food and drink: March 2011 Archives
Once in the misty depths of the past I was hanging out in a college friend's kitchen and she mentioned that she was a vegetarian. As a devout carnivore, I felt I had to give her a hard time about it. "Suppose," I said, pointing to a box of spaghetti she was holding, "you found out that the wheat that was made from had a consciousness, had hopes and fears and all that? What would you do?"
She grinned. "I'd eat it anyway," she said.
Now here's the thing—I was joking. I don't think wheat has consciousness and hopes and fears. I just had oats for breakfast and I don't think there's a mother oat plant somewhere crying her eyes out over her murdered children. I do eat meat, and actually I have some moral qualms about that. About vegetables, not so much.
But it seems there's at least one person in the world sensitive enough to not see this as a joke. A writer for the New York Times wrote an essay in which she says that she gave up meat for a while and got to thinking about whether it's OK to eat plants either, because like animals, plants strive to stay alive and move around and so forth. Then she suggests that maybe someday we'll overcome our blindness about this, the way we decided generations ago it was wrong to view people of another race as inferior and exploitable as slaves and so forth. Maybe it's a joke, but if so, she pretends to be serious all the way through and concludes thusly:
She grinned. "I'd eat it anyway," she said.
Now here's the thing—I was joking. I don't think wheat has consciousness and hopes and fears. I just had oats for breakfast and I don't think there's a mother oat plant somewhere crying her eyes out over her murdered children. I do eat meat, and actually I have some moral qualms about that. About vegetables, not so much.
But it seems there's at least one person in the world sensitive enough to not see this as a joke. A writer for the New York Times wrote an essay in which she says that she gave up meat for a while and got to thinking about whether it's OK to eat plants either, because like animals, plants strive to stay alive and move around and so forth. Then she suggests that maybe someday we'll overcome our blindness about this, the way we decided generations ago it was wrong to view people of another race as inferior and exploitable as slaves and so forth. Maybe it's a joke, but if so, she pretends to be serious all the way through and concludes thusly:
OK, two admissions here—I can't predict the future, and I may be an insensitive brute. That said, maybe future generations will slowly give up eating meat. But I'm pretty sure we'll still eat plants. The argument that they strive to keep existing just won't wash. Every object in the universe strives to hold itself together and maintain its integrity—the wastebasket under my desk, the Rock of Gibraltar, the nucleus of an atom, the ferryboats that go between Manhattan and Staten Island. I think the chances that our great-grandchildren will have the slightest moral qualm about eating plants are astrally remote, but if they do, I'm pretty sure they'll eat plants anyway.My efforts to forgo meat didn’t last more than a couple of years. Still, I wonder what our great-grandchildren will think of us. Will we have trouble explaining to them why we killed animals or perhaps even plants for food? And if so, what on Earth will we be eating?
