Getting to the question
Aidan Ward and Philip Hellyer
This image does not constitute advice! Please read on!
Most times the question is hidden in plain sight, camouflaged amongst our pressing immediate concerns.[1] My colleague and co-author John Smith often starts with people’s immediate concerns in order to decode a situation. Remember the classic experiment where people are asked to count the number of passes in a basketball game and fail to see a gorilla walking across the court.[2]
I just got the most replies ever to a tweet when I challenged George Monbiot’s somewhat triumphalist account of the need for everyone to become vegetarian to save the planet.[3] So what, I hear you say. Well, yes, precisely. I could also name Benjamin Taylor as an incredibly loyal colleague and reader, who says he is not prepared to start eating meat again yet.
For what it is worth, Walter Jehne in his talk New Climate Solutions, says that the US and Jimmy Carter got the wrong question in 1976, and we have been looking for solutions in the wrong places ever since. Even the timescales and the perpetrator for this climate change mistake are the same as dietary guidelines that were grossly wrong.
This already feels like infinite regress: how do you find the question when you don’t know what it is and can’t see it for your immediate concerns? How do you know when you have a good question? It is commonplace philosophy to say that a good question is worth more than any number of answers, but what is it?
Since we are talking food again (by way of examples) then Tim Noakes says that the big questions that have carried his career have all been found in paradoxes, in things that simply cannot be made to fit or cannot be squared away. Let’s name it: in the increasingly polarised and cantankerous confrontation between vegetarians and carnivores, what is the question? Sure as hell the question is not “who is right?”.
Benjamin points out that both sides in this non-meeting of minds claim that all the scientific evidence is on their side. But evidence for what? I’d like you to be able to feel the weight of that non-contact, of the dismissiveness of each side for the other. If you think Sunni and Shia for a moment, you will get the whiff ideological purity as well. How dare people kill animals, sentient beings after all, to eat them?[4] But what is the question?
Where does this belong?
One place to search for questions is in various sorts of history, minded of course that history can be more slanted and tendentious than most things. Since we are talking about saving the planet,[5] we are talking necessarily about ecosystems and their health and maintenance or lack of it. We have complained in these blogs before about human exceptionalism, so if we drop the idea that we are any different in kind from other animals, what sort of an animal are we? What is, or was, our role in various ecosystems before we started wiping them out? Where did we come from?
We have mentioned before the wonderful article in Eurozine, by David Graeber and David Wengrow. In what is taken to be the cradle of civilisation, ancient Mesopotamia,[6] people seem to have supported themselves from no fewer than five overlapping ecosystems. This is a big clue for us: diversity of ecosystemic base and outstanding adaptability and flexibility of human lifestyle. I can dive for shellfish AND I can build vast systems of walls to channel migrating antelope to kill them en masse.
These forbears of ours ate lots and lots of meat and fish, liberally supplemented by foraged plants. There is a story that the beginnings of intentional agriculture lie in ground cleared by floods or by fire. I can start to sense a question forming now. Humans have always been major interveners in ecosystems. Often that has had a problematic side, whether exterminating megafauna needed by the ecosystem, or destroying too many trees and changing the local climate. And in the Eurozine article, the authors’ big interest is in how the start of settled agriculture led to political exploitation and locked in exploitative agricultural practices.
As a parallel thought, that other hero of ours, Mariana Mazzucato, wants us to be able to distinguish genuine economic value creation from mere value extraction and rent seeking. We routinely fail to do that and whole economies are stolen under our noses by “successful” people. Think of the same in depth understanding of ecosystems needed to determine whether we are playing our (productive, necessary) ecosystemic role or whether we are just gouging.
Now I can bring in another loyal colleague, Richard Veryard, who says recently that any time someone says “holistic”, he smells a rat. The particular holistic practice he was commenting on was work by the Savory Institute on holistic land management. Richard is right to be sniffy, because holistic implies a system boundary, and such boundaries are always a bit arbitrary and have everything to do with finding the question.
Three kinds of health
We have sort of arrived at a notion of the sort of question we are asking, and it necessarily involves the relationship between humans and the rest of the planetary ecosystems. It is some sort of modern tragic version of Know Thyself. The Greeks were savvier than we allow them to be.
