Toward Ecosophy

Well, kind of. 

Sara and I ran an assortment of errands in Providence yesterday, and one of the places we stopped was the local Expensive Yuppie Grocery, which is the only place locally we can get certain useful foods for her. (Long explanation about celiac disease and serious food allergies deleted.) So there we were in one of the aisles, picking up bags of the one really edible brand of rice pasta and some other items of the same kind, when Sara turned and her mouth fell open in utter astonishment. She pointed at a shelf, and I turned to look.

There, in an expensive yuppie grocery, the kind of place that's crammed with certified vegan products and the kind of allegedly healthy foods that you couldn't feed to prisoners of war without violating the terms for humane treatment included in the Geneva Convention, were jars of clarified pork fat, duck fat, and beef tallow. 

There's actually more going on in its appearance than a tacit admission that many kinds of food cooked in animal fat really are tastier than their vegetable-oil cousins, although that's part of it. There are, broadly speaking, two kinds of evil in the world. There's the kind that's motivated by greed and lust, and the kind that's motivated by pride and envy, and one of the things that makes life entertaining here in the world of manifestation is that each of them tends to point at the other and say, "That's evil, and therefore I'm good." 

To use the labels Rudolf Steiner gave them, Ahrimanic evil is the kind that's driven by greed and lust. It's all about plunging into sensation and materiality, who cares about the consequences to me or anyone else, I want it, Mac -- got it? Luciferic evil is the kind that's driven by pride and envy, and it's all about being better than other people, the world is not good enough for me and neither are you, you lowlife scum! Each has its habits, including dietary habits, and compulsive veganism is one of the common expressions of Luciferic evil in today's society.

That's not to say that all vegans are evil, far from if -- there are people who simply thrive better on a diet without animal products, and if you're one of those, enjoy your Tofurkey later this month.  Most of us, though, have encountered a great many examples of the sort of vegan for whom abstension from animal foods is a fondly regarded proof of their personal sainthood and a license to hurl abuse at those of us who don't share their diet. (Yes, I've tried a vegan diet -- I was into macrobiotics back in the day -- and I don't thrive on it. Yes, I've had perfect strangers melt down and start screaming at me because they saw meat in my grocery cart.) 

I'm entirely in favor of vegan products being available in groceries, for that matter. It's the tendency on the part of influential sectors of society to exalt one set of dietary choices as good for everybody and to tacitly or explicitly denigrate all others that bears watching, especially when it swings hard in a Luciferic or Ahrimanic direction. When everyone in a society is supposed to eat diets have so few calories that they're only suitable for office workers whose most significant physical exercise in the course of a day consists of the walk from the parking garage to the elevator, you know that something has gone wrong, just as much as if everyone in a society was supposed to gobble down an entire turducken every day. 

So the appearance of animal fats in the Expensive Yuppie Grocery struck me as a good sign. Now of course I didn't buy any of it -- like so many products in the Expensive Yuppie Grocery, it's overpriced -- but I was glad to see it. And, dear reader, if you want to enjoy the benefits of tasty animal fat without spending a lot of money, get some bacon, fry it up nicely in a skillet, drain the fat through a fine mesh strainer into a heatproof container, and keep it in the fridge.  Fry some cabbage or other vegetables in that for a change; you'll be glad you did.