Horsemeat and species preservation

The very idea of horse-meat getting into our hamburgers seems appalling. The very thought that the majestic steeds whose strength and personalities can companion and transport us, and has done so off and on over millennia, could end up in between sesame buns and covered with cheese and tomato, accompanied by french fried potatoes and a soda, is a no-no.

Yet in the longer ups and downs of civilization, in the scarce times, people tend to put their few remaining resources into that which supports human survival the best. Other species tend to go extinct. In fact, even in present-day good times, lots of species are going extinct each week simply because we are taking over their living space and we couldn't care less about those diverse creatures' existence, not even giving them a hello-goodby as they perish; we are to busy to pay attention to where our boots stomp. But horses, now, they have been special.

The subject article http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2013/02/15/172124931/romanian-horsement-in-british-lasagna-reveals-complex-global-food-trade confronts us with this reality a bit. Apparently in Romania, the noble steed which can transport us through thick and thin, snow or desert, and find its own fuel in the grassland if necessary, at times has become needed food with which to survive.

Compare with the traditional steer or cow, which we feed until big enough to eat. Both cow and horse and even farm pig will look you in the eye and greet you as fellow beings on this planet now. Each of them is dependent on our support for them to live. And when we have messed up in our endless games of Whose-Boss-Here, resources get thin, and which creatures will be supported by people becomes one of the questions. Cows and steers provide us with milk and steak and hamburgers, and we give grain and feed to support them. Horses, on the other hand, could also provide hamburger meat - although not milk - yet before being part of a burger, a horse could provide us transportation and pull a plow; they have done so off and on for millennia.

Now a one-horsepower transportation may not seem much, as compared to our hundred horsepower steel and glass wheels that take us to work and the shopping center. But for a few tens of miles at a time, the one-horsepower horse can give us a lift almost as fast and vastly more energy efficiently. The hay-burner goes without any visit to the gas station, but has other quirks - hay is big and heavy, for one. Could one's car pull a plow to cultivate a field to grow food in a pinch? Maybe, especially if gas remained available and affordable. But a horse has done that for ages and can be powered by some of the agriculture which it helps plant and harvest.

And as Romania has shown, horses can also provide meat for lasagna and burgers, when work-time is done. Can a steer do that? Only the burger part. So, which is more versatile yet also provides us nourishment both in helping harvest but also as steak? The noble steed would logically be the choice.

Now, I have no interest in a horse-meat burger, any more than a kangaroo burger, such as was sold some decades ago, before an uproar against using the cute critters for burger makings put a stop to it.

The point am trying to - uncomfortably - make here, is that in the longer view of history, the species we find valuable enough to provide us food, are the creatures that we invest meager resources in preserving when the chips are down in the cycles of civilization.

I have sometimes wondered, does a bovine consider its life worth living, especially if in a feedlot existence, simply to end up as meat between halves of a sesame bun?

After much pondering, and also knowing that I cannot really speak from the perspective of such a creature, I would say that the answer is probably yes. Because, it is better to have loved and lost, than not to have loved at all.

The food pill again

A current satirical article "Food pills: A sci-fi staple"
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-17131158 interestingly parallels some thoughts that have been getting my attention lately. The thoughts came from a wide variety of subjects, and came to no conclusion, but that is what this jedcstuff blog post is about.

The new item in my thinking is this: for each pound of dinner I eat, a day or so later, I then output exactly the same weight of excrement. The part I utilized was a miniscule part of that pound of food and drink.

Maybe that miniscule part was all that I really needed to consume, in other words.

Now, the ancient miracle is that one can eat and drink the huge amount of material, and somehow extract that miniscule part out of the vast majority of it, discharging the rest of the material back into the world environment.

We living creatures have been doing that for eons. It works. And fairly well matches organism's needs with what is produced by the environment. By the food chain, nature doing most of the work with no effort by us.

And our digestive system making up the rest of the task's work to provide the miniscule but essential nutritional substances that get into our bloodstream and travel around to nutrify all our busy little teeming trillions of cells.

Yes it works. Yet when our human biomass becomes too large a percentage of the world biomass, nature struggles mightily to get the top fraction made for all of us. And indeed from the change from hunter-gatherer to agriculture food supply, we have bent nature's resources increasingly to slave just to our nutritional needs.

Could the next step in the progression from hunter-gatherer to agriculture to something else better matched to human needs, to directly use solar energy to convert our excrement into just the nutrition particles that we need on which to thrive?

And thus back to the ridiculed food pill.

Or maybe bulk materials designed to mimic the delicious meals we so enjoy, but actually be of cellulose fiber and contain a few squirts of that which our bodies will actually accept into our bloodstream to power our lives.