The first kind of health to pay attention to is infant developmental health. Infants are both closer to nature and harder to argue with than we are ourselves. We could include prenatal health but we don’t have to. There are two facets of health that we might focus on. The first is that all infants naturally spend time periodically in a state called ketosis. During ketosis the fuel for metabolism is fat not glucose. This is a signal and it turns out that many, many body functions depend on being in ketosis. Many adults no longer go there, they just graze on carbohydrates whenever they are hungry. The second facet is the rate of development, particularly brain development. It seems that infants fed on meat experience more rapid brain development. This is also probably a sign of how our bodies functioned historically, a sign of what we are actually adapted to do.
The second kind of health we can look at is adults whose health is compromised. That is, with hindsight, they have developed conditions such as diabetes, arthritis, dementia, CVD, cancer. The sort of study I have in mind is when these people are given a radically different diet than they have eaten previously. We could call this sort of diet ketogenic because it puts the body into ketosis as before, or we could go the whole hog to 100% carnivore. Not everyone, but many of these compromised people recover their health and do not need medical interventions. This must also be a sign of how our bodies have functioned historically: i.e. what we are adapted to.
The third kind of health is soil health, though we can also look at the health of ruminants that graze on grass growing on the soil. This has an ecosystemic feel to it already of course. Soil is built up over millennia by the action of climate and bacteria, and the decay of plant matter. There are places such as the Amazon rainforest where this process is minimal and there is essentially no soil. There are places such as flood plains and deltas where alluvium is deposited to form the basis of a very fertile soil. But the key to real soil fertility is the soil biome, an ecosystem that exceeds rainforests in its biodiversity and complexity. Looking at the work of the Savory Institute, it seems to me that the dung of ruminants is a crucial aspect of developing soil fertility. This is also my experience of allotment gardening where heavy application of horse manure before the winter so that the soil biome gets a chance to incorporate it before planting has a much better effect on plant health than artificial fertilisers.
Lets quickly rehearse a piece of Savory Institute research. On a semi-arid cattle ranch in Australia, they divided the grazing into 180 paddocks. The cattle are moved to a new paddock each day giving six months for the grazing to recover and for the dung to be incorporated into the soil. The grazing looks healthier. The cattle are much healthier. The farmer can see six months out whether he has enough grazing if for instance there is a drought, giving time to sell cattle to reduce the herd or to buy in food. Studies have shown that this is a net carbon capture system, taking carbon dioxide out of the air and locking it up in the soil.
The above-mentioned Walter Jehne says that like icebergs, 90% of what matters in plant growth in under the surface. This is familiar by now in our question seeking: people look at plants and think they understand. They don’t ask the long-term questions about soil development and how much water the soil sponge developed can hold. Agriculture has the wrong questions too.
Putting this together
There is a slogan “60 harvests left”. Maybe it is 59 or 58 by now. It is a slogan about soil erosion due to farming practices. We need to go at least this wide in thinking about our question. So far we have ruminants being important to the soil, and humans seeming to do well eating ruminants.[7] That is at least a glimmer of our place in the global ecosystems. Remember ecosystems evolve significantly on a timescale of maybe 10,000 years. We cannot design our way out of the mess we have made even though Monbiot seems to think we can. We first have to understand how it evolved to work as a piece.
We have done this experiment before. In the Eurozine article, the archaeological records of ancient Mesopotamia, and separately ancient Egypt, show that when people adopted settled agriculture, their health as a population declined dramatically. People were shorter, with brains 30% smaller, and suffered from a whole host of diseases, enough to show up as deformities and bone problems, as well as the evidence of epidemics wiping out whole populations. Our own gut biomes will have adapted a bit since then, but maybe this is a fundamental indicator about how humans can live sustainably.
We have a romantic notion of the farming community in the countryside growing healthy food (plants!) for us to eat. But that is a television commercial for Weetabix[8] and it is a lie many times over. Let me count the ways! Remember agribusiness only tells us its products are healthy when they are not.
