as small as a world and as large as alone, Seeing as Nita could talk to animals and such, did...

11:58am July 19, 2014

peregrine-rnendicant asked: Seeing as Nita could talk to animals and such, did she ever think about becoming vegetarian? Just something I was wondering after re-reading the part in A Wizard Abroad where she said she could eat a horse, then realized it probably wasn't the best thing to say in that household.

dduane:

Well, who knows, it might be an option that she’d eventually consider. There’s this, though: if you’re a wizard, you’re just as likely to be able to get into a conversation with a lettuce as with a horse. In fact Nita gets into this with her dad at one point in Wizard’s Holiday when they’re out shopping:

They went down the vegetable aisle and got potatoes, celery, tomatoes, and a head of lettuce, which Nita very pointedly handed to her dad. “The crisper this time,” she said. “He’s counting on you.”

“‘He’?” Nita’s dad said, turning the lettuce over several times in his hands and looking at it closely. “How can you tell?”

“If you’re a wizard, you can look at the gender equivalent of the word lettuce in the Speech,” Nita said. “Or, on the other hand, you can just ask him.”

“I’d probably prefer to pass on that second option,” Nita’s dad said as they came to the cold cuts and prepackaged meats. “I don’t know if I’d want to talk to something I might eat.”

“Daddy, this might sound weird to you,” Nita said, looking for her preferred brand of bologna, “but some things are less upset about being eaten than they are about being wasted.”

…The point being made here, in the background as it were, is that we have filled our modern environment with life forms that are tailored to be used or interacted with in a specific way — and this process has been ongoing since the Stone Age, if not earlier. Nor does this process seem likely to cease in the short term. If we’re going to continue to use these other life forms to live on while we investigate other ways of supporting ourselves, therefore, it behooves us at the very least to do so as respectfully as we can. Your business as a wizard is to be polite to your food no matter where it comes from: and to select, when you can, options that increase entropy as little as possible (i.e., free-range almost anything as opposed to battery or intensively raised options that substantially increase the originating creature’s stress or reduce its life to a brief grim shadow of what it was intended to be).

Now, at issue here also are any number of other factors, such as Nita (like most teenagers still living at home and being financially supported by other people) not being in full control of her own food supply at the moment. But whether we like it or not, always at the heart of the discussion will be the uncomfortable truth that nearly all animal life cycles on this planet are founded on the termination of the life cycles of other animal or vegetable life. This is likely to remain the case for human beings, at the very least, until we find a way to directly change inert matter into edible substances that suit our nutritional needs.That strikes me as a fairly expensive technology to develop, and one that won’t be widely available any time soon.

…And even if the whole planet abruptly went vegetarian, one thing could not be changed: the fact that the human species as a whole, as now constituted, is never more than a year or two from dying of starvation.* Food security is an extremely interesting and unsettling subject and worth looking into.

…So this is a complex subject, and one that each wizard is going to have to get to grips with independently — always with the understanding that no one person’s choices in this regard are more or less “right” than anyone else’s. …But a good question! Thanks for that.

*I can’t find the cite for this statement at the moment, but when I first read the article from which it comes I was satisfied with the logic used to arrive at the conclusion. …And extremely unnerved, especially at a time when climate change is increasingly manifesting itself in unanticipated ways.

I’ve always assumed that plants want to be alive just as much as animals want to be alive, and that all life lives off the death of other life, and that while there are choices that we can make, vegetarianism isn’t one I would make, because I don’t put plants below animals. I don’t mind that other people choose differently, as long as they respect my choices.

Notes: