Would You Eat Seal Meat?

One of the best things about this weekend's trip to Austin was the fact that we had some "down" time in which I was able at long last to finish the book Collapse by Jared Diamond. (He is the also the author of Guns, Germs and Steel.)

Collapse is a big book about the ways in which societies choose to fail or succeed. The author covered sociology, agronomy, geography, and climate as he examined the factors that he thought were important in determining the life or death of a society using ancient and modern societies as examples. It is an interesting read, but also difficult--especially for a non-sciency person like me.

I'm not going to try to summarize the book because it is far too complex. But I would like to share one of Diamond's insights that I found particularly striking. The Norse settled Greenland in the medieval period but their settlement did not survive the "little ice age" that afflicted Europe around 1200 CE. Not one Norse soul survived and their settlement stands abandoned to this day.

However, the Inuit population of Greenland survived the same harsh conditions using the skills they had developed over centuries of living in that area. Why didn't the Norse adapt some of those skills and survive? For example, the climate became too cold for traditional Norse agriculture and animal husbandry, but the Inuit continued to feed themselves by hunting seals, walrus and (if they could get them) whales. Why didn't the Norse eat seals, too?

Diamond points out that the cultural values of the Norse prevented them from adapting as the Inuit did. They couldn't imagine eating what the Inuit did, much as an orthodox Jew could not imagine eating pork or shellfish. A big factor was that the Norse disdained the Inuit and had, as Diamond put it, "a bad attitude" about them. They refused to learn from them, even when death was the alternative.

It is hard to imagine that you wouldn't go ahead and try to eat seal meat in an attempt to make it through the winter if that was clearly your only alternative. But something in the Norse mindset kept them from thinking: "Hey, we're starving to death. Let's go get some seal for the family." And so they perished.

Diamond makes the point that while in the case of the Norse settlements in Greenland, survival meant setting aside cultural values regarding hunting and eating, other societies either failed or thrived when they were able to re-examine the long-term utility of other types of practices and either adapted them or abandoned them while adopting new ones.

What would we refuse to eat? Probably most of us would not become cannibals. Although there are a few instances where people did resort to cannibalism to survive (the Donner Party and that airplane crash in the Andes several decades ago), there were people in those situations who died because they couldn't bring themselves to do it.

Changing our culturally shaped eating habits is really a metaphor for changing other culturally shaped practices. If we were convinced that the survival of our society depended on it, could we drastically change our dependence on fossil fuel or increase our consumption of fish or change our methods of agriculture or do whatever it takes to achieve zero population growth even if doing these things violated deeply held cultural and spiritual values?

Would we eat the seal meat, or would we perish? Collapse leaves you with a lot to think about.