[lit-ideas] Re: Alternative food sources
- From: "Mike Geary" <atlas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 30 Aug 2004 17:22:56 -0500
Greg Downing:
> This deeply held cultural belief in the naturalness (i.e., the
> not-interfered-with-by-people-ness, using the common post-18C sense of
> 'natural') possessed by familiar foods is pure romanticism and
> sentimentalism.
Are plastics "unnatural"? I used to take them to be because plastics are
human manufactured. But then, honey doesn't occur except through bee
manufacture. Is there an essential something to naturalness (ah, I hear JL
grumbling awake at the sound: "essential") to distinguish those things
brought about through "natural" bodily processes -- such as honey
production -- and those things produced external to bodies but through the
natural bodily processes of intellect, such as plastics? Is intellect
unnatural? My answer is no. We're just smart bees. No one would describe
anything within the animal kingdom as "unnatural". Animals do what animals
do. Only when it come to mankind are such judgments made. But man is not
outside nature any more than anything else. Intelligence is as natural as
dogs fucking. Whatever man does is natural. A genetically modified corn is
as "natural" as any corn you can buy in the supermarket. That doesn't mean
that GM is wise or the way to go -- I don't think it is, strongly I don't,
but has nothing to do with the "naturalness" of modified crops. If it can
be done, it ain't unnatural'
> If new modes of food-production or food-gathering don't
> fit the old paradigm, people over time can easily alter the paradigm
and/or
> substitute a new one.
I agree. My question was whether there's some ethical basis to my very
uneasy feelings about growing food by cloning stem cells rather than growing
crops and livestock. I think not, intellectually. But I lived on a farm
raising sheep during some very formative years and the idea of petri-dish
sheep is abhorrent and disgusting and vile and dispicable and horrible and
all those other things. For the last four billion years, life on earth has
been seasonal thing. It's hard to suddenly adapt to notion that now
there'll only the one season: Now. Now you can have anything you want
whenever you want it. When all our food comes from a factory instead of a
field, life will be different. Luddites to the left of me. Jokers to the
right.
> The assumption that the existing framework is immutable
Do you really think that most people on this list (as opposed, perhaps, to
Theoria) think that?
> Cultural
> modes that one has discovered by one's own work, or in the work of others,
> are not immutable simply because one has invested effort in discovering
> them, or is invested in the field of study that came up with them.
Agreed. In fact, nothing is immutable, though, I'm sure, everyone of us has
values she believes worthy of immutability. Although I agree wholly with
Andreas that the present factory farms are a blasphemy against life, still I
shiver at the notion of separating our human life yet another tier
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