Minimal contact with the natural world
19 October 2015(Reprinted from The Edge – Options pullout, 19 October 2015 issue)
Dear Kam,
I am getting very concerned about my lazy and good-for-nothing son. He only likes eating Western food. I tell him he needs to start earning some money because spaghetti doesn’t grow on trees, but then he says it does. His mother spoils him and he’s very clever for a seven-year-old. My question is, does spaghetti grow on trees? I also don’t know.
Pasta-less
I just cut off a chicken’s head. The chicken was very dead, it had been frozen and was completely plucked but still, I had to cut off its head and it wasn’t too much fun. I’ve eaten lots of chicken over the years and yet, I think this was the first time I’d even seen a chicken’s head. I know I’ve seen them on TV and now I’m not sure if I’m mixing up the TV images with reality. It might be that the last time I saw an actual live chicken was when I was a child. I have a very vague recollection of being attacked and chased by geese when visiting Kuala Kangsar, and a recollection of people laughing at my misfortune, which seemed to be everyone’s standard operating procedure when I was young. Oh look, Kam is absolutely terrified because he’s being attacked and chased by geese. Let’s all laugh at him and not rescue him from the single most terrifying experience of his young life.
My mother’s family are farmers in Devon, England. Well, they used to be farmers but their children have not followed them into farming. This is hardly surprising because it’s hard work and not very lucrative. At one point, they could only sell their sheep for £10 each because that’s all the big supermarket chains were willing to pay. They used to raise cows and sheep, which I found very exciting when I was young. But I never made the connection between the cute animals in the fields and the food on my plate. I doubt if any of my farming relatives would worry too much about cutting off a chicken’s head. But their children probably wouldn’t want to do it, one of whom now works for a big supermarket chain and delivers to them such delicacies as thick Devon cream. Does the cream actually come from Devon? Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t. Who knows?
Committing the tamely primal act of cutting off a dead chicken’s head reminds me of how separated I am from where my food comes from. In what conditions is my food grown or raised and would I have the courage or stamina to grow my own? And I’m reminded of something I saw in Shanghai.
Shanghai is a vast megacity with a population as large as the whole of Malaysia. Everything you see is the work of humans alone. It’s just a monoculture of humans. I was walking one night and I saw in a restaurant one of the tubby “little emperors” — one of the pampered products of China’s single-child policy. He was stroking a stuffed deer with a look of rapt concentration. Growing up in the heart of Shanghai, it is entirely possible that this stuffed deer was the nearest he had ever come to a non-human animal. This may have been his first and potentially only ever contact with what we might call “nature”. And it was only a stuffed deer in a restaurant. I’m certainly not laughing at him. I am him.
Reprinted with the kind permission of
