The concept
of cultural practices can be spun in different ways depending on which light a
person wants to shed them in. One food
related cultural practice is the avoidance of beef consumption in the Hindu
religion. Some of the reasons they do
this are because of their belief in minimizing harm done to any living thing as
well as the idea that when a person consumes meat, they are also consuming the
emotions the animal felt during its slaughter (presumably pain and fear). These two reasons align with moral principles
we have studied including not eating meat as it causes a great deal of
suffering, and to not cause a great deal of harm without a just reason to do
so. When put in this frame, cultural
practices can be a positive example for why we should respect the culture for
having the beliefs it does.
However,
certain cultural practices can be problematic.
In China, shark fin soup is a highly revered meal both for its symbolic
and medicinal powers. The problem here
though is that sharks are hunted by the tens of millions, to be stripped solely
of its fin and the rest of its body discarded.
On one hand, if we are respecting their culture’s right to make shark
fin soup, we can at least be frustrated by the tremendous amounts of food waste
created (eat the rest of the shark if you are going to hunt them!) Though, in an ecological lens, it is
difficult to respect the culture for what it is. The hunting of sharks is decreasing their
population massively, especially because their reproductive cycles are very
slow. This decrease in their population
causes a decrease in biodiversity and screws up the food chain massively
because the top predators are no longer there to regulate the population sizes
of others. When a cultural practice
becomes an ecological problem, it is hard to respect it and we come to a
stalemate of sorts in terms of balancing our concern for the environment with
being respectful.
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