On Food and Morality
I sometimes think much of the morality we have manufactured over the centuries comes from humans attempting to deny that they are also animals. After all, the “original sin” is sex, something that we must do to procreate, as animals. So then the next thing to moralize about is what we eat, which again, we must do to survive.
Some groups moralize about eating cows, others about horses, dogs and cats, others about eating pigs, lobsters and cheeseburgers. Others moralize about eating any kind of meat, denying once again our animal nature as omnivores.
Should we judge the lion for being a carnivore when he was designed that way? We accept the lion the way he is, but then we can choose not to eat meat because it’s “wrong” to eat meat, and then we can feel all superior over lions.
Stephen Jay Gould has a very popular essay called “Nonmoral Nature,” available in the collection Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes, where he talks about this parasitic wasp that would seem cruel by some human standards. So here’s how it works. The mother selects a big juicy insect and injects it with a paralyzing poison. Then she injects her egg into its belly so it can live in the warm body and eat its way out until it’s big enough to survive on its own. The host dies a slow death, and the baby wasp emerges, cracking through the carapace like it’s busting through the shell of an egg.
We can’t call it immoral. It’s just nature. You have to admit, it’s kinda cool too.