Several times each day we all engage in one of the most sacred acts there is: blending our lives with that of another. We take this life from another being and use it to fuel our own existence. The other being has no say in the matter. We call it “eating.”
My journey of relationship with food began when I did a science project in junior high where I raised shrimp, and treated the water in three of the four tanks with different pollutants to measure the impact on marine life. Shrimp had been one of my favorite kinds of seafood, but that wouldn’t last. Shrimp were invertebrates, so I didn’t need to fill out any paperwork, and we had assumed their intelligence was negligible. We had further assumed the shrimp would just go about their lives with no interaction outside of feeding, but we discovered otherwise. The shrimp knew us. They could tell when I entered a room versus my parents or sister doing so. When I came into the room, some of them would jump out of their tanks and flip in the air, before diving back in the water. They interacted with me through the tank walls.
I was horrified.
The end result was that I wound up with an ever diminishing number of pet shrimp, and refused to eat them again until well into my college years. I tried to go vegetarian with the logic that if I couldn’t eat shrimp because those few recognised me, then I couldn’t eat any other animals that would surely be able to do likewise. That lasted about a week, and uncovered a weird iron deficiency where I don’t produce enough of the heme molecule and must acquire it from animal sources. The medical dispensation to eat meat (and let’s be real, I’ve always been a carnivore by preference) didn’t sit well with me, I knew I was a hypocrite, but I had to live with it.
During my first year in college, I worked at a barn leading trail rides. At the time I was opposed to hunting (Shooting Bambi? How could you!?!), but the two cowboys who worked there would regularly trade sightings of particular deer (8 point bucks). Honestly I think they did it sometimes just to get a rise out of me. The farm butted up against a huge private deer preserve, and our people had permission to hunt there, and lead the trail rides on that property.
The lower pasture at this barn contained a good bit of woods, but the central portion of it was a huge pasture. I couldn’t tell you the acreage, and it was so long ago I no longer could tell you how many horses we kept on it, though it was somewhere around 20. The wooded portion of the pasture was enough space to lead an hour-long trail ride through, and still not see it all. It was huge, and yet we had to supplement the horses with hay. I could not figure it out.
The answer came to me one day when I was leading a ride back to the barn, cutting through this pasture. When we came to the clearing, all you could see was deer. I stopped counting when I got to 30 and had only covered about a third of the clearing. And every single one of them looked emaciated or diseased. We had taken away their predators, and not replaced them. And here I was, objecting to the few people doing something about the problem, for sentiment.
These were two events that shook my world when they happened, and have strongly influenced my outlook. By the time I got to college I had blended spirits with a tree, so I knew that trees had spirits too. That all plants had them as well was easy to extrapolate, as plants responded to things people did. So I was unsurprised when I read in The Hidden Life of Trees that the mycelial network existed. What I haven’t heard much about were the implications of this with respect to eating.
No matter what we do, if we want to survive we must consume other beings with spirits of their own, with consciousness. We have no choice. Nothing does. It doesn’t matter if the food you consume is vegetable or animal, it is a living thing. That is one hell of a responsibility. This means we have an obligation to the things that died for our tables to use their lives well.
This is part of why our disposable culture disgusts me sometimes. We throw out so much food, allow it to spoil, and we don’t even think about it. At best, there is some small guilt when we remember the proverbial starving children our parents held over our heads to make us eat our vegetables in our youth. These are lives we took. Something died, even if it’s “just” a plant, and yet we discard their sacrifices as if they are meaningless. Then we turn around and speak about the sanctity of life.
If life is sacred, then all life is sacred.
What does this look like in my life? My husband and I plan our meals for the week, and buy exactly what we need. We try to keep an eye on cans, and rotate them out regularly. We save leftovers, and even plan for them as meals. We are careful to stock things we will actually eat. When eating dinner, I split my portions into multiple bowls when appropriate, so I can more easily control what I eat, and more importantly, clean my plate. It’s a rare thing for me to send food back on my plate, and generally when it happens, it’s being packed up for lunch the next day.
I wish I could go further. I would like to support community supported agriculture, and eat locally grown and raised foods, but our society is structured in such a way that to do so is incredibly expensive. Being picky about where my meat comes from and how it was raised is a dream of mine, unfortunately not one my husband shares. Given the burden he carries of my medical bills, and caring for me, the cats, and the house, I can’t ask him to take this step further. The realities of being disabled unfortunately limit how much I can do, but I do as much as I can.
KeTHeSa (KEep The HEart SAcred),
Asra Lokakona