Is it possible to eat anything ethically? - Houston Chronicle

Are you a vegan? How adorable, not to mention annoying and elitist. Also, your almond milk is killing the honeybees.

Pescatarian? The oceans are already over-fished. You are not helping.

Plain old chicken-fried meat eater? So maybe you know nothing about factory farms, meatpacking plants, exploitation of workers and, well, anything else.

But these days, what you eat isn’t just a political choice but a spiritual one. Not just your body but your soul, the culture tells us, is shaped by what you eat.

You may think you’re doing pretty well on that score: You eat animal protein, but not too much, and preferably humanely raised. (Think of the 2017 sketch from “Portlandia” about the earnest couple trying to decide whether they can ethically eat a chicken who had once been named Colin.) You have little pots of herbs on the windowsill and you get a box of veggies every week from a local farm that is, inexplicably, always 70 percent beets. You hate beets. Still, you’re trying.

I have more bad news. A new report in the online magazine Psyche says that mushrooms — mushrooms! — possess a rudimentary form of consciousness: “a body of remarkable experiments have shown that fungi operate as individuals, engage in decision-making, are capable of learning and possess short-term memory. These findings highlight the spectacular sensitivity of such ‘simple’ organisms, and situate the human version of the mind within a spectrum of consciousness that might well span the entire natural world.”

We already knew that plants can communicate danger to each other and that trees socially distance. So how are they different from you and me? Richard Mabey, who wrote the book “Cabaret of Plants: Forty Thousand Years of Plant Life and the Human Imagination,” offers a little clarity in a National Geographic interview: “What the new botany is suggesting is that plants are sensitive and problem-solving but bypass the need for self-consciousness and brain activity that we assume is necessary for intelligence.”

Still feeling smug, vegan?

Honestly, though, we should cut ourselves some slack. Trying to feed our souls is just more complicated than it was in the past, because 1. We know both too much and not enough, and 2. So many of us are spiritually unmoored.

Organized religions have addressed this fractious issue of what to eat and not to eat for thousands of years. Witness the complex rules of keeping kosher in Judaism, or the strictures of halal in Islam. Such codifying of food preparation and consumption integrated religious practice into the most basic of human activities. It incorporated a kind of mindfulness into daily life long before mindfulness went Hollywood.

OK, but what about those darned mushrooms? One religion addressed this complexity thousands of years ago.

The Jains of the Indian subcontinent (and their diaspora) number somewhere between 4 million and 12 million. They are fervently nonviolent and do not eat animals. (I apologize in advance for over-simplifying the religion’s complexities.)

But many of the Jains’ food ethics mirror what we think of as modern concerns. Living things are ranked according to their ability to sense and to feel pain, with the goal of eating in such a way as to inflict as little misery and violence as possible.

Jains are vegetarian, but they may consume some dairy products if the animals have been treated well. They eat no root vegetables because harvesting them may not only harm insects and micro-organisms but also kill the plant. Fermented foods are verboten, owing to the presence of tiny organisms. Honey is a hard nope because collecting it constitutes violence against the bees. No eggs either, and definitely no Colin.

You and I won’t be able to follow the Jain lifestyle. It’s too hard, and to adhere to it without the underpinning of the religious practice seems like just the kind of cultural appropriation Westerners are absolutely never beloved for.

But maybe the takeaway is this variant of the food writer Michael Pollan’s famous “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants”: Eat food respectfully. Cause as little pain as possible. Thank the bees.

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Is it possible to eat anything ethically? - Houston Chronicle
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