at the smell of entrails or faint at the sight of blood.  Most would not salivate at the thought of fresh milk still foamy and warm from the udder, the way I do.

  Like many people of my generation, my consciousness of the growing shortages of water and farmland, the unwholesomeness of feedlot beef, and the waste of resources in its production, was raised by reading Diet for a Small Planet  by Francis Moore Lappe and her World Hunger: Twelve Myths.  Through the 1970s and ’80s,  I read Mother Earth News and became part of the back-to-the-land movement.  I would still be subsisting largely on grains if I had not learned that a high-carbohydrate diet was damaging my health, and I would still be engaged in the work-intensive farming and foraging lifestyle if I were healthy enough to do it.  But to me, “if onlys” are not any more helpful than “shoulds.”

  Three of you, soul_survivor, lupa, and nessi1, picked up on the “should” issue, and wixer‘s comment about “ought to” impelled me to edit that bit out of the entry.  The pop-psych shibboleth about the harmfulness of “shoulding all over oneself” or the inadvisability of “shoulding” on other people seems to have been gaining great currency.  A google search for, “should all over yourself,” brought 105,000 results.  I had never heard the phrase until one day recently at AA meeting.  It’s another of those pithy little sayings that help us convey how the programs work, such as, “We’re only as sick as our secrets,” which encourages openness, or “the yets” that can lead to risky self-congratulatory complacency.  The yets are the things that a given addict might not yet have done, such as going to prison or contracting HIV, but, “You’re Eligible, Too.”

  Regarding taboos, Orlando said, “People get all confused and caught up in their emotions about stuff like this….” and mentioned Mondo Cane, “dog’s world” or “dog’s life,” the seminal shocksploitation film that spawned everything from Fear Factor and Jackass to Faces of Death, and killed innovative artist Yves Klein when he saw what use the filmmakers had made of the artwork they commissioned from him.  People do indeed get all emotional about the breaking of their personal taboos.  Knowing this helps me appreciate the attitudes and experiences that have served to free me from the taboos into which I had been enculturated.

  Something else Orlando said makes a lot of sense to me:  “Truth is that your beliefs and values tend to change in desparate and life threatning situations.”  This is probably why I am so relatively free of common squeamishness and have such low regard for obeying common but pointless taboos.  My life has been pared down to the bare necessities.  I have scant time and no patience for nonsense, and I have had a lot of time (in prison and in my sickbed) to think about what has real meaning and what does not.  I haven’t gotten rid of every one of my hot emotional buttons, but I’m working on it.  I keep working on it because each success is so rewarding.  The freer I get, the freer I am, and freedom is what it is all about.

  

  • 8:35 pm
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