Shunya's Notes

Food, Inc.

If you see only one documentary this summer, make it Food, Inc. Here is Roger Ebert's review, and the first 3-1/2 minutes of it.

The next time you tuck into a nice T-bone, reflect that it probably came from a cow that spent much of its life standing in manure reaching above its ankles. That's true even if you're eating the beef at a pricey steakhouse. Most of the beef in America comes from four suppliers.

The next time you admire a plump chicken breast, consider how it got that way. The egg-to-death life of a chicken is now six weeks. They're grown in cages too small for them to move, in perpetual darkness to make them sleep more and quarrel less. They're fattened so fast they can't stand up or walk. Their entire lives, they are trapped in the dark, worrying.

All of this is overseen by a handful of giant corporations that control the growth, processing and sale of food in this country. Take Monsanto, for example. It has a patent on a custom gene for soybeans. Its customers are forbidden to save their own soybean seed for use the following year. They have to buy new seed from Monsanto. If you grow soybeans outside their jurisdiction but some of the altered genes sneak into your crop from your neighbor's fields, Monsanto will investigate you for patent infringement. They know who the outsiders are and send out inspectors to snoop in their fields.

Food labels depict an idyllic pastoral image of American farming. The sun rises and sets behind reassuring red barns and white frame farmhouses, and contented cows graze under the watch of the Marlboro Cowboy. This is a fantasy.

The Orangutans of Sumatra

In May 2009, Usha and I visited the Gunung Leuser National Park in north Sumatra to see orangutans in the wild. We hired a guide in the gateway village of Bukit Lawang and hiked several miles into a dense primary growth forest. Heavy rain on the previous night made the hike rather treacherous and we had to grab on to branches and roots to go up and down the hilly terrain. But the forest was beautiful, abundant with tropical flora and fauna (some of it unique to the island), rushing streams and animal sounds, and we did get lucky: we saw about ten orangutans on our daylong hike. One middle-aged female—rescued years ago by the orangutan center in Bukit Lawang and reintroduced into the wild—even came down and held Usha's hand! Other primates we saw include gibbons and Thomas's Leaf-monkeys.

The orangutan (“person of the forest”), whose habitat has shrunk to parts of Sumatra and Borneo, has cognitive abilities that rival those of the gorilla and the chimpanzee, the only primates more closely related to humans. Placid, deliberate, and mostly vegetarian, orangutans are known for their ingenuity and persistence, particularly in manipulating mechanical objects, and for their "cognitive abilities such as causal and logical reasoning, self-recognition in mirrors, deception, symbolic communication, foresight, and tool production and use. In the wild, orangutans use tools, but at only one location in Sumatra do they consistently make and use them for foraging, [defoliating] sticks ... to extract insects or honey from tree holes and to pry seeds from hard-shelled fruit." We saw one juvenile male using a stick as a tool.

Here is a slideshow of my best orangutan shots set to music (2 min, 25 sec). Check out some more pictures and a primer on orangutans.

Asian Food for Thought

Growing up in India, I ate meat only a handful of times until I left home for college. My mother, a moderately pious Hindu, had a deep aversion to eating animals and wouldn’t allow meat in her kitchen (I also remember her kindness and sympathy towards the ragged animals that shared our city streets: cows, dogs, horses, goats, cats, donkeys, and even occasional elephants and camels). My father was vegetarian for the most part, except when, on rare occasions, he pretended to enjoy a few morsels of meat. I think he did this despite himself, mostly to project the public image of an adventurous, cosmopolitan man. If no one were looking, I’m sure he would have picked a vegetarian option ten times out of ten.

The only times I ate meat was when my older sister brought home a chicken or mutton (goat meat) dish from a friend’s place, or cooked it herself on a Sunday morning on a kerosene stove in our courtyard. When she cooked, my task was to procure the meat. I would bike up to the butcher’s shop and await my turn, squeamishly eyeing the goat carcasses hanging on hooks, and gallantly ask the man for ‘the best cuts,’ to which he always replied, ‘only the best for you, son.’ Washing and cleaning the meat, I felt a strange exhilaration—I saw it not as food but as the flesh and bone of a dead animal, hacked to bits just hours ago. Mother allowed my sister to use only the most beaten down utensils from her kitchen and later instructed the maid to scrub them clean thrice as long.

Still, my parents encouraged us, holding meat to be salutary for growing kids. Their attitude later struck me as similar to Gandhi’s own during his early struggle and experimentation with eating animals. Gandhi saw meat as a contributor to the enviable vigor, material progress, and sturdier physiques of people from the West, while battling his own and his society's traditional dispositions against it.

