Eating Onions and Other Root Vegetables, Continued

So it may in fact be true that I have very little empathy for root vegetables, at least not to the point of not eating them, as practitioners of the Jain religion do. But my feelings about the matter are not at zero, so I have to reconcile them somehow. Undoubtedly the vast majority of people in the world do not think twice about the the fact that they kill the vegetables that they eat. Even now, at the age of almost 53, I have not lost the childlike habit of attributing emotions to nonhuman life forms and even to inanimate objects. This propensity in children is apparently the reason why a book like Goodnight Moon was so popular. Children are natural animists and everything is relatable and communicable. And as I said, I have never outgrown the impulse. I will select the ugly apple from the pile at the grocery store because no one else seems to want it. When I see someone pluck a leaf off of a tree I cringe. I feel the same way about a car getting scratched, however, or even worse, some crazy person taking a hammer to a statue, but the feeling in these cases is qualitatively different from how I feel when human beings do things to living things be they other humans, nonhuman animals or plants. I recall one time trying in vain to keep our family's German Shepherd from stepping, unbeknownst to him, on a pretty little caterpillar. I must have been all of six or seven, I imagine.

So about this problem of reconciliation. Irrespective of scholarly work on the origins of religion, I somehow feel that this need to reconcile a contradiction that is central to being a human being is at the root of religious practice. Interestingly, a young Brazilian filmmaker just released a fictional ethnography, an idea that I love, in which fisherman spear fish so that they can eat them, but then cradle them in their arms while they die, murmuring comforting and apologetic sounds as they expire. Such is the nature of sacrifice, something that humans have practiced since hunter gatherer times. Should it be the same when one eats a potato? I don't see why not, but it is surely better to have it take the form of mindfulness or some other modern psychological-emotional exercise or practice, such as being aware of where the potato came from, what it took to grow, who harvested it, et cetera. The point is not necessarily to not eat potatoes, pace Jainism, but to eat them with some kind of humility and realization of what such an act entails.

Greetings from the Valtellina!

For the next month or so, I will be writing from Talamona, a small town just east of Morbegno, as if that will tell you anything. Morbegno is a somewhat bigger town that is at the mouth of the Valtellina, just east of Lake Como. Bellagio? Where George Clooney has a house? At least I think he still has a house there. He did at one time.

In any case, it is very cold here, and it is nice to hear the local dialect, which will come in handy in creating my Franco Fasiolo character. Frécc! is what one hears out on the street often: Cold! And boy is it.

Typical for small towns in Italy, there are three grocery stores, one that rivals any supermarket in the United States, and two smaller ones, one of which is very good in both quality and price, all within walking distance in this town of 5,000.

It is in this nice small one that I set this post. Something about the change of scenery, and the extreme cold, has given me my appetite back. Before I left, I could barely eat a peanut butter sandwich, and had cut out wine and coffee all together. I actually felt quite good.

But something about the change made me instantly begin again with the wine, coffee and tea, and I actually bought a two-pack of canned tuna with which I made pasta, and then another single that I used to make a sandwich.

Today I was in the market and saw other things that looked appealing: sausages, a pork roast, slices of veal . . . I almost bought the veal, along with butter and white wine. I already had capers at home, to make veal piccata. Somehow the tuna was the gateway protein, leading first to veal and then to pork, a dangerous path.

Then I thought of the poor baby calf that was slaughtered to make the veal, probably after leading a miserable life, and I just couldn't do it. I sadly but also solidly put the other makings for the dish back on the shelf and continued with my shopping, worried that I might get to the point where I just can't eat anything anymore because of the moral and ethical implications.

So why, I thought on my walk back to my apartment, can I still eat vegetables, given what I know, from the latest research, about their sentient abilities? Certainly a big part of the difference is that many plants can be eaten without harm; in fact, they thrive on it. See my earlier post on pruning roses. And if I am going to be completely honest, I don't think any amount of research is going to make me feel bad about eating an onion or a clove of garlic. I am not a Jain, after all, as much as I admire their philosophy. Briefly, Jains will not eat any plant that must be killed to be harvested: so no root vegetables (garlic, onion, carrot . . . ) but certainly apples and things like peas and beans do not present a problem because these can be picked without killing the plant from which they originate.

