Laha Lele

On Being Food

    One Halloween night I had a dream, an exquisitely strange dream, that changed my understanding of the natural world forever.  I think of it now as my winter present from the dead.  Today, all these years later, it still has the power to make me pause, struck by the immensity of my ignorance.      Dreaming, I was trying to park my car, but the available space was too small. A skeletally thin woman ahead of me offered to trade places.  As I maneuvered my vehicle out and back, the woman casually walked forward, sprawled against her own car, and with no distress delivered the tiniest of babies, actually a transparent albino slug:  just like a baby kangaroo prior to its journey to its mother’s pouch.  This baby was so small the mother had no labor pains at all—and she was so dangerously thin I never would have guessed she was pregnant.     I braked, parked the car in the middle of the street, and rushed forward to help her.  She didn’t ask for anything, and showed no discomfort, but I could see she had no idea what to do with the baby, and she simply leaned there, half-sitting, half-lying, while the tiny creature opened and closed its mouth in futile hungry gestures.     I asked her if I could help her feed her baby—did she need some help after her delivery?  She seemed to shrug, vaguely, to indicate that I could help her with her top, but I sensed she was far from interested.  I held the tiny thing in one hand, trying not to think how much like a worm it seemed, and raised the woman’s sweatshirt with my other.     As her chest was revealed, I tried to hide my shock at what I saw—she wasn’t just skeletally thin, she actually looked like rotting flesh; her orange-brown skin was so corroded and corrugated over her rib cage that I had a hard time determining what was a breast, and then where on that flap of wasted muscle, furrowed and lumpy, was the nipple.     Finally I decided that one brown lump way off to the side must be it, and I lifted the gaping white worm baby to latch on, meanwhile reassuring the mother:  how amazing it was that her baby already knew what to do; she wasn’t going to have to teach it anything about sucking and feeding.  Those tiny jaws were already working that tiny mouth, and clamped right onto the apparent nipple without hesitation.     I kept trying to figure out what was wrong with the woman—dressed, she had just seemed painfully thin—but unclothed, as I tried politely not to notice, she actually had no flesh left.  She had wasted away to her internal organs and skeleton.  Something bulbous and orangey-brown sat cradled in her pelvis, a tough old fruit in a bowl of bone.  Her womb in the nest of her pelvis was like a leathery pomegranate (or an over-ripe pear I had discarded the day before, mourning the waste of it, the sheen of deep red flesh, still beautiful in its skin but rotten inside—consoling myself as I put it down with the thought of feeding the earth).     How had this woman been pregnant without her body reflecting her state?  Why was she so wasted away?  Why was the baby so translucent and colorless—a long, unnaturally long, thin baby, without the round parts and redness I expected?  Why was the woman seeming to disintegrate in front of me?     And then I awoke, crying.  Awake, I realized the woman was actually a rotting corpse, not a living being.  And the baby was really a worm, some embryonic state of transformative energy, eating away at the dead shell, not a baby at all.  Instead of helping a woman feed her newborn, I was assisting at her decay.  What I had failed to perceive, in my confusion, was a health condition known as death.     I was repulsed, terrified, grief-stricken; this wasn’t the way to new life I expected.  Yet, truly, in the natural world, decay is essential for transformation.  It’s as critical as birth in the cycle of life and death.  Metaphorically and sometimes literally, the death of the mother is the baby’s sustenance.              Since then I have pondered evanescence—disintegration and decay as food for new life.   Dying stars create all the matter in the universe; a dead tree feeds a young forest.  Certainly my lack of comprehension fuels my fear and revulsion.  I try to overcome these emotions through closer observation.  I want to understand that blind hunger in nature, like that hungry gaping worm, and not look away.      Consider the instinctive urgency of a baby bird, knowing only it needs to eat and grow.  This image, comfortably familiar, fails to provoke fear.  Then consider maggots, infesting the corpse of a dead dog by the side of the road—a manifestation of the same principle, yet difficult to appreciate.  Life springs from life, life feeds life, life spawns life.  This is nature, and I am afraid.     As a child I was terrified of insects, appalled by scavengers, and disgusted by algae, bacteria, and microscopic organisms.  Yet without insects most natural processes would cease, the web of life suddenly sterile, still.  Without scavengers, death would fill the world, omnipresent.  Without microorganisms, the fortunate symbiosis that allows for our digestion would not exist, and even the soil would fail to produce life.  How can I feel such distaste for the very beings that allow for my being?     So I watch them, and think about them, these creatures of my early nightmares.  I once spent thirty-seven minutes carefully observing the mating process of two flies, the pulsing bobbing dance that signaled new life.  Living in a small developing country, I grew accustomed to giant cockroaches surveying my kitchen for scraps, and streams of tiny ants reveling in drips and splatters and crumbs.   A visiting rat investigated the outlet of the wastewater pipe for possible nutritional finds.  We fought a battle for my bread flour, and the rat won.     Though I cannot yet say I find them beautiful, I’m incapable of killing them.  I won’t use insecticides, I won’t use roach powders, I won’t use rat poisons.  I won’t even use antibacterial soaps, which like antibiotics kill indiscriminately, the benign along with the feared.  I will, however, use bay leaves, ground pepper, and mechanical obstructions to indicate off-limit territory.  I make a concoction of epsom salt paste, citronella, and witch hazel to repel mosquitoes, because the idea of parasites feeding on my blood before I am dead still revolts me, and a bout with dengue fever gave me reason to be wary.  I think, though, if they leave me alone, I can leave them alone; and they are, after all, food for others.     As fear lifts, the urge to kill evaporates.  I still feel vulnerable, and when a large winged thing flies in my face or a crawly creature scampers over my foot I jump and scream with all the instinctive recoil of my biological being.  I do not want to be a meal before my time, and I will do my best to protect my life.  Yet I’ve found that protecting my life doesn’t have to mean exterminating all predators, or retreating to the sterility of a mechanical haven where nothing lives.     I want to feel part of this seething soup we call nature, and know my place.  I want to stop judging beautiful/ugly, worthy/repellent, acceptable/discardable.  I want to understand the layers of abundance, from the life of systems to the life of cells.  I eat, hence I am food.  I take in and let out.  I am that blind instinctive hunger that seeks nourishment in the refuse of other living things.  Old roots, old leaves, old flowers, seed husks and bark will sustain me, until I subside and give subsistence to others.     The winter dead gave me a gift so a spring of new respect could follow.  I will continue to watch, and learn, and try to understand.

