A Note on Ethics & Honest Doubts
The line this volume has tried to hold is simple to state and genuinely hard to walk: curiosity, yes; harm, no. An open, adventurous palate is one of the small glories of being alive to the world, and this book has celebrated it without apology — the willingness to try the unfamiliar dish, to take the offered delicacy as an honour rather than an ordeal, to understand that "strange" is very nearly always a fact about the eater and not the food. But an appetite for novelty is not a licence, and the loudest argument of these seven chapters is that the freedom of the curious palate is earned, and earned only, by the discipline to stop where stopping is right.
Some of what this volume has admired, it has admired strictly as history. Darwin's giant tortoises, provisioned by the ton until whole island populations were gone; the whale on the polar plate; the ortolan drowned in Armagnac; turtle soup and shark-fin and bluefin tuna — these belong to the record of what people ate, and several of them are now protected by the IUCN Red List, by CITES, and by national law precisely because the old appetite helped bring them low. This book has set such dishes out on the menus of Chapter Seven as documents, roman where the record is firm, and it trusts a reader who has passed through Chapter Six to read them as the past and not as a recipe. To admire a thing in its historical context is not to endorse repeating it, and this volume endorses none of it.
Chapter Seven sharpened one of those doubts rather than settling it. The menus from the ends of the earth are a record of appetite meeting a hard limit, and they carry two lessons that sit uneasily together. The first is that the historical extraction was often catastrophic and is rightly over: the whalers who took Galápagos tortoises seven hundred to a ship, and the industrial whaling that followed the explorers onto the polar plate, belong to a reckoning the modern reader must not sentimentalise into adventure. The second is subtler and harder. A food can be at once the treasured, ordinary cuisine of a living culture — everything the first commitment of the Curiosity Mandate insists we honour — and the flesh of a species conservation says we must now refuse, everything the second commitment insists we heed. When those two goods collide, this volume does not pretend the tension dissolves. It holds, plainly, that the survival of the species comes first, on the simple ground that a delicacy can be mourned and one day remade while an extinction cannot be undone. But it recognises that the cost of that priority has a habit of falling on the people with the least power and the oldest claim, seldom on the distant gourmet, and that a naturalist comfortable in a warm kitchen a hemisphere away should carry the recognition with some humility, and press it first upon appetites nearer his own.
And then there are the questions this book does not pretend to have closed, because honest people, reasoning in good faith, land in different places on them. Where exactly does a fair kill end and cruelty for novelty begin? Is the objection to foie gras decisive, or is it a matter on which a thoughtful cook and a thoughtful critic may still, respectfully, disagree? Does the case for eating insects — sound as it is on protein, water and land — extend cleanly to farmed animals whose capacity to suffer we understand far better? How much weight should fall on welfare, how much on conservation, how much on the culture whose dish it is to defend? This compendium has stated its own convictions plainly where it holds them, and has tried, just as plainly, not to counterfeit certainty where it has none. The reader is owed that honesty most of all: that the line between curiosity and harm is real and worth defending, and that its exact placement, on more questions than this book has resolved, remains a conversation still being had at the table — which is, in the end, exactly where such things should be settled.
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