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<back | home Seeing Too Deeply: the Hazards of Knowing Interdependency in the Global Economy by Diana Winston The salmon was dead. It was artfully displayed on my plate on a bed of arugula with a dollop of mango salsa. I was dining at one of those California Bistros where they fuse ethnic and California cuisine. I felt hip, at home, hungry. I extended my fork to sample its flesh and suddenly my discriminating wisdom kicked in. Was this fish farmed or wild? Atlantic or Pacific? Mercury high enough to worry about? Had this one been injected with antibiotics, pesticides, dyes? Didn’t that article say that 90 percent of all fish in the ocean have been caught and there are no more fish? Did it have a family — did someone murder the mother of a happy fish family? Did it come from some fishing industry that overturned the livelihood of small fishermen who were only making fifty cents a day anyhow because they were displaced by the large fishing boats? And how on earth did it get to me? Transported in trucks running on gasoline? For that matter, I drove to this restaurant. Great, I was supporting the war in Iraq by eating this fish. Shouldn’t I be a vegetarian, anyway? I’m a Buddhist, for God’s sake! I thought I was out for a peaceful dinner with friends, but instead I was treating myself to a full-on guilt ritual, one I undergo frequently now and drown out only with denial, or intense conversation on a subject other than salmon. Was I experiencing a deep insight into interdependence, fomented by years of spiritual practice? Or was this just too much knowledge guaranteed to ruin my dinner? Where does one draw a line? I ate the salmon. It was on my plate and we shouldn’t waste food. After all, there are millions dying of starvation in Africa. Yet even with all the theoretical knowledge about a food’s history, I don’t have much direct connection with my food. This salmon came from hundreds of miles away. I didn’t fish for the salmon. I didn’t catch it, filet it, or remove its bones. I didn’t even cook it, in this case. I have no personal relation to that which keeps me alive. At a family barbecue, Marina, my eight-year-old cousin, proudly announced her discovery: "Daddy," she observed, "There’s a food called chicken, and an animal called chicken!" Whether hypervigilant or out of touch, Americans are more food-obsessed than ever. Even in so-called alternative circles, social-lives revolve around meeting for lunch or dinner. We fantasize about where to go or what to prepare at home. If I get to the store on time I can get that sundried tomato paste for the olive bread. Or, Should we do Vietnamese, Italian, Thai, or Ethiopian tonight? In Ethiopia do you think they sit around wondering whether to go out for American? No, they make do, like most of the underdeveloped world, with the daily special: rice and whatever else they can get. In the U.S. our bookstores are stuffed with cookbooks and gourmet magazines. At the checkout counter we can purchase two different simple living magazines, each telling us to meditate daily and offering fabulous recipes using whole grains and cilantro. Even simple eating is a marketing device. It’s possible we are trying to fill a hole that’s never going to be filled in this way — the hole of loneliness, fear, lack. When I feel depressed I head straight to the refrigerator. I make myself macaroni and cheese when I start to feel the pain of loneliness. I numb myself out with goldfish[TM] crackers. I feel momentary relief as the crunchy cheesy salty creatures hit my tongue, but the underlying dis-ease is merely masked. In the U.S. we are glutted with food and worried daily about our fat thighs and butts. The dieting industry makes billions yearly off our low self-esteem while in another part of the world, let’s say Somalia, people are drinking from contaminated streams to quench their thirst — and that’s it for the day, that’s their nourishment. You want thin, I’ll give you thin! In the overdeveloped world, the privileged can eat whatever they want whenever they want it. What an odd state of affairs. The result: depletion of the world’s resources. Fish are now the canary in the coal mine. The world has overfished. Fish are becoming extinct. According to a recent scientific report, fishing should be completely banned in a third of the world’s oceans in order to reverse a catastrophic decline in fish stocks. Biologists recommend that large areas of ocean, including the North Sea, around the Falklands, and the Gulf of California, should be made into legally protected marine reserves, policed by naval patrols and satellites. Otherwise fish will be a thing of the past, and the millions of people who currently survive on fish will have to find an alternative, like soylent green. "In this apple I see the presence of the entire universe." - Thich Nhat Hanh One eating meditation practice is to trace the food on your plate back to its origin. Can you see the tree, the seed, the wind, the rain, the farmers, the ancestors of the farmers, the air, the sky, the ...? The results are often revelatory, especially when this practice is done for the first time. A few years ago I taught eating meditation to a group of teens. I wanted to teach them about interdependence and I surprised them with a bag of Hershey’s chocolate kisses. They surprised me with their deep seeing: "I see the rain," said one "I see the sun," said another "I see slavery in the Ivory Coast," said a third who had spent a semester interning at a social justice organization. "What?" I asked. He pointed out that children in West Africa have been sold into slavery to harvest the cocoa beans. He told us that these children, some as young as nine, are lied to about jobs and wages and suffer through beatings, insufficient meals, lock-ups at night, and workdays of more than 12 hours without breaks. "They say there could be up to 15,000 child