The film and the book that accompanies it are full of rare photos of Snyder in his serious Zen student days in the 50's, the heady early days of the counterculture in San Francisco and much else. It made me want to go back and re-read some of his poems and essays, which were hugely influential for me in the early 70's. So much that has happened since, from the Buddhist peace movement to deep ecology and the vital importance of supporting local economies, would be unthinkable without Snyder's work.
While I was reading all of this I was also struggling to come up with a concise response to a well-meaning but naive article extolling the virtues of vegetarianism in the most recent issue of Inquiring Mind magazine. The issues involved are vast and complicated. As luck would have it, I found that Snyder had long ago summed things up better than I could have hoped to, in the last essay in his book:
"Everyone who ever lived took the lives of other animals, pulled plants, plucked fruit, and ate. Primary people have their own ways of trying to understand the precept of non harming. They knew that taking life required gratitude and care. There is no death that is not somebody's food, no life that is not somebody's death. Some would take this as a sign that the universe is fundamentally flawed. This leads to a disgust with self, with humanity, and with nature. Otherworldly philosophies end up doing more damage to the planet (and human psyches) than the pain and suffering that is in the existential conditions they seek to transcend.
The archaic religion is to kill god and eat him. Or her. The shimmering food-chain, the food-web, is the scary, beautiful condition of the biosphere. Subsistence people live without excuses. The blood is on your own hands as you divide the liver from the gallbladder. You have watched the color fade from the glimmer of the trout. A subsistence economy is a sacramental economy because it has faced up to one of the critical problems of life and death: the taking of life for food. Contemporary people do not need to hunt, many cannot even afford meat, and in the developed world the variety of foods available to us makes the avoidance of meat an easy choice...Our distance from the source of our food enables us to be superficially more comfortable, and distinctly more ignorant.
Eating is a sacrament. The grace we say clears our hearts and guides the children and welcomes the guest, all at the same time. We looks at eggs, apples, and stew. They are evidence of plenitude, excess, a great reproductive exuberance. Millions of grains of grass-seed that will become rice or flour, millions of codfish fry that will never, and must never, grow to maturity. Innumerable little seeds are sacrifices to the food chain. A parsnip in the ground is a marvel of living chemistry, making sugars and flavors from each, air, water. And if we do eat meat it is the life, the bounce, the swish, of a great alert being with keen ears and lovely eyes, with foursquare feet and huge beating heart that we eat, let us not deceive ourselves.
We too will be offerings - we are all edible. And if we are not devoured quickly, we are big enough (like the old down trees) to provide a long slow meal to the smaller critters. Whale carcasses that sink several miles deep in the ocean feed organisms in the dark for fifteen years. (It seems to take about two thousand to exhaust the nutrients in a high civilization)."
Fast forward 21 years to today and one finds a more detailed, albeit less cosmic, perspective on the same issues here:
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2011/12/eating-animals/250179/#.TvEuU7skPjN.facebook
The common thread seems to be looking unflinchingly at the depth of our interdependence with other life forms, reallizing that both plants and animals are sentient, and real - which is to say non-conceptual, non-urban - experience of where food comes from. It's the Jeweled Net of Indra writ large, in the way that hunter-gatherer societies always knew it.
Posts
There are some beautiful words in this post. I am unqualified to enter into any discussion about Buddhism and vegetarianism, but there is of course a lot of wisdom in the idea of being enlightened and unflinching about one's food.
ReplyDeleteIn my mind, there is an essential truth about food: one should eat as little as possible, with mindfulness and reverence.
The vegetarian who is a glutton is not doing anything good for his health, the welfare of the planet or his fellow organisms, that is abundantly true. At the same time, it is possible to make the point that a diet that includes animals can theoretically be sustainable and ethical.
That said, however, I read the linked article as a grand rationalization of meat eating. They make the above point: that eating animals is not NECESSARILY a bad thing for one's health or for the environment. This is questionable: from a public-health perspective, many of the healthiest populations on the planet are vegetarian. From the health perspective, it is certainly possible to have healthy vegetarian and non-vegetarian diets. It's just hard to do either. I would argue it's easier to be a healthy vegetarian than a healthy carnivore, but that's a different subject.
