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Food, nature, and disillusionment
Jan. 26th, 2025 08:59 amStill a weekend, so still reading Mary Oliver. I will probably return to Pema Chodron tomorrow.
This chapter of Winter Hours started out with Oliver talking about how she is mostly vegetarian, in part because the poet Shelley thought a vegetarian diet would render his intellect docile--though, she says, "I am devoted to Nature too, and to consider nature without this appetite--this other-creature consuming appetite--is to look with shut eyes upon the miraculous interchange that makes things work, that causes one thing to nurture another, that creates the future out of the past." I should have considered that a warning. I did not.
She then goes on to write poetically [of course] about turtles she sees on her daily walks with her dogs--about the dangers they face, their struggles to lay their eggs, the raccoons that follow and eat their eggs, and their general attempts to ward off predators. This all culminates in her account of witnessing a turtle dig a nest to lay its eggs, and Oliver returning to that nest the next day, digging up half the eggs and eating them! I have to say I was quite disillusioned.
Before she gets to that part of the story, she reflects a little more on animals eating each other: Speaking of a hawk she saw that had captured a pheasant, and her sudden desire for pheasant meat, she said: "I know that appetite is one of the gods, with a rough and savage face, but a god all the same. Teilhard de Chardin says somewhere that man's most agonizing spiritual dilemma is his necessity for food, with its unavoidable attachment to suffering. Who would disagree."
Part of me understands Oliver here. She doesn't draw a line between humans and other animals; both are holy and both have desires; both live by consuming others. Perhaps if she had started there (rather than starting with her semi-vegetarianism) I wouldn't have been shocked. Certainly I have read other semi-vegetarian observers of nature, like Gary Snyder, talking about how consuming meat in certain climates can be kinder to the ecosystem than eating plant foods that require lots of fossil fuels to ship, for example. And normally I do not count eggs as meat! Perhaps she just made me empathize with the turtle too much before talking about the eggs. There is a certain pragmatism of the small farmer, eating animals they have raised, that emotionally I find harder than factory farming. To eat something you have a relationship with seems (on an emotional level) worse than eating a strange animal, even if the relationship means the animal is treated more humanely. And not to have a relationship with animals you raise feels like a terrible sort of slavery.
Humans aren't obligate carnivores (barring certain health conditions), though I recognize in certain ways it is a privilege to choose not to consume meat. And plants have been shown to have certain sensations, even a certain kind of community life (like tree colonies communicating via fungus in their roots), so I suppose the bright light I draw between animals and plants isn't entirely clear. Still, I would like to reduce suffering, even if it is "unnatural."
It is a dilemma, though, because humans are part of nature, and Oliver is correct that part of the natural realm is different species devouring each other, which is kind of horrifying when contemplated in that light. One can make it pretty metaphorically with communion metaphors, but if Chardin (and Oliver) truly believe that to live others must die, it does give me a lot more sympathy for Jains who practice sallekhana (ritual suicide), even though a lot of the practices of Jains seem to extreme to me. I guess a modern analogue Jainism would be less concerned with wearing face cloths and carrying whisk brooms, and instead would be opposing all sorts of tech and human development that destroys the environment.
Is Oliver's egg-eating just embracing the destructiveness inherent in living and going for a lesser version of it?
I did start--and abandon for really tedious writing--a short volume on the natural theology of Oliver. Certainly those seeking theological lessons from the "Book of Nature" have to grapple with issues like why God did create a universe where life has to feed on other life. Sure, I suppose Christians might say this is a product of the Fall, but while it is only after the Flood that humans were officially given permission to eat animals (though the Noah story talking about 7 pairs of clean animals implies otherwise), animals still had to eat each other, leading to the dilemmas of vegan cat owners everywhere. For the record, I do not endorse torturing an obligate carnivore by imposing a vegan diet on them. I suppose in the future I might support feeding them only lab-grown meat, assuming the environmental costs of it are not exorbitant, but I don't think one should impose a harmful diet on one's dependents.
Tibetan Buddhists, who traditionally do eat meat because lots of the Himalayas are above the tree line and even in the lower elevations the growing season is very short, solve this problem by offering their bodies to vultures when they die, so completing the cycle of life. I am too Catholic in my respect for bodies (and also too squeamish at the thought of being devoured) to embrace this, though, and still enough of a theist to wonder about what this all says about God. Clearly the God of nature is different than my traditional notion of God. Does God love lions more than gazelles? Hawks more than pheasants? Raccoons more than turtles? While I resist it theologically, this does help me understand the ancient theologians who came up with the concept of a hierarchy of being.
