Here’s something to fight about at the holiday table

ILLUSTRATION BY SALLY DENG

The December holidays are now in full swing. For many, the season is intimately associated with food—special food for special traditions. (“Feast day” is, appropriately, almost a generic term for holiday in the Catholic tradition.) That food is usually shared with family and friends, whom many of us will miss in holiday celebrations this year. But even so, this month’s downgraded feasts can give us comfort and continuity—understandable cravings in 2020.

Last Friday, Apocalypse Soon published a piece suggesting readers look at some of our assumptions about food with fresh eyes—specifically, assumptions about meat, which in many cultures is a core component of holiday feasts. It wasn’t a comfortable read. In fact, when authors Jan Dutkiewicz and Gabriel Rosenberg first pitched me a piece on the way industrial agriculture runs afoul of bestiality laws, I wasn’t entirely sold: Is it overly provocative to frame the meat industry’s reliance on artificial insemination as bestiality?

But their argument is an interesting and powerful one. And even if you’re not naturally inclined to click on stories of animal abuse, you may find material that grabs your attention: Gabriel and Jan look at the history and evolution of sex laws (starting with some deeply weird statutes from the Colonial period!), alongside the history and evolution of profit margins in modern farming. Artificial insemination, they argue, “is a clinical and detached term for a practice that involves invasive and sustained bodily contact between humans and animals,” and “the legal distinction between artificial insemination and bestiality was not a foregone conclusion,” but rather the product of sustained lobbying from Big Agriculture.

Some of the most interesting pieces we publish are ones that ask people to question very fundamental assumptions of daily life. Questioning the assumption that artificial insemination is ethical has huge implications for the U.S. meat and dairy industries, where pork, beef, milk, and turkey production is particularly dependent on the technology. It also has implications for climate change, given that meat and dairy production currently accounts for 14.5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.

The article was not written to shock and horrify: It doesn’t read like a PETA snuff film. But you may leave with a new perspective on the food on your holiday table, and on the policies state governments have instituted to govern its production.

—Heather Souvaine Horn, deputy editor

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A new paper in Science suggests the Biden administration could take advantage of the natural senescence of a lot of the nation’s current fossil fuel infrastructure for a smoother transition off fossil fuels: If a generator is already close to the end of its lifespan—as many are—phasing it out won’t mean “stranding an asset,” i.e., needing to engage in elaborate legal and financial machinations to compensate the company, it argues.

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Hakai Magazine has a beautiful and self-consciously indulgent piece on a type of “thoroughly forgettable moss” at risk of extinction in British Columbia:

Zygodon, despite its rarity, does not make a particularly strong case for its salvation. “Conserving such an inconspicuous species is really difficult,” says Irene Bisang, a bryologist at the Swedish Museum of Natural History, who has studied European populations of Z. gracilis. “What the hell do we say when people ask, Why should we save it? or, What does it add to the world?” Brainstorming out loud, Bisang notes that bryophytes serve crucial roles in ecosystems, such as sequestering carbon and producing peat. “And if you think of a mossy forest, you may be able to relax and calm down,” she says.

Dying out is different than dying. It is the moment an individual, or lack thereof, becomes a referendum on an entire population. It’s a heavy load to bear for a single colony of moss, which continues to live, or do its best to live, as it waits for a tree or two to be trimmed.

Sabrina Imbler | Hakai Magazine

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