The Sacred Nature of Consumption
And how we’ve lost our connection to it
We took our daughter Rory fishing the other day for her birthday. She turned 7 and is quite a nature enthusiast. There’s a stocked pond that’s close to us full of trout where you pay by the catch. She caught two big ones yesterday — a 16" and an 18" (with a little help from her parents who have never in their recollection caught a fish before).
Since her grandma (my mother-in-law) runs a restaurant here in town, we took the fish over so she could grill them up for us for dinner (the pond people clean the fish and put them on ice for you — yes, this is the ‘glamping’ version of fishing).
When grandma was doing a re-cleaning and beheading of the fish, Rory was watching intensely. When grandma’s knife severed the throat, Rory grabbed the head of the fish. She held it firmly. Then she started poking the eyeball. Not in a silly way, but in a serious, reflective way. A forlorn expression washed over her face.
It had hit her that she’d truly taken the fish’s life. Even though Alex and I talked with her about it beforehand(at length, due to her 6-year-old inquiring mind) and made sure that she was ‘okay’ doing this, she was affected by it. It was personal.
