All of this information is quite interesting, but it leaves me with a bit of a conundrum. Let’s suppose for the sake of argument that the Paleo people are somewhat on the right track and that it might not be bad, from a health perspective, to eat a diet relatively high in wild or pasture fed meat, along with a variety of vegetables and fruits and nuts. This still leads to some problems. The first is that it isn’t exactly easy to get a hold of pasture fed meat, and it’s expensive. The second, connected to the first, is that this sort of diet is not actually sustainable given the world’s current population. The fact is that agriculture is able to support much higher densities of people than hunting and gathering- up to 10 times higher. And right now our population is so high that even agriculture has to work pretty hard to feed people (although there is technically enough food for everyone at the moment, it just isn’t being distributed that way). So, the question I find myself facing is- just because I, being extremely privileged, might be able to eat this ideal diet, is it really all that ethical for me to do so?
I really hate getting into
discussions of ethics, but let’s say, for the sake of the discussion, that
it isn’t ethical for me to go whole-hog (pardon the pun) and eat the
non-sustainable paleo diet all the time, but it also isn’t entirely
ethical for me to knowingly just starve myself or feed myself bad food
(I’m sure there could be a lot of debate about that one, but moving
on…). So now what do I eat?
posted at 15:36 on Sat, 21 Oct, 2006 |
path: /living
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