I was introduced to eating fish and prawns in college. Thereafter, living outside India, I began eating other animals too—cow, pig, turkey, crab, squid, etc. I had non-vegetarian food several times a week and it became a key part of my cooking repertoire—I acquired a bevy of fans for my spicy lamb curry and barbequed chicken. On my travels, I even sampled lobster, shark, snail, venison, guinea pig, and wild boar. But in the ensuing years my meat intake began to decline. I came to relish it less and less. About eight years ago, I gave up eating mammals, and now almost always choose vegetarian. Long live tofu, beans, lentils, and the huge range of Indian vegetarian cuisine.

Tarra and Bella

Tarra, the elephant, and Bella, the dog, live together at The Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee, where retired elephants from zoos and circuses across America may be fortunate enough to spend the last decades of their life in a natural habitat among friends. The Elephant Sanctuary is funded entirely by private donations. Read about the sanctuary and their elephants' stories and behaviors here.

The Lives of Animals

"Life on the farm isn't what it used to be. The green pastures and idyllic barnyard scenes portrayed in children's books have been replaced by windowless sheds, tiny crates, wire cages, and other confinement systems integral to what is now known as 'factory farming.'" Here is a sobering look at how farm animals are transformed into food today (viewer discretion advised. Also see my previous post on this topic.)

(Click image to go to video site. The source of the image above here.)

The Tiger of Jelepara

The amazing Sunderbans, land of superlatives, is where the Ganga River meets the Indian Ocean, a great expanse of flat, mangrove covered islands, and estuaries that change salinity with the tides. Both the world's largest river delta and largest estuarine mangrove forest, it's also home to the world's largest population of Royal Bengal tigers as well as some of the world's largest crocodiles, which can get to be over 20 ft. long, with the girth of two grown men. Every year villagers are killed by the local wildlife. Three years ago, we took a boat ride through the uninhabited regions of the wildlife sanctuary. Since the islands are heavily forested and we were confined either to the boat or to fenced-in walkways on a couple of the islands, we did not see much of the unique wildlife (except baby crocs at a breeding station). No doubt, the water, too, teems with life, including elusive pods of rare freshwater dolphins, but it's too full of silt to see anything at all. The Sunderbans felt wild to me, and mysterious, a place where a thousand eyes peer at us, unsentimentally, though we are blithely unaware.

Here's a recent article on the increasing conflicts between tigers and humans in the Sunderbans. It's a story with a tragic ending, from every point of view, but it brings together several strands of complexity on questions of how people co-exist with nature (or don't), and might have done throughout human history. The people in this article live by forest subsistence in tiger territory, much as people would have throughout southern Asia for perhaps the last 60,000 years, until the tigers (and lions, and forests) were mostly killed off, in just the last hundred years. John Vidal, of the Guardian, vividly recounts the story of one tiger:

Tarak was walking along the high earth embankment that protects Jelepara from the river Chunkuri, and had just passed a small Hindu temple with its gaudy, painted wooden effigies of the tiger god Dakshin Ray. He would not have seen the real tiger that had just swum across the river from the great Sunderbans forest 400 yards away. It hauled itself out of the water and mauled him from behind. No one even heard Tarak cry out.... But that was just the start of the drama in Jelepara that night....

Now it was the animal's turn to run. First dozens of men tried to corner it, blocking off its escape routes and chasing it away from the village. The tiger was tracked through long grass and rice fields. Finally it leapt on the roof of a house. Film shot on a mobile phone by a villager shows the tiger looking perfectly relaxed.

You can see that video here—it's poor quality and grim, but worth a look. Read the full story, loaded with interesting information (via Asian Window).

Slaughter in America

A recent Humane Society sting operation at a California slaughterhouse brought to light some very cruel treatment of farm animals (see the investigator's video; viewer discretion advised). The media attention caused a minor outrage and the largest beef recall in the history of the nation. Many wondered if cruelty is all that rare in the American meat business. Donations to animal rights groups followed (not unlike the spike in donations to charities following ads of emaciated children in god forsaken countries). Guilt assuaged, let's do pork chops for dinner.

Curiously enough, what bothered people most was the cruelty itself, and the nutritional safety of meat from downer cattle. In other words, if all USDA rules were followed, in letter and spirit, the complaints would dissolve and people would go back to maintaining their equanimity about the industrial-scale raising, killing, and processing of animals for food and things. Notably, the USDA—US department of agriculture—regulates this industry. This is on par with agriculture? What does this reveal about the American society's relationship with animals? How many little Eichmanns now thrive among us, within us?

