The Tiger Who Ate Everything

Sometime around 12,000 years ago, our hunter-gatherer ancestors began growing food that would sustain a life high on physical endurance and low on material comforts. With time, humans evolved, and our bodies became more in tune with how efficient we had become with our daily chores. The human brain too reduced in size with time. In the book ‘Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind,’ anthropologist Yuval Noah Harari traces this evolution: “Mammals weighing 60 kilograms have an average brain size of 200 cubic centimeters. The earliest men and women, 2.5 million years ago, had brains of about 600 cubic centimeters. Modern Sapiens sport a brain averaging 1,200-1,400 centimeters.” However, there is a cost of thinking. Large brains were a drain on energy and lead to muscle atrophy. This jumbo brain accounts for about 2-3% of total body weight, but it consumes 25% of the body’s energy when the body is rest. 

While we pride ourselves on being the most intelligent race, these advantages would not have been possible without the natural course of evolution. Someone was looking out and thinking for us. This efficiency resulted from human evolution, acquired knowledge, and the rapid progress we made in science & technology.

We could now do more without spending much energy. Efficiency became directly proportionate with how much can be produced, with the least amount of time and cost. This economy of scale, however, started showing up on our weighing scales. Our ancestral brain continued to feed its body as if it was just coming out of a long period of starvation. The body was eating, but the mind kept starving. 

The internet and travel have brought us closer to foods from cultures and civilisations that our ancestors took centuries to discover. Now food, irrespective of where it is produced, can be bought easily in kirana shops, supermarkets, or online stores. To compensate for the long gap between production and consumption, food is often spiked with preservatives, travel miles, and some form of labour exploitation by the time it reaches us. The instant gratification monkey in our heads is too high on the taste of what it ate, or the numerous distractions that surround us make it easier for us to move on easily. We don’t have the time to track the life cycle of what we ate because, in all probability, we might be already eating something else, really fast. 

Plastic contamination is old news, but the toxicity of it has already crossed all lethal benchmarks. “We're Now At A Million Plastic Bottles Per Minute - 91% Of Which Are Not Recycled”, screams a Forbes article. If you live in a first-world country, most probably your garbage is accumulating flying miles to a third-world country. This lopsided cycle of consumption presents another contrast in how the world's resources are so unequally distributed between the developed and the developing. Someone is either wasting food because they have more than they can chew or someone, somewhere is going to bed on an empty stomach.

Yesterday I chanced upon a children’s book called ‘The Tiger Who Came to Tea’ by Judith Kerr. The story is about a tiger gate crashing Sophie, a young girl, and her mother’s tea time. The kind lady invites the tiger, the tiger accepts and leaves by eating and drinking everything. I sometimes wonder if I am the tiger who ate everything without thinking about:

How good is the food to me?

What did it cost the environment?

Where did it come from?

Where will the residue go?

There is no easy way out from this conundrum because consumption is a basic human need. It is the balance of things that I am striving for. 

Like the bee hunters of the Nilgiris, a mountain range in South India, who perform rituals before every harvest, the ritual is their way of taking from nature and at the same time seeking guidance and forgiveness for taking what is not theirs. This openness to finding out more and accepting that nature will prevail till a balance is restored gives me hope.