I was cooking today morning, making some dosas (rice pancakes for the luddites for who still don't know what dosas are :-).
And I added a liberal dose of active yeast about 30 minutes before making the dosas. If you actually allow the yeast to settle in, you get some of the most yummy dosas, that life can conjure up. Seriously try it.
But thats for another post, and beside the point. The few tiny pellets I dropped into the batter, probably consisted of around 3-10 bn live yeast strains. As soon as they see happy grounds, (like batter for example), they begin actively working and multiplying....So in the 30-45 minutes I let them be, they must have begun multiplying to over double of what we started with.
Point is - give and take about X Bn tiny creatures.
And the larger point is - why is it ok for me to go ahead and slaughter these billions of lives for my single food sojourn, when I seem to take a moral offing to killing livestock for food? (I actually don't, but given my Buddhist roots, I easily could...which means I could demonstrate indignation very naturally....just that I am aware that is shitstock indignation and hence stay away from it).
There are moral dangers of choosing whom to kill. A bull versus a snake, a snake vs a rat, a chicken vs a dog, shark vs a dolphin. I can see how our anthropological biases lead us in some of these decisions.
But really, for all my moral posturing (or the posturing of my ilk), I killed about 20bn creatures, just during breakfast today. Three times the total human race.
What kind of karma am I piling up?
There is no easy answer in this business....but the Zen Buddhists have an answer. If you do have to kill, then kill an elephant - at least you can feed a whole village with a killing.
And meanwhile I wallow in my moral decrepitude.
And I added a liberal dose of active yeast about 30 minutes before making the dosas. If you actually allow the yeast to settle in, you get some of the most yummy dosas, that life can conjure up. Seriously try it.
But thats for another post, and beside the point. The few tiny pellets I dropped into the batter, probably consisted of around 3-10 bn live yeast strains. As soon as they see happy grounds, (like batter for example), they begin actively working and multiplying....So in the 30-45 minutes I let them be, they must have begun multiplying to over double of what we started with.
Point is - give and take about X Bn tiny creatures.
And the larger point is - why is it ok for me to go ahead and slaughter these billions of lives for my single food sojourn, when I seem to take a moral offing to killing livestock for food? (I actually don't, but given my Buddhist roots, I easily could...which means I could demonstrate indignation very naturally....just that I am aware that is shitstock indignation and hence stay away from it).
There are moral dangers of choosing whom to kill. A bull versus a snake, a snake vs a rat, a chicken vs a dog, shark vs a dolphin. I can see how our anthropological biases lead us in some of these decisions.
But really, for all my moral posturing (or the posturing of my ilk), I killed about 20bn creatures, just during breakfast today. Three times the total human race.
What kind of karma am I piling up?
There is no easy answer in this business....but the Zen Buddhists have an answer. If you do have to kill, then kill an elephant - at least you can feed a whole village with a killing.
And meanwhile I wallow in my moral decrepitude.
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