Last Sunday, I watched David Attenborough’s autobiographical film about his career in wildlife documentaries, where he is still going strong as he approaches 100. All of us have likely heard his voice even if we may not know who he is. Attenborough, it turns out from interviews, was once skeptical of climate change, and his views shifted greatly in the late 1990s while doing filming of once-familiar locations in the field. In A Life on Our Planet, he pinpoints the beginnings of the destructive shift in human societies to about two thousand years ago (for reasons that I do not understand 🙃).
One impasse we have when considering the climate crisis is that a lot of what is said seems like a new apocalypticism. Americans are especially wary of that, as we have a problem with cults and fanaticism, and the predictions of the climate crisis sometimes seem like that. While there is definitely an idealist current among climate activists, from a scientific standpoint, the projected maps of 2100 generated by simulations need to happen somehow. In one of the models, the habitable zones will give way to desert at just above my latitude. Roughly 42°N up to the poles will be tolerable. There are differences between models, but none is exactly stellar.
Most people coming at this from the scientific community understand the climate crisis as less of an apocalypse and more like a cancer diagnosis for a well-studied subtype, where the treatment is unpleasant, but we do have a good prognosis if we get started now. Again, the change in habitable zones and precipitation bands has to happen somehow, and that “somehow” will be catastrophic — wildfires, floods, droughts, and other disasters leading to the mass deaths of many human and nonhuman animals. It’s difficult to convey this to many in the public, so we talk past one another.
The unfortunate problem is that many of the treatments involve structural changes to how we live (like the burden of replacing highways with high-speed rail that can get you from Chicago to New York in just under three hours, with devastating implications for Thanksgiving guest lists). As much as I am disgusted by haul videos (which encourage overconsumption) and flummoxed by the term “outfit repeating” (isn’t that just getting value out of your clothes?), my rants will not actually do that much to further passing regulations and injecting tax dollars into forethoughtful projects.
There is also the delicate problem of this quotation from Proclus’ Timaeus Commentary, II.215.15, trans. Runia & Share:
For even matters that seem insignificant enjoy providence and are important to the extent that they are dependent on the gods, whereas things that are important in terms of their own nature, when separated from the divine, appear as wholly insignificant and of no value.
We have spent nearly two thousand years with a spiritual wildfire sweeping around the world undermining, and in many cases shattering, communities’ theurgic rituals that put them in rhythm with the myriad divine beings. Erysichthon’s grove-cutting pales in comparison to what has happened. (Here’s a poem about that.) Communities under recent stress, many of them indigenous, often classify these under the term “traditional ways of knowing,” which tends to boil down to sets of practices that recognize kinship with place and the other beings that inhabit it through a set of theurgic traditions that a people has been given by numinous beings and Gods, a relationship which is celebrated by mythic traditions and motifs. Recognizing what is sacred and acting on it are crucial, but many people nowadays are averse to the sacred — just see all of the Westerners trying to create a secularized x philosophy or religion where it is removed of all of its deities and myths for the “true core” of it — which spells disaster for our capacity to truly make things right on a societal level.
I do believe that there are things we can do, though, in the realm of “what is up to us” in an embodied sense, beyond simply being engaged in our local polis. The big one is food waste, and households contribute significantly to this — the average wastes 31.9%. Convergently, after thinking for several years about issues in Platonism regarding humans, animals, and plants, I have a few other thoughts about food waste that pull from Platonic metaphysics.
Cetaceans have always fascinated me. One of the first CDs I got after my parents gave me a CD player in my late preteens was an hour of dolphin songs. I listened to it frequently because it reminded me of Star Trek 4: Save the Whales (yes, I know) and of a book I read at around the same time, The Music of Dolphins, about a feral child raised by a coastal pod of dolphins. I await what we discover now that our technology is assisting us with decoding cetacean speech — perhaps one day letting us talk to them and apologize for the devastation we unleashed when we did not recognize them as intelligent like us, when we wantonly destroyed them without limit (as Attenborough so eloquently described in his testimony).
By the time I was born, whaling and related species’ slaughter had already been a contentious practice for some years. A cookbook I bought a few years ago, which viewed itself as an anthropological snapshot of Nordic countries’ cuisines, included several cetacean meat recipes — not because the author thought anyone should eat them, but because he wanted to preserve what would soon be an obsolete practice in Nordic countries.
It was relatively straightforward to come to understand cetaceans as worthy of respect once we had the capacity to record and distribute audio of whales’ songs and dolphins’ clicks. We have less of a capacity to do this with plants, despite years of research showing that they share nutrients (preferentially with kin; they can tell) and that many of them communicate through root systems. They scream when we cut them, even if we cannot hear them.
When I’m reading in Platonism, I’m sometimes struck by the confidence with which we create a hierarchy: ourselves, then other animals, and — last of all — plants. We have a rational, spirited, and appetitive soul. Animals, it is said, do not have a rational soul, but a spirited and an appetitive soul; plants possess only the appetitive soul. The more I think about this, the more I consider how these boundaries are not about the intrinsic worth of a species, but about the limits of our embodied capacity, a material echo of likeness and unlikeness spilled out across a gradient of species, blossoming into the web of life. Partiality cuts the soul apart and partitions her into a specific individual of a specific species, and the sensory landscape through which she views the world is a huge factor in how she ascribes worth to other living beings.