The authors then go on to extol the virtues of ethical, pasture raised meat. There is no question that these practices are better than the factory equivalents. But does that make them ethical? We know that eating animals is the most inefficient way to get calories, which after all, are energy from the sun converted by the miracle of photosynthesis to useable fuel. The farther up the food chain we eat, the more inefficient our calories are, by definition. This means that any time we choose meat, we are indulging in a wasteful treat.
In the context of the hunter-gatherer, where grazing animals converted the inedible grasslands to calories for the hunter, that inefficiency is a reasonable compromise. Does it still make sense, as we have moved from hunter-gatherer to a dense population of city dwellers? We might indulge in the fantasy of returning to hunter-gatherer ways, or of the family farm with its self-contained web of crops and animals, but that would require a downward readjustment of the global population, which is of course impossible.
This means that regular meat-eating- particularly the ethical kinds- is an indulgence of the very wealthy and entitled, just like any other kind of overindulgence. No rationalization of animal-eating can escape this.
If we hope to create a global society without suffering and deprivation, we must develop a new way of eating and feeding ourselves and our brothers and sisters. I doubt it is possible to include meat-eating in this new diet.
Rationalizations like the Atlantic article muddy the waters, confusing this basic truth. And, as we have seen, once the idea of "ethical" animal-eating takes hold, humans have a tendency to go meat-mad, putting layers of pastured pork belly on top of their bacon-and-foie-gras sandwich. It turns meat eating from the occasional indulgence- which is the only way it makes sense in any way shape or form- to a somehow ethical choice. And the new piety of the pastured meat zealot congratulates overindulgence as a somehow moral act.
Anyway, some thoughts as I head over to our Christmas meal.
Peter
Great post Kevin!
ReplyDeleteHi Peter,
ReplyDeleteThanks for your thoughtful comments. There are many layers to all of this. I will say for starters though that you're wrong that eating meat is or has to be a wasteful treat. As Lierre Keith puts it in her very worthwhile (albeit uneven) book "The Vegetarian Myth," if we care about our food being sustainable the first question to ask is "does this food conetribute to topsoil depletion or not"? For all row crops - including soy and grains grown thousands of miles from where most of us live for vegan/vegetarian diets, the answer is "yes."
Snyder goes into the complex issue of what kind of of population of humans the planet can support, as do Keith and her even more radical friend Derrick Hansen. When you look at these issues really deeply as they do, you start to see how agriulture itself - and civilization, in the sense of living in cities - are the root problems.
Neither I nor any of these authors are arguing for meat mania! I would encourage you to check out this tour on the Weston Price Foundation web site for more information:
http://www.westonaprice.org/about-the-foundation/vegetarian-tour
I was a vegetarian for many years myself and still eat that way most of the time. I appreciate very much the compassionate intention behind your approach!
Kevin-
ReplyDeleteI agree that there are many layers to all of this. I have been personally transformed by personal experience with malnourishment among the poor, and I think this discussion- how we can nourish everyone on the planet so that everyone can be healthy and inspired by their food- is the most important one we can have. It seems that you are fairly entrenched in your position on animals as a food source, and I have little chance of persuading you. But it's good to have the discussion anyway.
I am familiar with the position that civilization and agriculture are "the problem"; in fact I heard this recently at a Weston Price seminar at a Food Justice conference. I understand the logic- that crops always require repurposing land from nature to food, and that we destroy man's nature as a hunter-gatherer when we do this. However, the inescapable truth is that civilization is made of people, and the insistence that civilization is the problem is that people are the problem, which is an argument I am unwilling to make. The Weston Price people- and anyone who argues that we ought to return to a hunter-gatherer food system- are advocating (albeit indirectly) that we must eliminate a large portion of the planet's population. Lierre Kieth apparently advocates for exactly this in the last chapter of her book. Her blunt advice: "Don't Have Children."
