Sublime

According to totalitarian agriculture, cows may live but wolves must die. According to totalitarian agriculture, chickens may live but foxes must die. According to totalitarian agriculture, wheat may live but chinch bugs must die. Anything we eat may live, but anything that eats our food must die—and not merely on an ad hoc basis. Our posture is no

You can have everything a person could possibly need by the standards of our culture—but those standards can badly misjudge what a human actually needs in order to have a good or even a tolerable life.

The human blitzkrieg across America testifies to the incomparable ingenuity and the unsurpassed adaptability of Homo sapiens. No other animal had ever moved into such a huge variety of radically different habitats so quickly, everywhere using virtually the same genes.6

For two hundred thousand years, our body’s appetite and weight-control systems functioned well. They even worked during the US boom years from the 1940s through the 1970s, when food was just as abundant as it is today. And just like today, almost everyone had an automobile—we weren’t walking everywhere—and jogging and gym-going were relatively rare

The peasant’s ancient ancestor, the forager, may have eaten berries and mushrooms for breakfast; fruits, snails and turtle for lunch; and rabbit steak with wild onions for dinner. Tomorrow’s menu might have been completely different. This variety ensured that the ancient foragers received all the necessary nutrients. Furthermore,

The only foraging societies with high population densities were coastal groups (most notably in the Pacific Northwest), who had access to annual fish migrations and plentiful opportunities to hunt aquatic mammals: reliable supply of high-protein, high-fat food allowed some of them to switch to sedentary lives in large communal wooden homes, and lef

Just as woodpeckers specialise in extracting insects from the trunks of trees, the first humans specialised in extracting marrow from bones.

Capitalism is a historical form of life in which wage labor is the foundation of social wealth. The deepest stakes of Marx’s critique of capitalism reside in his critique of the measure of value that is entailed by the dependence of society on wage labor.