When we were hunter-gatherers, we ate other animals and plants like the rest of creation; and since we were few, our appetite had little impact on the biosphere, we were naturally integrated with the web of life and it's give and take. When we became numerous, we made a kind of pact with nature, to wit: we will eat enormous amounts of certain species, but we will also guarantee their survival as species, domesticating and elevating them in the best of conditions (in principle).
I've been thinking about not eating large animals anymore. Partly because the raising of farm animals alone accounts for an enormous amount of greenhouse gas, soil degradation, habitat destruction, marine pollution, and public health risks. Partly because of the fact that I no longer want to be part of the cause of the suffering and death of these animals, which, if they lived in my garden, I'd rather make friends with than kill and eat. In fact, since I have no doubt that all creatures have some kind of self-awareness and inner life, the more I think about it, the more eating even fish and fowl seems barbaric. After all you can have a pet chicken, or a pet fish. It even seems presumptuous to draw a line at, say, shrimp. I knew a boy once who had a pet huntsman spider, and who was depressed for days when the spider moved on as winter came.
Imagine if we didn't kill and eat- or just kill- the other creatures in our earth family. Imagine if butterflies and birds, deer and squirrel gathered and played with us in our gardens. I'd like that. Maybe we would learn how to communicate.
I happened upon a dog-eared copy of The Secret Life of Plants, in which I was reminded that plants have anxiety attacks when someone starts "harvesting" their garden-mates, or even when this person enters the greenhouse. So how will billions of humans live peaceably on the planet with a natural biosphere flourishing around them... what would they eat, if not everything?
Then I thought of fruit. Not so much apples and pears and the other northern fruits, but the wildly diverse fruits of the tropics from which our species came: mangos and mangosteen, rambutan, salak, durian and papaya... and dozens of others, which surely, in their great variety, might cover most of our nutritional needs. After all, if a giant fruitbat, with a six foot leathery wingspread can fuel it's flight on fruit, I should do fine.
Fruit, alone among all the things we eat, are made for us (primates primarily) to eat. That's why they generally come in lovely colors, smell good, taste sweet and moist, and give us energy; they want us to eat them, so we'll deposit their seeds in a fertilizer envelope at some distance from the tree.. They seduce us to have a taste.*
If we ate only fruit, we wouldn't be chopping up or slaughtering other life forms. Fruit-bearing trees release their ripened fruit all by themselves -a bright and transportable pod of nourishment, essentially saying, "Here, take this, it's ready to eat"; the tree lives happily on for decades. Like a cow gives milk, fruiting trees will continue to produce food for us as long as they live.
I can imagine a world in which fruiting plants have been cultivated for a wide range of nutritional benefits, and most of the growing land on the planet is devoted to our fruiting companions.
*And they may tend to make us more seductive to each other- fruiting trees would select for traits which by some means could over time increase the number of their 'seed-porters', thus securing their future generations. The way to do that, beyond offering essential nutrients and energy, would be to stimulate mating activity on the part of the seed-porting species. Clearly, forage-able vegetables would have no interest in offering such an inducement, lest they be eaten up by rapidly multiplying herbivores.
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Update: Here's a video peek at some of the tropical fruits mentioned in this article...