One of the ugly truths about plastic bags.

True confessions up front:  Yes, I am a registered Green Party voter. No, I won’t use poisons to eliminate cockroaches, mosquitoes, and other insect life.  OK, I may be kind of out there on the environmental preservation spectrum.  But that’s me.

I know half of Oahu is in an uproar about today being the first day of the plastic bag ban.  I have personal friends who refuse to carry canvas bags.  I have used plastic shopping bags as garbage bags, because I refuse to purchase plastic.

Nevertheless, there are valuable alternatives to plastic that could actually improve our economy.  While my partner was dying of progressive MS, we needed lots of general disposal bags in addition to the biohazard boxes for his syringes, etc.  Through a local food co-op I was able to source a company that manufactures grocery bags using cornstarch instead of plastic.  Believe it or not, using plant starches and vegetable oils, it is possible to create a quite satisfactory shopping bag, as strong and convenient as plastic. (Anyone up for funding a taro starch and coconut oil experiment?)

The amazing advantage is that these bags break down into biodegradable, compostable particles in a matter of months, as opposed to trashing country roads, floating away in the ocean and killing whales and turtles, and adding to that very frightening garbage spiral in the Pacific, which is growing bigger every day.  In fact, the bags I had stored on our lanai broke down in their boxes after a year of sunny days and cool evenings, because I had purchased too many, anticipating a much longer life for my partner.

Even paper bags can be produced from 100% post-consumer paper waste, another biologically and environmentally attractive alternative.

We don’t even have to carry calabashes on our heads, so I think we’re lucky!  

If we are consuming so many “things” to the extent that the transport of these “things” is sufficient to create conflict, then maybe we could examine our consumption habits?  Any self-sustaining consumption model could be patterned after a biological cycle, where the output (waste) of the end of the cycle becomes the input (raw materials) of the beginning of the cycle.  The problem with our current consumer patterns is that they are convenient (and profitable) only for the very wealthy top percentage of the Earth’s population, with a massive load of toxic trash jamming up the end of the line, creating destruction and misery for all.  (The “Constipation Model?”)

Consider today the beginning of something better and more sustainable. Your children’s children’s children will thank you. 

Now we need to eliminate more plastic. Consider the microplastics invading our brains, from plastic wraps, food containers, tea bags, and microwaved plastic plates. Consider the BPA adding to the load of "forever toxins" in our bodies. With plastic's organic chemistry being confused as "biological" by the insects, birds, and fish that consume it, and our bodies uncertain what to do with it, is it so surprising that more and more terrible autoimmune conditions are being "discovered?"