Food Chains: From Farmyard to Shopping Cart

2. How Much Depends on Dinner?

Chapter 2 How Much Depends on Dinner? Warren Belasco The science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein is credited with popularizing the saying “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch” in his 1966 novel, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. Or maybe credit should go to Barry Commoner, whose fourth “Law of Ecology” (1971) said about the same thing, albeit more grammatically .1 Either way, the context was the late 1960s, when Americans were beginning to confront the environmental costs of their consumer economy. However, the “no free lunch” axiom dates at least as far back as the nineteenth century, when American saloons offered complimentary food as a way to lure workers who either paid for their meals by buying drinks (with all the added social costs of drunkenness) or were “bounced” as “free-lunch fiends” and “loafers.”2 Going back much further to mythical times, the principle applies even to our primordial meals. Think about this much-quoted passage from Lord Byron’s epic poem “Don Juan” (1823), which directly links “dinner” and “sinner”: All human history attests That happiness for man— The hungry sinner— Since Eve ate apples, Much depends on dinner! So how much depends on dinner? Well, in Genesis at least, quite a lot— both before that primordial snack and afterward in the fateful consequences. As for the events upstream leading to the bite of the forbidden fruit, we might start with the six days of heavy lifting that it took God to establish the orchard. Then, in probing Eve’s decision, we can cite motivations that often drive culinary experimentation—curiosity, boredom, hubris, ambition, sexual frustration , serpentine salesmanship, and so on. For the sad downstream aftereffects of Eve eating apples, Genesis suggests shame, pain, sweat, difficult childbirth, spousal abuse, the brutalization of animals, along with assorted bruised heals, dust, thorns, and thistles—the primal ecological and economic catastrophe. In the classical Greek version of the “no free lunch” principle, Prometheus pities shivering, starving humanity and steals fire from his less compassionate boss, Zeus. Humans learn to cook meat and to forge metal; with that technological breakthrough, they proceed to conquer the earth. However, in punishment for his hubris, Prometheus is chained to a rock, where he is doomed to have his liver eaten daily by an eagle. In a rather literalist interpretation of the story, the vegetarian poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1813) speculated that Prometheus’s “vitals were devoured by the vulture of disease.” Adding in the ecological costs of feeding grass and grains to animals, Shelley went on to blast the meat eater who would “destroy his constitution by devouring an acre at a meal. . . . The quantity of nutritious vegetable matter, consumed in fattening the carcass of an ox, would afford ten times the sustenance . . . if gathered immediately from the bosom of the earth.” Such feed-conversion calculations were already a familiar part of vegetarian analysis a full two hundred years before Frances Moore Lappe’s Diet for a Small Planet (1971), which educated many baby boomers about the external costs of a meat-based diet.3 The reality-based wisdom of “no free lunch” may well be universal, as it is possible to find stories of Promethean innovation (cooking) and punishment (the ravaged liver) in many cultures. For example, in some Native American versions, the people (humanity) steal fire to cook and to warm themselves; but with their new technological edge come dire consequences, including forest fires, rain, and mosquitoes. In one Polynesian tale the mischievous superhero Maui (Prometheus’s Pacific counterpart) steals cooking fire from the underworld , but as he escapes to the surface the angry flames follow him, producing the first volcano. Claude Fischler detects more than a residue of such mythical thinking in an analysis of the recent European panic over bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE)—thought to be exacerbated by the thoroughly modern practice of feeding animal residues to animals. “The mad cow epidemic is perceived as punishment for some human misbehavior that caused it in the first place by attracting some sort of a sanction, the most common description of this behavior being the conversion of herbivores into carnivores or even into cannibals.”4 Connoisseurs of catastrophic thought might also relish this compelling reminder of eating’s unforeseen consequences from The Road to Survival, a 1948 jeremiad by William Vogt, an ornithologist turned environment crusader: “We are paying for the foolishness of yesterday while we shape our own tomorrow. Today’s white bread may force a...