Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
No matter how extraordinary human behaviour – in our own culture or elsewhere – there’s always an explanation for it. Exploring lifestyle, custom and ritual in traditional societies from India to British Columbia via New Guinea and the Holy Land, this anthropologist makes a very convincing case for the importance of understanding history, not just for explaining mysterious customs of the past but for avoiding the mistakes we repeat again and again.
So why do we do it? Why do we waste so much?
No matter how extraordinary human behaviour – in our own culture or elsewhere – there’s always an explanation for it. That’s what Marvin Harris argues very persuasively in Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches: The Riddles of Culture. It really opened my eyes.
In the cow section, for example, he explores why starving peasants in India today don’t go and kill the sacred cows and eat them. After all, the Rig Veda gives long descriptions of horse and cow sacrifices and meat eating in the India of 2,000 years ago. So Harris looks at why vegetarianism first took root in India and why cows came to be held sacred. It was essentially due to high population density at a time of food scarcity: cows are simply a more efficient way of turning grass into food. Plus they pull ploughs, they provide fertiliser in the form of dung and, in a good year, maybe a bullock too.
He looks at more apparently mysterious behaviour too. In the potlatch ceremony practised by some Native Americans, a clan chief would call a gathering and effectively give away the clan’s possessions. Why? Partly as a show of strength but partly to encourage his people to produce a surplus and to redistribute wealth where it’s needed.
Conspicuous consumption therefore does have a purpose. Producing a surplus – and consuming it, even wastefully in good years – can arguably contribute to food security.
So the question is then how much surplus do we need?
It’s surprising how little attention agronomists have given this problem but there is general agreement that around 130 per cent of a population’s nutritional requirements is sufficient to guarantee food security. Yet today, surplus levels have risen to about 190 per cent in the US and between 160 and 190 per cent in Europe. Add on what we feed to livestock and it rises to between 350 and 400 per cent in the richer countries.
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In his first book, campaigner, and historian Tristram Stuart looked into the rise of politically motivated vegetarianism in the 18th century. His second, Waste, is an urgent call to action. Nearly one billion people in the world go hungry every day while in North America and Europe, our farmers, manufacturers, supermarkets, and consumers discard between 30 and 50 per cent of our food supplies – enough to feed the world’s hungry more than three times over. As a result, freegans like Stuart are able to live on what is thrown away by our supermarkets. He’ll only stop taking food out of supermarket bins, he’s pledged, when they cease to throw good food away.
