This Whole Food Chain Idea: Rant

I think the holidays make me cranky. At the very least I don’t feel I’m totally myself right now. People at my work like to say things to me like “You have the patience of Job.” Weird. But I don’t feel patient right now. I feel very, very cranky.

Part of my crankiness is having to have the same conversation over and over about this concept that there’s a food chain and people are at the top of it, and therefore it’s right for us to eat meat. First, there’s not a food chain, in a functional ecosystem there’s a complicated web of inter-dependence among species. There’s no top or bottom of the web, there’s only balance and imbalance. The lion might be the top predator, but take a certain fungus out the ecosystem and some plants disappear, then some animals and so on, until we can demonstrate that the lion needs the mushroom and is utterly at its mercy.

So come visit my neighborhood and look at all the concrete and the liquor stores, fast food joints, and the people just hanging out in parked cars with tinted windows and talk to me about a “food chain” here.

Better yet, read Jared Diamond’s books, including The Third Chimpanzee and Guns, Germs, and Steel. We’ve been out of balance for a while now because extinctions followed every human expansion. We’ve just gotten a lot better at driving some species into extinction and messing with others genetically, and packing them so closely they can’t move to meet our appetite for animal flesh.

It might be totally natural to eat other animals, but there’s not much that’s natural about how we live. In a working ecosystem we wouldn’t flush our waste away in water, polluting the oceans with sewage. Instead our wastes would be consumed by insects, microbes, and fungus and so the waste would be taken back up into the ecosystem. But that only works when you aren’t insanely densely populated. That only works when the rest of the ecosystem is working.

In a working ecosystem we wouldn’t be obese because we’d have to work for every calorie we consumed, even fruit would have to be picked and roots would need to be dug from the ground. If we want to talk about our “natural order” we might reflect on the consensus among archeologists that early hominids were likely herbivores that gradually became omnivores as they added insects and the scavenged the bodies of dead animals. Only after the invention of tools were our claw-less, relatively slow, relatively fragile forbearers able to hunt animals and kill them. However, following our ability to build lethal tools and our expansion into areas previously unknown to hominids other species started disappearing. Our ancestors weren’t conservationists, they were walking appetites. Understanding of our situation came much later.

This is all relatively natural. My dog Kyra would in fact probably eat herself to death given the opportunity, and many people care-taking non-human animals have observed the same thing. Kyra doesn’t save something for later, she eats whatever is edible as soon as it is found and she eats it all. We still have these same instincts, instincts that drove us to stockpile calories in the form of fat for leaner times ahead. But the sad truth is that left to do what comes naturally, many of us are in fact eating ourselves to death, just the slower version with heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, and all the related illnesses of over-consumption. I feel for people struggling with these diseases because I know that I struggle with the same instincts; there is an animal part of my brain that screams at me to eat as much of the most calorie rich foods I can find. We are an animal that has become too successful for our own good as we destroy every ecosystem on the planet for the sake of raising certain species we prefer to eat, species we’ve altered to be as fat and helpless as possible. We are an animal that is so successful at the basic instinct of reproducing and protecting our young that our numbers would be unsustainable under our “natural” condition of hunting and gathering. We are an animal that has become so successful that we have time to sit back and justify our actions by saying we’re the top of the food chain. We’re an animal that has become so successful that we leave the less fortunate of our own species to slowly die of starvation and disease, in lands we ourselves stripped of natural resources.

I know many people who say that they have no issue with eating animals, since that is the natural order of the world, but they don’t like factory farms. Wake up and look at our population. If you oppose factory farming, then you oppose eating animals or animal products for the majority of the world’s populations. There aren’t enough grasslands for everyone to eat grass-fed beef for dinner. There aren’t enough quaint country farm yards for everyone to eat the eggs of happy well-treated hens.

When someone says that they are at the top of the food chain, what they’re really doing is deferring thinking with a happy, self-congratulatory lie. What they’re saying is they’re better than the other animals and so they should be able to eat them, but refusing to further investigate that concept. It’s not my place to decide better or worse really, but I do know that self-congratulatory lies have terrible histories. There were missionaries forcing “modest” clothing on indigenous women, clothing so confining that it prevented them from doing the things they’d done previously like climbing trees to pick fruit, squatting down to pound starchy roots into meal, and dancing. There were slave owners saying that they were different and better from the human beings they enslaved and raped and beat. I know that I’ve been mistreated by people who felt they had a right to be cruel to me because they judged me as less attractive or less intelligent than themselves. I’ve told myself self-congratulatory lies in the past because I wanted to hide from my responsibilities toward the planet, toward non-human animals, and from my obligations to other human beings.

I will end with a not terribly pleasant story that illustrates the collapse of the self-congratulatory lie. For years I lived with a very special rabbit named Ivan. Bunnies are not stupid creatures, as their caretakers well know, but among bunnies Ivan was an evil genius. One holiday my brother complained that there were too many animals around with my Ivan, my mother’s two rabbits, two dogs, and a cat. He suggested setting up a pen in the back yard and putting all the companion animals in there then returning a couple hours later and retrieving the survivor. Without hesitation my father answered that even though at 4.5 pounds Ivan was the smallest animal he would be the last standing because “he’s the smartest and the meanest of all of them.” Nobody argued that point.

In any case I moved to Brooklyn and I really had no issues with pests until I got some new next door neighbors who were pretty sloppy. There was some kind of gap in our common wall and some roaches got into my apartment. I knew roaches were getting in because I’d get up in the morning and pick up Ivan’s bowl to give him his breakfast and there would be a dead smashed roach underneath it. Then one evening I actually caught him the act. He’d wait by the stove with his bowl and a roach would come out. He’d grab the rim of the bowl in his teeth and tip it up. Then the roach would come closer and he’d slam the bowl down, using his paws for extra force and kill the roach. This was somewhat disturbing to discover actually. Ivan was incredibly sweet and loving toward me but hostile to other animals, and often to other people, and apparently he felt roaches didn’t belong in our space.

When I related this story to my family, some of them marveled that this showed Ivan was actually a “tool user” a title that used to be uniquely human, but has been expanded to a couple of other species recently. My brother objected. He said that Ivan didn’t make his own tools and therefore we were overestimating his intelligence. He was merely making use of an object a human had crafted.

In this moment, maybe to defend Ivan, I objected that most humans don’t make their own tools. They go to the store and buy and use tools others have made. My brother hung his head for a moment and said “You’re right, but that’s incredibly depressing. Most people aren’t tool builders either.

So I have to say that most of us, if you strip us naked and take away all the stuff we’ve bought and toss us out into the woods without help, we’re not going to do so well. Food chain or no food chain.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. We live in houses, we drive cars, we use medications to extend our lives. We study nutrition (Kyra operates on the if it smells good or if it smells really bad, eat it and see what happens theory), we know more and understand more than our hominid ancestors did. Choosing a vegan diet that is kind to animals, kind to the planet, and kind to our own bodies is one huge advantage we have over our ancient ancestors.