Our question is looking a bit like: “What are the set of reciprocal factors that allow humans and their host ecosystems to thrive mutually?”. As an open question, as distinct from a place for dogma to be imposed, that is a really tough scientific challenge. Most of us are human exceptionalists and by implication don’t mind a bit of environmental degradation so long as humans are OK. But is does not, and cannot, work like that. We have to know how we make a positive contribution to world ecosystems.
There are post-WW2 studies, essentially ethnographic, of populations that have adopted western lifestyles and diets in that time. The current studies are of the Torres Straits aboriginals, that people are calling a genocide because Australian dietary guidelines are obviously killing the indigenous people off. The other populations show smiles going from wide and white with perfect teeth to broken. Even facial shapes change with the archetypal round Chinese face becoming more elongated with not enough space for the wisdom teeth in the jaw. These are presumably cases where our tentative question has been answered with a definite NOT LIKE THAT because the interrelationship is so obviously changed for the worse.
Paradox
We promised you a paradox to guide our search for a question. My best guess is that the paradox here is in notions of survival. The vegetarians claim that to keep the vast population of the world alive we are going to have to feed them a plant-based diet. The carnivores claim that our current trend towards a plant-based diet is going to see the whole population overtaken with the western diseases, and the current healthcare arrangements completely overwhelmed. Either way you are dead of course.
Strangely in this paradox, it is the hippy, spiritually enlightened veggies who have the more mechanical argument based on calories and linear extrapolations. The supposedly more aggressive and selfish carnivores have an argument based on being all we can be. Both sides claim (as communism was supposed to do) that history is on their side. You will be thrilled to know that Google searches for “keto” exceeded those for “vegetarian” for the first time last month.
According to Gary Fettke, the nutrition textbook he studied as a medical student in Australia did not mention meat. There is something very odd and unquestioned about the assumption that missing out a major foodgroup that almost all humans have always eaten does not require evidence to justify its exclusion. By contrast, the proposition that grains are not good for us is met with massive incomprehension, and grains came late to humans.[9]
I don’t claim to have cracked this nut. We have explored how important the starting question is and how it is hidden in plain sight by the passions. I think vegetarians are more pre-committed to their position, more prejudiced if you like. But I am very successfully on a keto diet, wrecking the planet or not.
I think it would not be possible, even in principle, to enumerate the ship-wrecking ways in which humans are coupled to our ecosystems. It’s not just about plants and animals, but about insects and micro-organisms and creatures we haven’t dreamed of yet. My instinct is that anything that smacks of dogma can easily be fatal in this unfolding story. Don’t hold your breath.
[1] We’ve previously written about how value is hidden in plain sight. Perhaps there’s a connection between questions and value…
[2] More recent experiments with gorillas include embedding them in radiography scans. Unsurprisingly, in looking for naturally-occurring biological anomalies, experienced radiographers often fail to spot the ape. Much fun is poked at them for this failure, despite (as far as I know) there having been no real-life case of acute monkey-in-the-brain.
[3] That’s a nice tidy narrative, fits in a soundbite. As we’ve written about before, such tidiness is often indicative of bullshit somewhere in the situation. At least we know that George changed sides, which suggests that he may have something of a handle on the arguments both ways. Though there’s none so militant as the ex-believer born anew.
[4] Different cultures value different species differently, of course, so it’s doubly difficult to unpick. Pigs, dogs, horses, insects, humans, cetaceans, et cetera. And now that we’re aware of the communcation between trees (and other plants), where to draw the sentience line?
[5] Though, of course, people who speak of saving the planet are rarely speaking of saving the planet, and neither are we in this blog. It turns out that the Earth itself is pretty robust but, if you’re that way inclined, Sam Hughes has a list of possible methods: https://qntm.org/destroy
[6] Etymologically: between two rivers
[7] It was with some surprise earlier this year that I realised that even the most carnivorous of humans shy away from eating obligate carnivores; eating other omnivores is about as far as we go. i.e. sometimes dogs, never cats.
[8] Worse is its ugly sister Alpen…
[9] Many of the key experts in Australia are creationists, so for them even the history and evolution never happened…
