Meat-Eating, Climate Collapse, and the Tyranny of Empathy
plus learn why we need to ban all outdoor cats
After two weeks in Scotland hiking the West Highland Way with my dear pal Kiley, I am back on the grid. While I thought I wouldn’t learn much about food on my trip (I was, after all, subsisting mostly on pre-packaged industrial camping meals that couldn’t even pass muster as airline fare), I was sorely mistaken.
Kiley and I spent much of the trip surrounded by food systems in action: we saw mountain sheep being herded, forests being cleared for timber and agricultural lands, and remote gas stations replete with snickers as far as the eye could see. As those who know us might have predicted, Kiley and I also spent much of our time talking about food. I learned about the politics of maple sugaring from my favorite Vermonter, and we spoke about the impact of COVID on local food systems in her home state. And, of course, every night I read (on my brand new kobo!) about things like wild fermentation, the draw of meat-eating, and the diet for a small planet. The trip was in many ways a break, but it was also an intensification of what I am learning and doing.
It was only two weeks (and only nine days on the trail), so I don’t want to get too sappy, but it was an incredibly special time. Mostly, I was just so grateful to be able to learn and walk with Kiley, eight years after we first hiked together in the foothills of the Himalayas. I went into the trip saying “the trail provides” only ironically, and scoffing at hikers who said it with full earnestness. Now, after coming home, it is said with equal parts irony and equal parts cringe (just kidding, definitely still more irony than cringe).
Lately, I have been confronted with two lackluster models of how to prevent the imminent collapse of society. This first I came across when I was in a Zoom meeting with an eclectic group of folks interested in climate/food issues. An Oxbridge-educated physicist was talking about his work to create “carbon neutral” fossil fuels, a proposition which (while certainly ambitious and adequately buzzworthy) is currently fictitious. When a climate advisor working in the US government who was on the call pointed out that this was, as it stands, scientifically impossible, the physicist quickly countered with the point that “no major change has ever happened historically unless it has been convenient to the public.”
The second model was presented to me by a dear friend who is considering applying to graduate school with a brilliant and important project on the climate crisis and its impact on reproduction. When I asked her to describe the stakes of this work (because I am nothing if not my hist & lit training), she at first said that she hoped her project would inspire people to care about the deeply held impacts of climate change on our bodies. She was presenting empathy as a potential social catalyst, drawing on the popular belief that “if you know enough—if you see or feel enough, surely—you will do something to help because, clearly, something must be done.”
These two visions of social change— of convenience and of empathy— are widely touted as panaceas in climate circles and the media. The trouble is, though, they are both wrong. As a historian of imperialism, I shuddered when I heard the Oxbridge physicist’s statement on the need for convenience: while conservative historians and commentators may claim that historic changes like decolonization only happened because it was economically or politically expedient, we know that this is not true. Rather, as Priyamvada Gopal persuasively argues in her book Insurgent Empire, “Britain’s enslaved and colonial subjects were not merely victims of this nation’s imperial history and subsequent beneficiaries of its crises of conscience, but rather agents whose resistance not only contributed to their own liberation but also put pressure on and reshaped some British ideas about freedom and who could be free.” It was only with these grassroots social movements—which spanned from Dublin to Durban to Delhi— that the conditions for so-called “convenience” could be created.
Thus, convenience cannot be the only or even most important thing that catalyzes social change. What, then, of empathy? Jonathan Safran Foer, in his 2019 book We Are The Weather, relates the story of Jan Karski, a 28-year-old Catholic who traveled from Poland to the US in order to tell world leaders the horrors that were occurring under Nazi occupation. In June 1943, Karski scored a meeting with the (Jewish) Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter. After hearing Karski’s gruesome discussions of exterminations throughout concentration camps, Frankfurter responded that he just could not believe Karski: while he did not think Karski was lying, he noted that “my mind, my heart, they are made in such a way that I cannot accept it.” Frankfurter, while empathetic, was simply unable to wrap his mind around the horrors of what was “lethal but over there.”