We cannot completely get the embodied mind of others in Animalia. We definitely struggle deeply with understanding how Plantae makes decisions without brains. In other words, the relative center a soul is working with will always be the species she has incarnated into, regardless of her incarnation’s culture, and it’s easy to map other beings onto her experiences based on their likeness to her own embodied squishiness. We got a chill in our hearts about cetaceans because many of those species may have language (like us). We feel nervous about elephants because they mourn their dead — because they have rituals (like us). We like crows because they are clever and use tools (like us). We have less capacity for empathy when we think about trees screaming as they are cut down or arugula fighting us when we chop it to pieces, neither of which we can sense without data collection mechanisms.
What is true about being alive is that, unless we are photosynthesizers, we have to eat something else. Unless it is fruit or a something that can be pruned, we have to kill to eat. Even the pruning induces suffering. Most people limit murder to only other humans. Increasingly, many limit the term to humans, elephants, bonobos, various cetaceans, and similar. In the case of veganism and vegetarianism, to Animalia, with minor differences in where the cutoff is made. What if we instead thought differently about this whole situation? What if we actually accounted for the fact that we are all living beings?
There are definitely reasons to mindfully limit eating meat out of civilizational altruism — namely, it is resource-intensive to do so beyond the animals that are required for grassland ecosystem health, crop fertilization, mowing solar panels, or utilizing inhabited land that is not good enough for agriculture. (This is likely only until our population peaks and re-stabilizes at a lower point in a few hundred years; the point of stability will impact how much land becomes available. One way early climate messaging went wrong was by not making it clear how waiting to act would require more drastic changes and sacrifices, much like how most overconsumption problems could be fixed with minimal pain early, but are usually only treated after someone’s debt and/or hoarding hits a breaking point.)
There are many people who stretch their budgets to ensure that they are purchasing responsible meat. And, with human genetic diversity, there are also many for whom a vegan or vegetarian diet would not work very well, such as those with Vitamin A conversion problems (a genetic thing) or anemia. There are even times in everyone’s lives when dietary changes make sense. A popular plant-based recipe creator recently had a hysterectomy for fibroids and integrated animal collagen sources (chicken bone broth) for her surgery recovery period because she is science-based, and collagen improves healing outcomes.
From a Platonizing perspective, I am coming to understand that the best position to have about eating in general is to minimize food waste and to eat lifestyle-reasonable portions.
I generate food waste.
You generate food waste.
Everyone except for those strange zero-waste YouTubers and several thousand of their followers generates food waste.
The most just thing we can do — and, coincidentally, something that the UN has prioritized in fighting climate change — is to eliminate as much food waste as possible. Almost everything on our plate, whether it came to us by blood or by sap, died to be there.
Most of my own food waste happens when my expectations for my energy levels do not match reality. I stopped wasting as much when I learned to shop with my future energy in mind. I also take care of my future self by chopping extra alliums (except I press garlic fresh), doing extra veg prep if I already have the cutting board out, and pureeing ginger and garlic with oil to freeze in ice trays.
I precook and freeze proteins. I have a Dash egg cooker that I steam fish or eggs in. I buy salmon on sale, cube it, and wrap portions in parchment paper to freeze. My goal is to have modular ingredients that blends variety with simplicity.
This may sound similar to what I say about creating a daily prayer practice, and there is a reason for that. Life is often cognitively exhausting. Routines and foresight ensure that the inertial threshold is small. If we were robots who always had the same amount of energy and the same daily routine, we would not have a global food waste crisis, nor would we see a lot of pagans and polytheists suddenly feel time-claustrophobic when someone brings up daily devotions. None of our lives is an ideal. Such a thing is impossible in embodiment.
Figuring out how to work with ourselves rather than against ourselves is the key to actually keeping the promises we make to ourselves, to honoring the living temple that is the cosmos, and to showing proper piety to the Gods.
I am definitely a work in progress when it comes to food waste. Just this week, a pack of tofu in my refrigerator with a due date of next week started bulging up, and it went bad. I was upset. As I became more mindful of what I throw out, I’ve stopped buying bagged onions because half of them go bad before I have gotten to them. Potatoes also don’t seem to last the weeks that they once did when I was younger, maybe due to a change in how they are processed, so I’ve stopped buying them unless I know that I want to make a recipe that week.
Of course, these issues are far more complex than I can do justice to in a blog post. Honing in on food waste and trying to rely less on my sense of empathy and likeness does not change that many beings are suffering needlessly at the hands of human beings, such as captive orcas held in tiny pools and the many victims of the poaching industry. Again, much of this mindset involves training myself to think differently about non-Animalia. And I am aware that I may have an easier time of it than others because one of my earliest toddler memories is of going out in the woods with one or both of my parents on the hill where we lived and seeing the forest break into clear-cut land, a chilling and horrifying experience of death and devastation that has stuck with me ever since.
It would be easy for me to come at all of you and lay out the exact contours of where the ethical, moral, and/or virtue lines are with food. I am not going to do that. Instead, I have presented a snapshot of how I am dealing with these issues, with the hope that it helps us all reflect on how deeply we are tied to other life on Earth in the everyday.
(Note: I am aware that there are some charities that are involved in redirecting grocery store and supermarket nearly-expired food to soup kitchens and people in need. Those are great efforts, and volunteers are always needed. I intentionally kept the focus of this discussion on household waste. That’s also why I stopped short of going into a discussion of fast fashion or plastics even though both are also relevant to the broader topic of consumption.)
KALLISTI 