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There has been a bit of discussion at this web-log about GM versus organic food. My position is well known including that I consider the aversion to GM irrational. I have written in the IPA Review (March 2004, Vol 56, No. 1) that GM is the new ‘taboo food’ and suggested that organic food might be the equivalent to the Jewish kosher and Moslem halal.

Rog sent me some links this morning to information about a fellow called Marvian Harris. Harris (now deceased) wrote about ‘cultural materialism’ which is apparently “…based on the simple premise that human social life is a response to the practical problems of earthly existence”.

Harris had some interesting ideas about food as culture including:

The Hindu ban on killing cows? Absolutely necessary as a strategy of human existence, Dr. Harris contended: they are much more valuable for plowing fields and providing milk than as a one-time steak dinner.

“Westerners think that Indians would rather starve than eat their cows,” he told Psychology Today. “What they don’t understand is that they will starve if they do eat their cows.”

In Dr. Harris’s view, then, a manufactured “divine intervention” was needed to encourage people simply to do the practical thing.

The Jewish and Muslim bans on eating pork? Pigs eat the same foods as humans, he reasoned, and are expensive to keep. Sheep, goats and cattle, by contrast, thrive on grass, and provide wool, milk and labor.

So in Harris’ view, what would the state government bans on GM food crops be about?

The links:

http://www.faculty.rsu.edu/~felwell/Theorists/Harris/Index.htm#Web

http://www.users.voicenet.com/~nancymc/marvinharris.html

This follows my earlier two postings ‘on politics’ including the proposition that the left think the right are evil:

“The truth is not as simple as the question are people good or bad, as we so often put it. It is not as easy as Hobbes or Rousseau, because Hobbes and Rousseau are both wrong about the essential, inescapable fact of human nature.

Namely, that humans are animals, pure and simple. We are not good. We are not evil. We are not angels or demons. As much as we may try to deny it, we are very much a part of this world.

We are the product of evolution, and evolution bequeathed to us a system that is damnably hard to improve upon. If we find the world today is not to our liking, perhaps it would do us well to examine those cultural systems that evolution gave us, that worked for us so well for millions of years.

I refuse to believe that striking bit of irrationality that of all the animals in the world, humans are unique twice–the only fallen animal, and the most exalted one. Our mythology talks of “the fall,” and makes us the worst of all animals. Or we can focus on our superior soul or intellect, and laud ourselves as the best. Neither is true, but those myths serve a purpose.”

… from a blog here http://anthropik.com/2005/04/the-state-of-nature/
by Jason Godesky and titled ‘The State of Nature”.

“The fundamental flaw in Jared Diamond’s treatment of Easter Island is that he approaches the problems of its evolution and history with the zeal of an environmental campaigner, and not with the dispassionate detachment of a scientist. He is too much inclined to employ his historical reconstructions as a tool for the environmental agenda and subordinates much of his analysis to moralistic and preconceived intentions. ‘Collapse’ is perhaps the prime upshot of the amalgamation of environmental determinism and cultural pessimism in the social sciences.

“It epitomises a new and burgeoning doctrine expounded largely by
disillusioned left-wingers and former Marxist intellectuals. In place of the old creed of class warfare and socio-economic driving forces that used to explain every single development under the sun, environmental determinism essentially applies the same one-sided rigidity to historical events and societal evolution.”

…according to Benny Peiser in a piece titled ‘From Genocide to Ecocide: The Rape of Rapa Nui’ in Energy & Environment, 16:3&4 (2005), pp. 513-539. Read the complete paper here:

http://www.staff.livjm.ac.uk/spsbpeis/EE%2016-34_Peiser.pdf .

And Roger Kalla has emailed me with a link to a multimedia exhibition based on Diamond’s book and commented that in a recent issue of Nature (vol :436 p778) under books and arts the exhibition is given a positive review by Philip Campbell who is the editor-in-chief of this respected Journal.

The link to the exhibition:
http://www.nhm.org/exhibitions/collapse