Food Taboos

All creatures eat other living beings. Everyone and everything is merely someone else's potential energy source, and in the world's view, I have no more value than the rotting carcass of any other large omnivore to be devoured by carrion beetles and assorted corvidae. Grass is as much a living being as any doe eyed fawn; we never mourn the grass or the white cedar as the deer eats them, however, since we don't value them in this culture; We don't place moral value on them. We usually reserve this for sentient beings with eyes and are similar to us. Thus dogs are no longer a work animal and potential food as they once were, but are instead bred into weird shapes that serve no purpose and can't survive without human intervention, dressing them up in costumes and calling them children. The same is true for guinea pigs, which are actually a source of food. Most of these taboos are merely derived from wealth and culture. They are really the mere privilege of a very large industrial machine  devouring everything on earth to produce boxed and frozen food. Almonds for humans have demolished habitat, require mass pollination and have no more moral value than any other large scale agricultural enterprise. We simply think they are better because almonds don't have pretty eyes and nurse their young, so people don't think they are killing anything. But they did; they destroyed thousands of acres of habitat for the monoculture, just as much as they bulldozed it into a mall and paved it. They have to import pollinators in the millions just to keep the entire enterprise going. Humans now use about 58% of the world's photo-energy for agriculture and that still isn't enough; we have to make nitrogen via the Haber process, use fossil fuels for production and transportation and mine all the materials in order to use it, from transportation to storage. No matter who you are, and especially if you live in the U.S., you are using whole pieces of the finite earth just to keep your gullet full. No one, except for the few hunter-gatherers left, is any more moral then the other, organic lettuce grown in human fecal compost not with standing.

I do know this; given a week or so without access to a grocery store, all sorts of moral taboos would disappear. Animals with big brown eyes would suddenly become edible to many. Many animals not thought of as food who also have big brown eyes would  become edible. Suckers, thought of as garbage fish, might suddenly become gourmet. Given a few more weeks, dogs would no longer be dressed in costumes. They would end up in stew or on a spit and served with onions. Anyone in the U.S. who claims different is laughable as they simply have not known hunger. After the woods and waters have been picked clean, which would be much faster than anyone thinks, certain other delicacies would arise with no cultural taboo; organic kale has very little value if you are ready to gnaw on tree bark.