The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [142]
So even if we wanted to go back to hunting and gathering wild species, it’s not an option: There are far too many of us and not nearly enough of them. Fishing is the last economically important hunter-gatherer food chain, though even this foraging economy is rapidly giving way to aquaculture, for the same reasons hunting wild game succumbed to raising livestock. It is depressing though not at all difficult to imagine our grandchildren living in a world in which fishing for a living is history.
For most of us today hunting and gathering and growing our own food is by and large a form of play. That’s not to say there aren’t still subcultures of people, especially in rural places, who hunt some portion of the protein in their diet, feed themselves out of their gardens, and even earn an income foraging for wild delicacies such as morels or ramps or abalone. But the exorbitant price these wild tastes bring in the marketplace is only proof that very few of us can be serious foragers anymore.
So though a hunter-gatherer food chain still exists here and there to one degree or another, it seems to me its chief value for us at this point is not so much economic or practical as it is didactic. Like other important forms of play, it promises to teach us something about who we are beneath the crust of our civilized, practical, grown-up lives. Foraging for wild plants and animals is, after all, the way the human species has fed itself for 99 percent of its time on earth; this is precisely the food chain natural selection designed us for. Ten thousand years as agriculturists has selected for a small handful of new traits suited to our new existence (a tolerance for lactose in adults is one example), but for the most part we still, somewhat awkwardly, occupy the bodies of foragers and look out at the world through the hunter’s eye.
“We don’t have to go back to the Pleistocene,” wrote Paul Shepard, an environmental philosopher who exalted wildness and deplored modernity, “because our bodies never left.” Somehow I doubted I would feel quite that at home stalking game in the woods, but it was reassuring to think that in doing so I would be contesting only my upbringing, not my genes.
My wager in undertaking this experiment is that hunting and gathering (and growing) a meal would perforce teach me things about the ecology and ethics of eating that I could not get in a supermarket or fast-food chain or even on a farm. Some very basic things: about the ties between us and the species (and natural systems) we depend upon; about how we decide what in nature is good to eat and what is not; and about how the human body fits into the food chain, not only as an eater but as a hunter and, yes, a killer of other creatures. For one of the things I was hoping to accomplish by rejoining, however briefly, this shortest and oldest of food chains was to take some more direct, conscious responsibility for the killing of the animals I eat. Otherwise, I felt, I really shouldn’t be eating them. While I’d already slaughtered a handful of chickens in Virginia, the experience had disconcerted me and left the hardest questions untouched. Killing doomed domesticated animals on an assembly line, where you have to keep pace with the expectations of others, is an excellent way to remain only semiconscious about what it is you’re really doing. By contrast the hunter, at least as I imagined him, is alone in the woods with his conscience.
And this, I suppose, points to what I was really after in taking up hunting and gathering: to see what it’d be like to prepare and eat a meal in full consciousness of what was involved. I realized that this had been the ultimate destination of the journey I’d been on since traveling to an Iowa cornfield: to look as far into the food chains that support us as I could look, and recover the fundamental