May 1, 2007

Dear Colleague:  

    Ever since I used up my Biblical span of three-score years and ten, I worried about consuming more than my fair share of resources. It hasn't made me eat less, of course, or even less expensively. I just fell more guilt ridden. The human omnivore appeals to me only when he is new to the world. A chubby infant greedily tugging at his mother's breast, or swallowing globs of flavored mush makes me smile. But a grown person eating is not a pretty sight, which is why no pretense to civilization can be taken seriously without some effort at covering up. Ernest Becker offers an odious image of us as a devouring beast. "If at the end of each person's life he were to be presented with the living spectacle of al that he had organically incorporated in order to stay alive, he might well feel horrified by the living energy he had ingested. The horizon of a gourmet, or even the average person, would be taken up with hundreds of chickens, flocks of lambs and sheep, a small herd of steers, sties full of pigs, and rivers of fish. The din alone would be deafening" (Escape from Evil, p. 2).

    I am a city person. Not all the literature on rural charm and virtue makes me want to live in the countryside, least of all on a working farm, which, being the scene of life, is necessarily also the scene of violence and death. Ronald Blythe gives an account of oppression and violence in rural England at the beginning of the twentieth century (Akenfield). Reinaldo Arenas does the same, only in far more gory detail, for Cuba in the 1960s. "Violence was everywhere," he wrote. "Sheep would be hung by their legs to have their throats slit. Pigs were stabbed with a long knife thrust into the heart, and before they were dead, alcohol would be poured on them and lit, to burn off all their hair before they were roasted. The bulls that were to work in the fields were castrated, as were the horses. The castration of a bull was one of the most violent and cruel acts I have ever witnessed: The bull's testicles were tied with a thick wire and then stretched out onto an iron and stone anvil. With a sledgehammer the testicles would be pounded until the tendons and connections to the rest of the body were severed. Only the bags remained hanging and in time would wither away. The pain suffered by those bulls was so intense that one could tell when the testicles had been destroyed because the animal's teeth would loosen. Many died, but others survived and were no longer bulls but oxen--that is, tame, castrated beasts used to pull plow" (Before the Night Falls).

    There was a scene in Public Television of Stephen Hawking experiencing weightlessness as the airplane carrying him dived from a great height. Afterward, he urged that humans move into space, for they cannot hope to survive for long if they remain on earth. The deadly human virus projected into pristine outer space? I wasn't at all pleased even as I shoved another chunk of "orange beef" (courtesy of Husnus) into my mouth.

Best wishes,

Yi-Fu