slaves there," he informed me. "It’s horrible, these poor kids." We sat together in silence staring at the kiss. One girl began to cry. "It’s just so sad," she said. "I look at this kiss and now I see small children dying." When the Buddha realized interdependence in 500 BCE, it was not so complicated. "Let’s see," he mused, "With my divine eye I realize this chapati is made from flour that comes from a village one day’s walk away, where it was milled by the hand of maidens. Ahh, we are all interconnected." But in 2004, the flour I’m eating usually comes from a corporation whose business practices I may or may not know anything about. My wheat may be distributed by a corporation without a union. My corn has been genetically modified. It was flown in from Peru where it was picked and sorted by 12-year-old peasant children making a heartbreakingly low wage. The airplane that transported it uses fuel that’s linked to the war in Iraq — and I’m back to where I started. I live with a constant presence of what I might call for now: Unhelpful Awareness of Interdependence (UAI). Helpful interdependent awareness might be seeing the presence of the entire universe in your morning grapefruit. You sigh with joy and oneness; yes, we are all connected. UAI, however, is another story. For me, it is made of layer upon layer of thought processes present in nearly every experience of daily life, tormenting me in that knowing voice. It’s not helpful. It can’t be helpful to feel shame and guilt every time we eat non-local food — it just can’t be. Guilt is a kilesa, or defilement, according to the Buddhist abhidharma. It is an unskillful state of mind that leads to suffering. It is a form of self-flagellation. The Buddha distinguished it from hiri and ottappa (moral fear and moral dread, respectively). Hiri and ottappa are wholesome states of mind that invite us to reflect on past actions and make different choices. We feel fear or disgust when thinking about an ethical breach and we vow to act differently. That’s the good kind of remorse. We’re not paralyzed by thinking we’re fools; we simply learn our lesson and don’t do it again. Later when we even think about transgressing, we are turned off. In the West the privileged live in a set of conditions where, in order to survive, unless we join a back-to-the-land movement or find a fully self-sufficient lifestyle, we are stuck, face it, living off the backs of the global poor. Many of us, in luxurious America, live as well as we do only because the poor take the brunt. We can’t be pure. This is the reality of the global economy. In order to live, most of us depend on structures that perpetuate oppression. This is a very serious notion for a Buddhist to contemplate. If we take seriously that first precept, and look with interdependent eyes, we will see harming in nearly everything we eat, wear, ride, or enjoy. So how do we tap into an understanding of interdependence that helps us feel more compassionate without falling over the edge into guilt and self-flagellation. I have a few thoughts: 1) Personal Approaches Abandoning Guilt: It’s okay to enjoy our food. Actually, it’s a good thing. It’s helpful to remind ourselves of the impossibility of purity in this interdependent global economy. It’s okay to make mistakes, to not buy locally from time-to-time, to get your coffee in a Styrofoam cup when you’re in a rush. Making Smart Food Choices: The above is true only if we can cull the wisdom from the guilt. We can work with hiri and ottappa (fear and dread). We can use the discriminating wisdom embedded in UAI to make skillful food choices, such as buying organic, buying local, not supporting big agribusiness with our purchases, aiming for mostly vegetarian, supporting farmers’ markets and community supported agriculture (CSA), not buying processed food, and so on. Eat healthful whole foods; you’ll feel a whole lot better. Working with the UAI mentally: Notice the UAI voices. When they arise unbidden in your mind, gently say to them, "Not now." Note the number of times they come to your mind; treat them as thoughts that don’t need to be identified with. When they arise, what does your body feel like? Are these voices tied into other self-judging voices? Investigate. 2) Slow Food The Slow Food Movement which originated in Italy is so in-keeping with mindfulness practice. Slow down and taste your food. What a concept! As we learn to appreciate our food more, we will begin to make more sustainable food choices. And there’s something extremely pleasurable about eating in community, sharing meals, cooking for each other. 3) Structural We can take social or political actions on behalf of better food, whether it’s protesting GMOs, writing congresspeople, organizing community supported agriculture, facilitating farmers’ markets, creating campaigns to boycott inhumane production methods, or fighting against overfishing. If we actually are doing something out in the world, it seems to appease the guilt. We have a retort when the UAI voice gets nasty. "I’m working on it!" 4) Gratitude Gratitude goes a long way to wiping out UAI. I try to transform guilt into gratitude by reminding myself how lucky I am to be alive and to have such a variety of foods to eat, to have sentience, to be able to smell and taste. Before I eat I take a moment in prayerful silence. Sometimes I say a traditional Buddhist prayer. Sometimes I send metta (lovingkindness), sometimes I just sit there until I really truly feel gratitude: How amazing that the salmon gave up her life so that I could eat. May my life be worthy of that little salmon. May my work in the world do her justice. Diana Winston worked for BPF from 1994 to 2002. She is the author of the newly released Wide Awake: A Buddhist Guide for Teens. This was reprinted with permission from Turning Wheel Magazine (www.bpf.org/html/turning_wheel/turning_wheel.html; call 510/655-6169 or email bpf@bpf.org). <back | top^ |