Stress-free recipe
During a recent hospital stay in England, I spoke with a Zimbabwean nurse about the things she misses most from her home near Harare.
She talked sadly first about her relatives, and then with great enthusiasm she said: “Real organic food! The vegetables… and oh, the beef! It doesn’t taste the same here.”
I know what she means, and over the years, many westerners from countries where livestock is simply an industrial product have told me they thought Botswana beef is superior to what they were used to at home. Nutritionists also say free-range beef is far healthier to eat than meat from maize-fed cows who have been separated from their mothers unnaturally early and spent most of short their lives in crowded pens.
I’m mentioning this now because while recovering from the leg operation I had during that hospital visit, I stumbled across a possible explanation for why naturally raised beef like we have in southern Africa tastes better. Appropriately, it’s in a book by a man named Harari. Yuval Noah Harari; and it’s called Homo Deus, A Brief History of Tomorrow, which is a follow-up to Sapiens, A Brief History of Humankind.
In both books, he says humans have always mistreated domesticated livestock and talks about how poorly industrial meat farmers treat their animals today, but in Homo Deus,
Harari spells out that all mammals have emotional needs. Unfortunately, animals can be kept alive and made to reproduce by simply meeting their physical needs, so that’s what tends to happen, but those animals are not happy or healthy, and they are not particularly good to eat.
Arguments can be made for not eating meat at all, or for only eating wild animals we hunt ourselves, but there can be no moral justification for ignoring the emotional needs of domesticated animals. Unless, of course, you don’t believe mammals have feelings.
But Harari says they do… as do birds and some fish, and it has been proven they use their emotions to survive in the wild. For example, when a baboon sees a bunch of bananas hanging in a tree and a lion lying in the grass nearby, he doesn’t try to reason whether or not he should risk getting the food. He feels it.
That’s because mammal emotions are algorithms, or recipes, for making decisions. How far to the bananas? How far to the lion? Does he look hungry? How hungry am I? The answers to these and many more questions come back to the baboon as sensations and feelings and translate into his decision to go for it or retreat. Too cautious and he starves to death, too rash and he’s lion food, so in the wild, survival recipes are constantly being honed by natural selection.
All mammals, including humans, use these algorithms, so when pigs, cows, baboons and humans feel fear, similar processes take place in similar areas of our brains. That means we probably experience fear, separation, boredom and other emotions in similar ways. So, I’m guessing all mammals, including African nurses in Europe, feel family ties and are happier when they live the way they want to live and eat food they naturally want to eat.
Maybe I’m wrong, but it’s certainly food for thought.