Useful Delusions and Big, Juicy Steaks

I did some sewing yesterday afternoon and listened to podcasts while I worked. I love podcasts and listen to a wide variety of them. Among those I listen to regularly are some that do not align with my way of thinking, but I believe it is a good idea to listen to them to stay wellinformed and to be sure that I am not in an echo chamber as I feel so many people are these days. If you have read this column over the years, you know that I am an advocate of always learning and always seeking the truth. Sometimes seeking the truth involves listening to someone who thinks differently.

The first podcast was assigned to me by a person I often refer to as my “adopted son,” Zack. It was about what some people are hoping is the future of meat production—lab-grown meat and plant-based meat substitutes. The people in the podcast had disparate reasons for supporting this. The person who had established this particular research and marketing program was on the right track, in my opinion, which is looking at the facts of population growth along with the facts of commercial/ industrial meat production and seeing that it does not add up decades down the road. He and his group of scientists are trying to get something going now that can fill in the gaps that are coming. The interviewer was on the track of thinking that surely people would prefer the image of meat grown in a clean lab while being monitored by scientists in white coats to the messiness of animals, blood, poop, dirt, etc.

The second podcast was about “useful delusions,” ways in which we all tell ourselves little stories that help us deal with the realities of life. An especially interesting concept was about how we have generally thought that delusions and detachment from reality are aspects of mental illness, when we are starting to find that some mentally ill people, particularly those with depression, have few delusions and tend to have a clearer view of reality.

These two topics may seem very disparate, but they were perfectly paired in my mind. Part of the discussion with Zack and my husband regarding the meat podcast was about how life itself is messy and many people embrace that messiness. Of course everyone in my family hunts as does Zack, and we generally eat what we kill. Zack was here with us during the winter storm and entertained himself by reading a book on slaughtering and butchering meat animals. Between hunting and raising meat animals, we are intimately familiar with what it takes for meat to end up on a plate. But I have observed that many, maybe most, people have a little delusion in their minds about meat coming from the grocery store, not from a now-dead animal. I think they do not let their minds connect those peacefully-grazing cows they see on the sides of the roads with the steak or hamburger on their dinner plates.

Why does this matter? Because we cannot make good decisions when we do not know the facts. We make poor decisions when we base them on delusions, even helpful delusions. When we are deciding based on delusions we do things like take rich farmland out of production and turn it into recreational land or a solar farm. In our business I hear about these things all the time and have long since started wondering where food is going to come from in the future. I suppose it will all come from a nice clean lab! (I really need to be able to add that eye-roll emoji sometimes!) SpringCreekArtsGuild@gmail.com