I think it all goes back to a philosophy I developed when I was in my early to mid twenties or so, one of a sensual morality. If doing something repulses me, it is wrong, and no amount of rational thought will change my mind about it. Could I or would I kill a calf so that I could eat its meat? Not a chance. I would starve first.

But there is something about the ontology of an onion that removes it so far from the realm of my senses, the theater in which my sensual morality flourishes, that it does not pose a problem for me to kill it and eat it. And I doubt if any amount of scientific research on the sophisticated lives of onions will change how I feel about it.

EXCERPT: Davos (4)

Franco thought of what kind of wordless performance he could present to his interlocutors. A dance? Was that goat trying to tell him something with her gush of urine? It produced such a tender sense of vulnerability and empathy in Franco. Isn’t that what is needed? All of these words and reasons did nothing. It was like a water balloon exploding, not linear at all. Maybe that was the trick. Multiple stories all at once. Here it is my friends, everything you need to know, all at once. No, not know. Feeling, not reason, is what is needed, a dance, a gush, an opera in which everyone sang their song on stage at the same time, cacophonous and opaque, but communicating nonetheless, but feeling and empathy, and not knowledge, not reason or argument, flows and fluency. Don’t they see the florid and fruiting fig tree? Franco thought, don’t they see it, and feel it? This is what they need. The noisy fig tree that speaks nothing at all yet says everything.

Now Franco found himself amid the trees, beautiful and terrifying in their number and anonymity. They soared above him and blotted out the light, and trapped the moisture, like big wicks that sucked the water from the earth and the air, storing it in their cells, thousands and millions of cells, in their pulp and in their bark, cells in every twig and stem and leaf. Franco was thirsty and had already drained the measly two bottles of water that he had brought with him. He felt the lightness of dehydration that was thrilling and worrisome at the same time. So different he was from a tree, who could just suck moisture from the air. Maybe he could also, and the moist air felt good on his sweaty skin, but he could still feel the dryness inside of him. His legs felt skinny, as if they weighed hardly anything at all, and again he had the feeling that as he walked he was not really moving forward, but was just pushing off in space, floating, without ever gaining traction that would make forward movement possible. Or he was moving forward, but there was no way of telling, since everything that surrounded him seemed the same, the lack of differentiation in the landscape yielding space without dimension or direction. It was a trick of the trees, and of the oblique road whose slope was not a slope, but exhausting nonetheless. Franco’s thirst was gone, and hunger was a distant memory. He knew then that he was in trouble.

Animal Rights Scholars

I was listening to a leading animal rights scholar speaking on National Public Radio (NPR) the other day. In elucidating his position in favor of animal rights, he made sure to point out that animals are sentient beings that deserve rights because they have interests. He then went on to contrast this special condition of animals, which of course includes human beings, with plants that are an example of beings, perhaps he said entities, that are not sentient and that do not have interests (!).

Why do animal rights scholars so casually and confidently make this assumption? Are they aware of the science around the topic? Do they even have an interest in it? It seems not. They just blithely make the same mistake that people who ascribe rights only to human beings do. Can't they take just that one extra step? What can we think of our academic system when it is populated with such parochial and illogical thinkers?

Pruning Roses

I read that we prune roses for our own human purposes. It makes sense to me. But it seems that roses and many other plants, trees included, do much better and look much healthier when they are pruned or trimmed. I can only think that the way plants are situated domestically often protects them predators to whom they would be exposed and in concert with whom they have evolved. So isn't human pruning just a substitute for the foraging that would be done by other animals under wild conditions? A theory based on the agency of allergies comes to mind, one that is often applied to both biological and sociological dynamics. For example, the proliferation of allergies in modern industrial society is theorized to be the result of human immune systems being undertaxed. Without anything to do, they produce bodily reactions that are then pathologized as various diseases, specifically as autoimmune disorders. I think the same malaise can be seen in plants that are not regularly trimmed or nibbled on. In other words: Viva la parassita!