Problem is, what about our silent partners in life, that inhabit our digestive tract? The ones that now actually utilize the vast majority of the substance of our meals, converting it into bacterial biomass that forms our excrement? Nearly all of what we enjoy eating, actually goes to feed this trillions-population tiny critter zoo we carry around in our digestion tract. They also make some of the essential nutrients we need to live, as part of it all.

Maybe we can figure out ways to make this whole system a lot more efficient.

No more inhumane cattle feedlots, pigs living life in a little cage, chickens in tiny individual cages until slaughtered. Why not have far fewer of them and keep them in living conditions pleasant to each of them, while we get our nutrition through more direct means?

We human beings consider ourselves fairly smart. Even at times wise and compassionate, too.

Yet much of science is raw trial & error, ever selecting that which provides less error. (Yet hopefully not losing out on the lateral paths too.)

For example, a couple decades ago I recall buying bottles of what was labeled liquid amino acids, a major part of the stuff we actually use in food. Liquid protein, take it by the spoonful. Yet eventually there was the thought that since the stuff would not spoil, bacteria could not live on it; so most likely we humans could not utilize it either. Eventually it vanished from the store shelves, in the consumer process that efficiently evaluates such things. (Assuming, of course that we are not too bamboozled by the enormous ad machine.)

Population grows, fortunately. More hands to the task of creating better civilization. We took on the task of agriculture and made it work. It took a long struggle to refine agriculture and is still a work in progress.

Lab-grown meat is making progress nowadays, long a sci fi dream too. Just take a few cell samples from cattle, pigs, chickens, fish; and then let those archetype animals get back into their natural-world lives, while we grow food from those cell's designs, to provide our need for meat.

But in the design and contrivance of the nutritional bath in which that lab-grown meat thrives, why not just be more efficient and let it directly nutrify our own cells?

And even fruit and nuts, grain of all types, even vegetables, could their substance be more efficiently be converted into our nutrition as powered by sunlight? As well as provide the above-mentioned nutritional bath for growing meat cells, either in lab-grown meat or directly in ourselves.

Well, I cringe at the thought of enduring three nutrition injections a day, instead of nice hot tasty meals. I much prefer the above-mentioned idea of flavored and textured cellulose meals containing a few squirts of the nutritional components that we actually utilize.

I think it is time for us to go the next step beyond agriculture, and give nature back what she needs to again thrive in diversity. Can we be that smart, wise, compassionate, responsible?

Looking at most of the ongoing news, it does not look very likely.

Human thought and effort seems to mostly instead be bent to the task of destroying or effectively enslaving other humans, largely in the fantasy that specific male lineages each have superiority over the others as supposedly favoritely ordained by the Creator Himself. Reminds me too much of the battles in nature of whales and deer and wolves of one male striving to impregnate the whole next generation with his Creator's supposedly favored genes. Well, anyway, "proven" by which males survive the attacks on each other, of course.

Mankind was supposed to be lots more wise and smarter and responsible in the management of the world's nature than all that.

And, sometimes, we are.

Some words of wisdom re SETI

An article in BBC News http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8642558.stm has a thoughtful wrinkle relating to the ongoing SETI efforts to communicate with alien species (alien not meaning the folks on the other side of the border, nor meaning any of the million of kinds of creatures yet to be discovered lurking in the depths of the jungles and at the bottom of the sea.) The referenced article includes the phrases:

"... "If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn't turn out well for the Native Americans," he said.

"Prof Hawking thinks that, rather than actively trying to communicate with extra-terrestrials, humans should do everything possible to avoid contact.

"He explained: "We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn't want to meet." ...."

Beside affecting our efforts to communicate with species elsewhere, Hawking's thoughtful wisdom also might invite some soul-searching of ourselves. Remember, we humans often arrogantly refer to ourselves as the "top of the food chain" and "top predator". Up until fairly recently, the only species on this planet that we actively worked to propagate and nourish, were the ones we used for food in agriculture, like wheat and sheep. Anything else edible was doomed if crossing paths with the hunter-gatherers.

So consider Prof Hawking's wisdom. We might indeed get found by some spacefaring hunter-gatherer bunch with far more experience than we at being top predator, and just as arrogant. (Lots of sci fi has been written about just such a thing. If the sci fi writer wants to sell the books, it better have the humans as the winners. But the real world tells about America's land vs the Amerind's fate; do a reality test and check the results, as suggested by Prof Hawking. And worse yet, those space faring aliens might not recognize us as like themselves, and consider us more like ... maybe turkeys or saber-toothed tigers.)

Yet, it is a big Universe, and there is the principle that "like tends to attract like." I don't know how well it would work, but maybe we might consider working on changing ourselves into something we would want to meet.