Today, we are seeing this dynamic play out every day as part of what Amitav Ghosh calls “The Great Derangement” of the climate crisis. In our internet age, we all know the horrors of the climate crisis vividly: we are confronted with the lethal fires in California, the mudslides in British Columbia, the sinking of Bangladesh every single day. But most of us still are afflicted by what scholars call the “apathy bias”: British journalist Oliver Burkeman points out that because climate change, for many of us in the Global North, is not wholly immediate, is not an intentional threat from specific humans, and is not a phenomena which changes daily, and is disaggregated, we have difficulty acting as if it were real: “If a cabal of evil psychologists had gathered in a secret undersea base to concoct a crisis humanity would be hopelessly ill-equipped to address,” he writes, “they couldn’t have done better than climate change.”
Thus, it is not as though we don’t know enough about climate change to act, or even that we don’t feel enough empathy to those experiencing its daily brutalities. We do. We are simply reaching the “banality of empathy” and its limits, as it is a concept which is “intrinsically beset with a certain grotesque power dynamic.” (Of course, we are also seeing these limits play out in the COVID-19 crisis, as much of the US populace has given up on wearing masks despite knowing this will effectively force immunocompromised peoples out of daily life and/or kill them).
I am not denying the importance of structural change, and of recognizing larger systems of oppression. But I also am noticing a disturbing trend in which we abdicate all responsibility and hide behind the shield of these systems (I recently had to explain to one of my very smart and compassionate best friends that taking a private jet for work counted as corporate emissions, after she alleged that her actions didn’t matter because most emissions are caused by corporations rather than individuals). As Gerawork Teferra and Kate Reed argue, we need to move beyond empathy and recognize vibration: how do our lives and actions impact others and contribute to suffering? Discussing refugeehood and asylum, they write, “by taking seriously the material conditions that make certain forms of literature possible, we can move past empathy to relationality, to an interrogation of why it is that some of us write from inside the camps, and others from outside.”
The last thing I want is for this essay to come off as sanctimonious (I am, after all, a lapsed vegan who famously used to skip Divest Harvard protests because they interfered with 6 PM yoga). But I do hope we can recognize the way our material conditions impact the world and others in it, and not fall prey to the tyranny of convenience, empathy, or even structures. To that end, I will try harder to do my part and to feel this vibration. I will eat much less meat (if any). I will work harder for climate justice, even when “inconvenient.” I will wear a mask in public spaces and not eat indoors. I will recognize my own role in the world— and, with that, reaffirm my own agency.
Other food-related pieces occupying my mind:
If you haven’t, please play Half-Earth Socialism, a surprisingly educational game about how to fix our food and energy systems and prevent the impending climate collapse. (Hint: partner with the Fanonists and ban all outdoor cats). Also read the book!
The heat wave in India that is happening is gut-wrenchingly horrible (and still underreported in Western media). In addition to causing deaths, it will also have a big impact on food security worldwide as it is impacting the price of wheat. As The Atlantic notes, we can expect more shortages like these given the rising fertilizer crisis and the “warming and weirding planet.”
I loved this article on the difficulties of growing wasabi and one farmer’s attempt to cultivate the crop in California.
I haven’t been imbibing much besides water and coffee, given that I have been hiking for most of the past two weeks. However, before I left I did manage to make a trip to St. Vincent’s with Jake to try this lovely Domaine Kiralyudvar Tokaji Furmint Sec from 2017.
I usually like my wines either smoky OR fruity, but this one managed to braid the two quite nicely! It tasted a bit like apricot or peaches, but with a healthy sprinkle of tobacco mixed in.
Here is a brief update on some of the food-related work I’ve been engaging in lately:
I’ve really enjoyed the Association for the Study of Food and Society hybrid conference. I moderated a panel on Emerging Issues in Sustainable Agriculture, and was presented with the Alex McKintosh Graduate Paper Prize for my essay on toddy!
I have a JStor Daily piece coming out on black-eyed peas soon, so I’m really enjoying reading this article by Michael Twitty on the crop from Emergence Magazine.
My paper on robusta coffee for the Oxford Food Symposium is due next week! I am kind of stressed, but very grateful to botanical illustrator extraordinaire and friend Nirupa Rao for her help setting up interviews for the piece.
Thanks everyone for reading! This week, in addition to moving out of my beloved apartment in Adams Morgan (💔), I will be attempting to cook some of my way through One Pot, Pan, Planet, which I finally snagged from Bold Fork Books! Please send more veg-centric recipes my way as I dip my toes back into the world of vegetarianism.
Love, Julia