Nearly ten billion mammals and birds are slaughtered each year in the US alone (a million per hour). How are they processed? The time-lapse footage below from the visually resplendent film, Baraka, has some details for chickens, mixed-in with scenes from modern life (a more disturbing one here. Also check out cartoonist Mark Fiore's, Doreen the Downer.)

Bird's Eye View

It has long been a puzzle how birds manage to navigate the world without the specialized instruments that humans use—including the human brain. Birds, after all, have only bird brains.

New evidence strongly suggests that birds actually use their visual circuitry to detect the earth's magnetic field and navigate by it. That is, in some sense birds see the earth's magnetic field, even in the dark.

How does it work? A certain chemical found in the eyes of migratory birds responds to electromagnetism, and according to the German team who pursues this research:

"When light hits these molecules, their chemistry changes and magnetism can influence them," Mouritsen said. The molecules might then affect light-sensing cells in the retina to create images, which would help the brain navigate during flight, he added.

It's difficult to imagine what this would look like, since humans are confined to... well, the "visible" parts of the spectrum. One scientist suggested the analogy that perhaps north looks like a dark spot, and all other directions are within some gradient of light. More details here.

How many other senses are possible, unknown to us? Unimagined by us?

Five Primates

With its 300 or more species, primates represent the third most diverse order of mammals, after rodents and bats. They include lemurs, lorises, tarsiers, monkeys, apes, and humans. For their body weight, the primate brain is larger than that of other terrestrial mammals, with a fissure unique to primates that separates the first and second visual areas on each side of the brain.

In all primates except humans, the big toe diverges from the other toes, together forming a pincer capable of grasping objects. Not all primates have similarly dexterous hands; only the catarrhines (Old World monkeys, apes, and humans) and a few of the lemurs and lorises have an opposable thumb. Fossils of the earliest primates date from at least as far back as the Early Eocene Epoch (54.8 - 49 million years ago).*

   
 
(Left to right: Hanuman Langur, 3 Common Indian Monkeys, Black Monkey)
* Text adapted from the Encyclopedia Britannica, 2003

On The Road With Jesus

Sam Fentress is a Jack Kerouac of sorts. He travels the roads of America looking to find not himself but Biblical signs and bill boards - messages to praise and persuade.  In his many sojourns he has found farmhouses, grain silos, restaurants, hair salons, gas stations and even traffic signs bearing Biblical messages. An artist and a photographer, Fentress first started photographing roadside biblical messages when a student in his class brought him a picture of a barn covered in Scriptures. Fentress was stunned.

"It just knocked my socks off as a picture," he said. "The boldness of the farmer in covering the roof, the sides — every square foot of the barn had some sort of Bible quote, Old Testament, New Testament, Gospels, Epistles, Revelation."

Fentress has photographed an urban billboard which rotated its message to read among other things.

• God is like Coke: He's the real thing.
• God is like Pan Am: He makes the going great.
• God is like Tide: He gets the stains out that others leave behind.
• God is like-VO-5 hair spary: He holds through all kinds of weather.
• God is like Alka Seltzer: Try him, you'll like him.

Behind the billboard was a building with a big sign, "Furniture Factory Outlet World." God and mammon jousting for attention.

Now Fentress has a book out of his collection of photographs titled "Bible Road" which he edited for what he hopes is, "interesting both theologically and aesthetically."

Sam Fentress has spent the past 25 years crisscrossing America's highways and byways, stopping along the way to snap shots of religious signs in every state except Hawaii. He found everything from John 3:3 on a farm silo in Ohio to "Obey God or Burn" scratched into a rock in Harlem....

At some point in the late '70s or early '80s, Fentress realized the farmer wasn't alone. Wherever he looked, he saw religious signs along the roadside. He started to methodically photograph thousands of such images over the next two decades. Along the way, he also became a Catholic.

Fentress, 52, has a master of arts from the Art Institute of Chicago and his work is collected by museums, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the St. Louis Art Museum.

The religious roadside signage is particularly American, he said, given the First Amendment's guarantees of freedom of speech and religion and the country's religious diversity.

"Americans are told they can say whatever they want," he said. And people feel free to say it — or perhaps, show it — whether on their front lawn, barn or business.

Fentress said he was intrigued by the juxtaposition of landscape and religious message. Some images capture signs on businesses, which he attributed to a capitalist tendency to co-opt religion into something that can be marketed and sold. But he also recognized the impulse to spread the "good news" wherever possible.

In Las Vegas, he spotted Glorified Bodies Inc., a collision repair shop with the Christian fish symbol on its signpost. He noted the relationship between Jesus' resurrected body, as described in the New Testament, and restoring damaged cars. [Link]

For some samples of Fentress' photos see here.  (Crossposted at Accidental Blogger)