READY, FIRE, AIM: You Are What You Don’t Eat

I looked out the window on Saturday, and my cat, Roscoe, was munching on a small bird, with a contented look on his face.

I found this sight mildly distressing, because Roscoe has not yet dealt with the infestation of mice in my kitchen. In my opinion, he has no business munching on birds in the back yard, when he’s allowing the mice to run rampant inside the house.

But beggars can’t be choosers, during the Great Resignation. Employees have the upper hand, nowadays. Or in the case of cats, the upper paw.

Once upon a time, the working class in Pagosa Springs was thankful for jobs. When you hired somebody to do a job, they were happy to show up to work, and do what you told them to do.

Actually, they didn’t always show up to work happy… not all of the time… but they did show up occasionally.  Now they don’t show up at all.

I don’t know what happened, but it may have had something to do with the COVID virus.  The medical profession thought the worst symptoms were the lower respiratory infections. They didn’t notice, I guess, that COVID was also making people quit their jobs.

Before COVID, Roscoe’s job — in the eyes of his employer (me) — was to rid the house of mice. That’s what he was originally hired to do.  Then along comes an invisible virus, and Roscoe starts turning up his nose at the furry vermin. First thing in the morning, there he is, sitting at the back door, whining to be let outside, so he can chase down innocent birds, while perfectly edible rodents ransack my kitchen.

Not that I blame Roscoe. Or the rest of humanity. Times are kind of weird, and a lot of us have changed the way we think about work.  And about health.  And about food.

Here’s a little quote from a January 2019 article in The Lancet written by Dina Hamideh and associates, on the topic of “digital nutritionists”.  The article talks about how AI might be better at telling us what to eat, and what not to eat.  Because, as we are beginning to understand, the diet that’s good for Jack’s health might not necessarily be good for Jill’s health.

Ms. Hamideh and her team wrote:

We are all the descendants of people who for hundreds of millennia spent their days doing primarily one thing — assuring their food needs were met. Because they were successful, we are here reading this…

That’s one way to look at success.  Because our ancestors were able to find food, we are here today, reading this.  Or, in my case, writing this.

From that point of view, the purpose of life is to survive long enough to have grandchildren.  (Children are a pain in the ass, but grandchildren are delightful.)

For hundreds of millennia, the primary thing was finding food.  Today, we all know where to find food.  At the grocery store.  Everything you could possibly want to eat is at the grocery store.  And lots of it.  I’m constantly amazed at the number of ice cream flavors available in the frozen food aisle.  Makes me wonder how our ancestors

The primary thing for us, today, is to stop eating too much, of the wrong things.

When our ancestors wanted to succeed, they worked all day, out in the hot sun, hoeing the cornfields and herding the sheep and goats.  Apparently, they did this on our behalf, so that we could have a hundred different flavors of ice cream sitting in massive refrigerators in the food food aisle.

When we want to succeed in the 21st century, we sit all day in front of a computer screen, writing AI computer programs that can tell seriously overweight people what to buy at the grocery store.  Or, more likely, telling us what not to buy.

Someday, computers might be able to tell us what not to read, as well.

Sitting in front of a computer all day can have other benefits. For example, you occasionally come across interesting articles. Like, did you know that people in Cambodia, Thailand and Indonesia — among other places — eat mice?

Roscoe and I are going to have a talk about that.