On animals and food - Part 1

Some people say we are superior to other creatures because we are “intelligent”. The truth is this intelligence is only of value to us as humans because we possess it and we know how to use it. An elephant could equally believe he is the superior species on this planet because he has a trunk – and all the great things he can do with it! He considers every other trunkless species as inferior, lacking, because we don’t share that one thing that to him his survival is dependent on. Our “intelligence” and interaction style is dependent on the arrangement of our nervous tissue, our phenotypic appearance is genetically-determined, and our behaviour is in the broadest sense survival-driven. Now, we (all animate creates) are carbon-based constructs of eukaryotic cells incapable of photosynthesising to meet our own nutritional needs. We are amazingly adaptable and very different to other species in the way we interact with our environment, but even if we were the superior species, it does not entitle us to haphazardly proceed to abuse our environment and the creatures in it to meet our own needs.

We are truly an amazingly adaptable species. Human beings have developed ways to overcome our deficiency in obtaining and forming our own nutritional needs for survival by consuming other eukaryotic matter. We have even developed systems to make this more efficient and safe for our digestive systems. We, for example, cook our food. Simple biology classes have taught us that cooking our foods, especially those derived from other animals, has effects on the quality of food itself so as to make it suitable for the human digestive tract. Heating denatures protein, makes food stuffs generally easier to transit along the gastrointestinal tract, destroys pathogenic microbes, changes the taste of most foods, and all these other things that are limiting (and thus important) factors to our ability to live off these products. We are also incredibly adaptable on the choice of foods we can live on.

I have always had an omnivorous diet except for a few years where I was a vegetarian purely as a teenage fad. It was interesting in those few years, though, what you do learn about human beings and our need to stereotype others. I openly admit I chose to have a vegetarian diet purely as a choice, not based on my views on animals or religion or anything really.  In fact you could probably say it was almost on a whim similar to any teenager who has ever dyed their hair an “odd” colour or done anything considered outside the norm just because they could. Adolescence is a time of experimentation and trying on different identities until you find one you stick to a little more permanently. My phase was vegetarianism. What I learnt was that people do have a particular relationship to food that is not like that related to fashion or hair dyes or music preferences. People generally relate food to something more akin to spirituality. Now, of course, my choice on diet was on a whim, but it is true that a great majority of people do make their dietary choices based on these things.

I grew up with what you’ll often hear me refer to as “edible pets”. This was what I was exposed to growing up. We had pets in the form of ducks, chickens, rabbits. We raised them and fed them from young and considered them as anyone else does a pet. When they got to a particular size, my mother or grandmother (or sometimes my siblings) would kill them and prepare them as food for all of us. This we all understood as the circle of life. We cared for those animals and treated them without cruelty; in fact we would play with them and be fond of them as our pets. We did not shed tears for them when their time came, though. We had known all along what the fate of these animals were to be – and yet we did not hold back from caring them as we did. To us it seemed similar to the way people love each other, siblings, parents, children, spouses, friends, etc, and don’t hold back even though we know these people will one day sooner or later leave our lives.

Growing up, our family had at one point also a dog or two as a pet that we did not consider “edible” in our culture. We kept this animal purely for company.  And we considered it okay to keep him because we could sustain him without going out of our needs to meet his (he ate scraps, inedible leftovers, and whatever he could fend for himself). Why I mention this is because still to this day I have moments where I consider it unethical to go out of our way to provide for ‘non-edible’ animals when there are starving families in the world, when money could be diverted to help other fellow humans in need… I have those days, but I have also learnt to be a little more open-minded and understand that, particularly in western-culture, people do often equate dogs and cats and whatever other pets, to family and even to being equal to human beings. A view I understand even if I still cannot say I share it.