Читать книгу Riverford Farm Cook Book: Tales from the Fields, Recipes from the Kitchen - Jane Baxter - Страница 35

See the happy moron, He doesn’t give a damn.

I wish I were a moron.

My God! Perhaps I am!

Anonymous

Most of us live our lives the way my overweight Labrador eats her dinner: in a frantic rush, with little pause for consideration or appreciation and an almost paranoid resistance to sharing. She salivates at any suggestion of food and invariably wants more as soon as it is finished. For her, there is no such thing as enough. It is said that her breed lacks the satiated gene and, given the chance, would eat to obesity and ultimately death.

I watch her eat with pity. Like Pooh Bear, she is a dog of very little brain, but her appetites are fairly harmless and, between meals, provided there is no hint of a bin to raid or a child’s lunch to steal, she is loyal and endearingly happy in her skin.

I like to believe that I am smarter than my dog and, though I admire her ability to live in the moment, as a higher being I have the future to think about. Surely we should be able to organise and live our lives for long-term happiness and fulfilment. Surely we should be able to balance the fleeting pleasures of short-term material gratification with the needs of our long-suffering planet. All the evidence shows that material wealth in developed countries is very poor at delivering lasting happiness, but we allow our appetite for it to outweigh all the wisdom that would recommend a more balanced life. I sometimes think we might stand a chance of attaining that wisdom if it weren’t for the fiendishly clever and well-resourced marketing industry that is so adept at appealing to our base desires.

Our phenomenal technical prowess, combined with a century of cheap fossil fuel, has given us the power to consume our planet in one last supper. All the signs are that we will consume until the last drop of oil has gone or the capacity of our planet to support us has been destroyed, whichever comes sooner. The spectacle of a species hell bent on self-destructive consumption is, like our Labrador, both pathetic and tragic, but not nearly as endearing.