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.