This chapter of Winter Hours started out with Oliver talking about how she is mostly vegetarian, in part because the poet Shelley thought a vegetarian diet would render his intellect docile--though, she says, "I am devoted to Nature too, and to consider nature without this appetite--this other-creature consuming appetite--is to look with shut eyes upon the miraculous interchange that makes things work, that causes one thing to nurture another, that creates the future out of the past." I should have considered that a warning. I did not.
She then goes on to write poetically [of course] about turtles she sees on her daily walks with her dogs--about the dangers they face, their struggles to lay their eggs, the raccoons that follow and eat their eggs, and their general attempts to ward off predators. This all culminates in her account of witnessing a turtle dig a nest to lay its eggs, and Oliver returning to that nest the next day, digging up half the eggs and eating them! I have to say I was quite disillusioned.
Before she gets to that part of the story, she reflects a little more on animals eating each other: Speaking of a hawk she saw that had captured a pheasant, and her sudden desire for pheasant meat, she said: "I know that appetite is one of the gods, with a rough and savage face, but a god all the same. Teilhard de Chardin says somewhere that man's most agonizing spiritual dilemma is his necessity for food, with its unavoidable attachment to suffering. Who would disagree."
Part of me understands Oliver here. She doesn't draw a line between humans and other animals; both are holy and both have desires; both live by consuming others. Perhaps if she had started there (rather than starting with her semi-vegetarianism) I wouldn't have been shocked. Certainly I have read other semi-vegetarian observers of nature, like Gary Snyder, talking about how consuming meat in certain climates can be kinder to the ecosystem than eating plant foods that require lots of fossil fuels to ship, for example. And normally I do not count eggs as meat! Perhaps she just made me empathize with the turtle too much before talking about the eggs. There is a certain pragmatism of the small farmer, eating animals they have raised, that emotionally I find harder than factory farming. To eat something you have a relationship with seems (on an emotional level) worse than eating a strange animal, even if the relationship means the animal is treated more humanely. And not to have a relationship with animals you raise feels like a terrible sort of slavery.
Humans aren't obligate carnivores (barring certain health conditions), though I recognize in certain ways it is a privilege to choose not to consume meat. And plants have been shown to have certain sensations, even a certain kind of community life (like tree colonies communicating via fungus in their roots), so I suppose the bright light I draw between animals and plants isn't entirely clear. Still, I would like to reduce suffering, even if it is "unnatural."
It is a dilemma, though, because humans are part of nature, and Oliver is correct that part of the natural realm is different species devouring each other, which is kind of horrifying when contemplated in that light. One can make it pretty metaphorically with communion metaphors, but if Chardin (and Oliver) truly believe that to live others must die, it does give me a lot more sympathy for Jains who practice sallekhana (ritual suicide), even though a lot of the practices of Jains seem to extreme to me. I guess a modern analogue Jainism would be less concerned with wearing face cloths and carrying whisk brooms, and instead would be opposing all sorts of tech and human development that destroys the environment.
Is Oliver's egg-eating just embracing the destructiveness inherent in living and going for a lesser version of it?
I did start--and abandon for really tedious writing--a short volume on the natural theology of Oliver. Certainly those seeking theological lessons from the "Book of Nature" have to grapple with issues like why God did create a universe where life has to feed on other life. Sure, I suppose Christians might say this is a product of the Fall, but while it is only after the Flood that humans were officially given permission to eat animals (though the Noah story talking about 7 pairs of clean animals implies otherwise), animals still had to eat each other, leading to the dilemmas of vegan cat owners everywhere. For the record, I do not endorse torturing an obligate carnivore by imposing a vegan diet on them. I suppose in the future I might support feeding them only lab-grown meat, assuming the environmental costs of it are not exorbitant, but I don't think one should impose a harmful diet on one's dependents.
Tibetan Buddhists, who traditionally do eat meat because lots of the Himalayas are above the tree line and even in the lower elevations the growing season is very short, solve this problem by offering their bodies to vultures when they die, so completing the cycle of life. I am too Catholic in my respect for bodies (and also too squeamish at the thought of being devoured) to embrace this, though, and still enough of a theist to wonder about what this all says about God. Clearly the God of nature is different than my traditional notion of God. Does God love lions more than gazelles? Hawks more than pheasants? Raccoons more than turtles? While I resist it theologically, this does help me understand the ancient theologians who came up with the concept of a hierarchy of being.