It is true that conventionally, industrially grown crops lead to topsoil depletion. Of course, the vast majority of meat animals are fed these same conventionally grown crops, and their inefficiency of converting these grains to calories compounds the environmental damage per calorie. So conventional meat is worse than conventional grain. Pastured, organic meat is better, though pastures also lead to soil depletion and erosion, plus there is just not enough grassland to graze enough cattle to feed a significant human population. If there were, we'd have no problem at all. But there is a problem with sustaining people on wild animals, and that's why agriculture was invented.
Agriculture and vegetarian diets have the advantage of feeding many more people more efficiently than animals, which is why the invention of agriculture (wheat in the Mediterranean, rice in Asia, and corn in the Americas) led to the population explosion we know as "civilization". Civilization led to the inventions of art, religious practice, and language. Is it our choice to eliminate these things, destroy most of the world's population, and recapture our hunter-gatherer lifestyle? Because that's what we do when we say "agriculture and civilization are the problem".
It is very true that any diet- vegetarian or carnivorous- which is based on synthetic (conventional, industrial) fertility depletes soil and is unsustainable. That's why organic agriculture- which builds soils by definition- is so important (we've discussed this before). So, the organic, vegetarian diet- the most efficient and sustainable way of eating we know of- is the smartest choice.
I say this as a lover of meat, and the food traditions associated with it. I would love to rationalize meat-eating as sustainable and compassionate, and I have been an advocate of pastured meat myself. But in my heart of hearts, I just can't figure out how a carnivorous diet can work in the long term for our race and our planet. This makes me an aspiring vegetarian I suppose. It is human to want meat and to celebrate it, but I think it is going too far to pretend that a diet based on animals is sustainable, affordable, or compassionate.
I likewise appreciate your compassionate, conscious approach to eating!
Peter
Hi Peter-
ReplyDeleteOne of Lierre Keith's key points - and I think you would get a lot from reading her book - is that there is no one size fits all answer to "what is the responsible thing to eat." Much depends on where one lives. Organic and vegetarian is not a universal solution, for reasons she and the Weston Price folks go into in great detail. Personally I could be happy as a clam on a lifetime diet of South Indian vegetarian food, but it isn't healthy and not what our bodies are designed to eat. The evidence against grain-based diets and vegetarianism is compelling to me and I say this as someone who truly doesn't crave meat and could quite easily get by without eating it if I thought it was the right choice.
Gary Snyder addresses the population issue earlier in the same essay I quoted in my post (p. 177 of "The Practice of the Wild"):
"There are criteria for discussing the carrying capacity of the planet. Proposing an ecologically optimal number of humans is not an automatic demand that some be killed or that abortion become mandatory, as some people seem to think. It is a proposal for discussion. If acted on, the reduction in numbers would be accomplished by a lower birthrate over decades or even centuries. I once speculated that 10 percent of the world's current (1990) population of five plus billion might be a target to aim for, one that would guarantee space and habitat for all, including wildlife. My figure has been quotes with a certain disbelief - citing my "obsession with wildnerness." Population was 10 percent of what it is now about the year 1650! At that time the 550 million or so souls on earth were living in the presence of great arthitecture, art, and literature and debating long-established philosophies and religions - the same ones we are still grappling with."
The huge increase in population we've had since about 1950 is almost entirely due to petrochemically "juiced" agriculture since WWII. Again Keith and others go into the numbers so I won't go into this at length, but bottom line is it looks to me like the planet will get to somehting like Snyder's optimal numbers (the same as Keith's) eventually anyway, albeit with incalculable suffering and catastrophe along the way.
No we're not going to see a return to hunter/gatherer lifestyles, but without a recognition of the depth of the mess we've made for ourselves we're in no position to plan for a better future. "Sustainable organic agriculture" needs to be seen for the oxymoron that it is. More profoundly, we ought to be able to talk seriously about plans for reducing human population on the scale Snyder and Keith are talking about out of a love for the vast number of species that our numbers continue to render extinct, the vanishing forests, polluted and decimated oceans, on and on. In light of those realities I think that the radicalism of folks like Keith and, more articulately, Derrick Jensen and other "anarcho primitives" looks more and more like plain common sense given the predicament our planet is in. In that context one sees pretty quickly how ludicrous it is to think that individual dietary choices we might make are going to make a meaniungful difference in saving or damning the planet.