Morsels on carnivorism & sociality

When Shaun Ellis lived with wolves, he ate raw elk and deer that they brought back to him. “When you haven’t eaten for a week, it looks appetizing,” he explains. Craig McClain avers that Minke whale tastes like a rich filet mignon, as an aside to explaining why Iceland whaling might not be so bad. More importantly, he presses the need to separate scientific claims from normative claims, and to distinguish the normative notion that it is wrong to eat (some) animals from normative concerns about the environment. Many who would balk at eating whale have no such hesitation with eating cow. Yet beef eating does more harm to the environment, including the Gulf of Mexico, and wreaks quite a distortion to the US economy and politics. The power of Big Corn probably blocked Ricardo Salvador from heading the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture, at Iowa State University.

Ellis lived with wolves because one learns a lot about other animals by socializing with them. Lisa Miller worries that our elected congressmen no longer do that.