4 Decisions You’ll Make
or a game animal primed with fresh meat? The grass stalks are now still.
Your memory of what you observed is elusive, making it hard to be sure.
This is a time of day when lions are known to hunt. But it is also the time
of day when game animals forage.
Your intuition tells you that encountering a lion is unlikely. Yet being
wrong could mean the end of your life. Your choices are to advance for-
ward, or retreat and detour around. Backtracking is safer, but requires
more time and effort, and you are forgoing an opportunity to take down
much-needed food. Which option do you choose?
You are the product of choices like these, when risk was pitted against
reward and life hung in the balance. But you are different. You no longer
have to make such choices. The “savannahs” we face have become super-
markets and restaurants. Unlike our antecedents, we have the benefit of
history. We can make choices that they could not.
To guide our decisions, we possess more scientific knowledge and
understanding of how intricately food, life, and nature are linked than
any generation of people that ever lived on this planet. We know more
about nutrition, health, and acute and chronic illness related to food
than ever before. We can recognize the fragility of resources. We know
the reality of how we can alter nature and the environment—but we
cannot dictate what will happen afterward.
Compared with all those who came before us, we have everything
stacked in our favor. Moreover, as humans, we possess something else
that has eluded all other living beings from the beginning of time—the
ability to contemplate what the future might be, based on what we do in
the present. Unlike other creatures that have evolved and automatically
respond to predator threats or changes in weather or events in the imme-
diate future, our ability goes further, can be a conscious one, built from
supreme cognitive abilities, understanding, and meaningful reflection.
Each time my thoughts return to life on the farm—planting and
harvesting crops and feeding cattle—I have come to believe that this
one ability—to exercise foresight—is what sets us apart from all other
species. While other species can react, we can consciously act. So what
has happened to us that refining this ability no longer seems necessary?
As the grand food bargain made it easier to pleasure ourselves with
food we desired on our terms, our skills to peer into the future, see
what was happening, and change how we lived diminished accordingly.