[lit-ideas] Re: Alternative food sources
- From: Gregory {Greg} Downing <gd2@xxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 30 Aug 2004 10:00:08 -0400 (EDT)
At 11:39 PM 8/29/2004 -0400, JimKandJulieB@xxxxxxx wrote:
>I think the vat-grown is too unnatural, too close to soylent green, too
>suspicious (how do I *know* what it is that I'm eating??). It would certainly
>creep me out. It's too close to the laboratory (neither the wild nor home)
for me.
>
You're aware, aren't you, that virtually all domesticants (animal and
plant), including the ones most consumed in developed cultures like yours,
are far far different from their wild ancestors? The wild ancestor of maize,
for example, was more like grass, with those weensy little seeds along each
side of a small stalk. Pre-maize plants with mutant huge seeds were
selectively bred and cultivated in mesoamerica to produce plants with the
many rows of liquid-filled kernels that we now seem to assume are natural,
and advertise sometimes using depictions of precolumbians (on the equally
false assumption that they are natural in a way we are not). The ancestor of
cattle, the aurochs (long extinct, as often happens to the wild ancestor of
a major domesticant), stood six feet tall the the shoulders. Examples are
legion.
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. You are completely entitled to be romantic and sentimental,
but the fact is that the most recent and other imminent innovations in
modifying domesticants are nothing new -- domestication began in several
independent location around the world a decimillennium ago, in the
post-pleistocene/post-iceage period. And, in fact, the newest modes of
modification may well prove to involve more nuanced techniques (time will
tell) than those employed in the first ten thousand years of domestication.
The somewhat levistraussian discourse posted on expanding circles from pets
to wild animals fails to take into account that as circumstances change
culture too evolves in a dialectical or (etymologically and literally)
ecological fashion: 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. They don't need to treat a given cultural mode from a
given stretch of cultural history as immutable and fit new modes into that
framework somehow. It depends on how well or poorly they are seen to fit,
and the decisions that the aggregate culture makesabout those perceptions
over cultural time. The assumption that the existing framework is immutable
and that new modes should or will be evaluated as fitting into it somehow is
an erroneous though understandable assumption (but also easily avoided and
to be avoided), often seen in the work of those who study cultures. 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.
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