Rachel Marie Stone's Blog, page 27

Flight Behavior and Global Weirding

Last weekend, Graeme had a fever and so I ended up spending most of the weekend curled up on the couch with or near him as he perused Tin Tin books or watched DVDs and as I read Barbara Kingsolver’s newest novel, Flight Behavior.

I’ve enjoyed Kingsolver’s work ever since I read The Bean Trees for English class in high school and then headed straight for the library to find Pigs in Heaven and Animal Dreams. One college summer afternoon I started reading the first chapter of The Poisonwood Bible and found myself unable to do anything else until I’d finished. Even when Kingsolver gets on my nerves by being a heavy-handed in making a point, political, religious, or philosophical, she can sure turn a phrase and weave a plot.

This new novel has all the charms (if also the usual shortcomings) of Kingsolver’s earlier books; I was a little worried that she would be excessively pushy with the “issue” of this one–climate change–but she kept it pretty real.

Speaking of “real,” climate change is, and it’s so apparent in Malawi that everyone from university professors to brickmakers will tell you about it. Most people in Malawi grow their own staple food–corn that’s pounded and cooked into a doughy paste called nsima–and so when the weather goes weird and the rains are late or too scant, they feel it in their empty bellies: people who have never owned a car, never had electricity, never bought a computer, suffering the worst effects of a climate problem that they didn’t create.

Is this not close to the definition of “unfair”?

I don’t want to give any exciting plot details away, but a similar (yet, of course, very different) injustice forms something of a theme in Flight Behavior. There’s also a lot in there on faith and science. I recommend it!

 

At The End of the Day, An Ox Is Still Dead

The New York Times reported on an incident at a college in Vermont where an ox–one of a pair of oxen–had to be euthanized after it became ill. That wasn’t the plan; the plan had been to slaughter the humanely-raised creatures and serve them in the cafeteria in keeping with the college’s mission and vision for  sustainable-farming. But animal-rights groups protested the move and pressured slaughterhouses not to participate in the plan.

image via Wikipedia.

So at the end of the day, an ox is still dead, and no one got to eat him.

(Read the whole article here if you wish)

Steve Thorngate at the Christian Century thinks this is very sad and wasteful. He writes:

I’ve talked before about why I stopped being a vegetarian after many years. In part it’s because yes, pork is incredibly delicious. But it’s also because I’ve come to believe that the cultural goal I favor—much lower meat consumption, which would improve public health and reduce the incentive for cruel and ecologically destructive factory-farming methods—finds more effective ambassadors in flexitarians than in strict vegetarians. (That bean soup is an easier sell with a little bit of uncommonly good bacon.) And in part it’s because I’ve gotten over the identity-marker element that was so important to me when I was younger.

And he quotes Katherine Willis Pershey on fasting and feasting as opposed to claiming identity markers (a vegan is something you ARE, a fast is something you keep, and then break.) Read her post here.

What do you think? Are dietary habits/rules something to take on as practices to be started and stopped, or are they markers of identity? What motivates each?