Hedonism and Food

Chapter 7Part Three: Replacing Animal Products in FoodMarkdown

More Refined Tastes

One of my favorite videos on the Internet is an advertisement by the Finnish company Fazer.1 Fazer is the country’s leading producer of salmiakki, a candied, salted licorice. They formulated a salmiakki-flavored ice cream, and the video is promoting this new product. For the uninitiated, salmiakki will likely taste as objectionable as it sounds: it’s bitter, cacophonous, and foreign, but the Finns love it. The first half of the video features interviews with non-Finns, who are tasting salmiakki for the first time, only to quickly retch in disgust. When probed by the video producers, they immediately inveigh, “Awful,” “This is the worst ice cream I ever had,” and “I just can’t.” Naturally, the latter half of the video trots out Finns eating the ice cream and exclaiming: “I don’t know how you could make it any better; it’s already so good,” “If I had this in my fridge, it would not stay there for long,” and “Can I have another one?”

All the Nordic countries—Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, Norway, and Finland—love salted licorice. Go into any gas station in those countries and you’ll find salted licorice products adorning the walls, shelves, and counters. How is it that a product can be so beloved in one area and reviled outside it? We might instinctually believe that this is due to ancestry differences. However, the video highlights a Finn of African descent among the aficionados. Furthermore, my friend of Indian descent loves salted licorice, after having lived in Denmark for some time. And I too, who am also of Indian descent, have slowly come to appreciate salmiakki over time after some prodding and trying more varieties.

This dichotomy of salmiakki lovers and haters demonstrates that what we consider to be a “good” sensory pleasure can mutate over time, and it’s hardly the only example. Most of us remember getting used to beer, likely finding it bitter and offensive on first sip. But we can form a liking quickly, especially as social norms inculcate that preference into us. Bitter foods, in particular, seem to follow this script of initial determent to eventual delight (think coffee and scotch). In the obverse, what we consider good may eventually turn gross. I gleefully consumed beef burgers as a meat-eating teenager but gave up meat when I got to college. While living in Switzerland, I heard the news about the Impossible Burger and just how well it captured the taste of beef. When I moved back to the States, I had my first opportunity to try one in the summer of 2018, a full ten years after forsaking meat. As I chomped into the burger, I found it off-putting. The heme-iron taste reminded me of biting my tongue; I didn’t find it pleasant even though that’s how beef burgers apparently taste.

Most of us intuit that our tastes can change; otherwise, we would still have the palette of kids and prefer eating macaroni and cheese and chocolate pudding. This feeling of positivity and negativity associated with unique experiences has a name: valence. Positive valence is often associated with a flash of dopamine throughout our brain, reinforcing our preferences further. There’s research that invokes dopamine to explain our predilection for animal products: one theory asserts that our ancestors, Homo habilis, developed increased dopamine levels after meat consumption 2 million years ago.2 Ice cream, rich in both fat and sugar, can trigger a dopamine response, even surpassing that of cocaine.3 The dopamine-coupled pleasure is the third of the four Ns of eating meat: nice. The positive valence is hard to give up, and this stymies the transition to a future without animal products. We imagine a dreary, subdued life without flavor. However, as we, albeit superficially, explored, valences can mutate, and our hedonism can transform.

We’ve seen some of this in the transition from animal to non-animal products. Dairy milk has seen a substantial decline in consumption over the past twenty years in the US market. The average US citizen consumed nearly 100 liters (26 gallons) of milk per year back in 2000, but by 2019, that figure had sunk to 70 liters (18 gallons).4 In its stead, almond, oat, and soymilk have surged, accounting for fourteen percent of the market, with most of the growth being very recent.5 This growth is not driven by increased availability. In fact, the sales of plant-based milks are exceeding the pace of their distribution, meaning customer preferences are driving the curve. Indeed, some studies echo favorable taste evaluation on the non-dairy milks, particularly the sweetened ones.6 Now at my local Starbucks, I have at least three varieties of non-dairy milk—soy, almond, and oat milk—from which to choose.

While I’m confident that, in the long run, plant-based foods will taste vastly better than their animal counterparts, there’s another consideration. Directly addressing and modifying our hedonic programming should be not only considered, but taught and fostered broadly in the population. When life goes poorly or we suffer or feel anxious, we should not always expect some external pleasure to rescue us; be it a box of ice cream, a different partner, some new product, a vacation, etc. Sometimes, we’re better served to internally reprogram and develop our resilience to handle vicissitudes and seek new habits and training. Examples could be joining WW™(Weight Watchers), or engaging in therapy, yoga, or meditation practices. With better understanding of our brain circuitry, we should be able gain insight into the hedonistic pleasures we turn to that don’t serve us or the planet and make different choices.

Hedonism in Our Lives

Being able to note—and remember—a sensation as good or bad has obvious evolutionary advantages. Our brain has evolved to repudiate offending smells and bitter tastes as their noxiousness alert us to toxins in spoiled or dangerous foods. The bitterness of natural almonds clues us in to their highly poisonous cyanide content.7 Our ancestors learned through trial and error that the sweeter variant, or cultivar, of almonds was safe to eat, and this is what we now breed exclusively throughout the world today.8 High caloric foods—sweets and meats—enliven our taste buds and light up the pleasurable neural pathways in our brains, which, over generations evolved to give us a preference for them, while at the same time programming an aversion to certain dangerous or possibly toxic foods. In this way, our taste buds helped to ensure the continued survival of the human species.

The way we characterize sensations depends on our neural circuitry. Neurons extend out from a brain region, called the tegmentum, to another brain region, the nucleus accumbens.9 When we try a new, delicious food for the first time, pleasure senses trigger the start of the Mesolimbic pathway, where the neuron activation cascades, ultimately resulting in a spike of dopamine levels. The dopamine binds to receptor proteins of learning-associated brain cells. We crave that experience of pleasure again, and our minds link the events to the precipitating causes. The net result is that we are conditioned to continually pursue such behavior, in this case, seeking out more of the pleasure-inducing food.10 After we’ve tried the food for the first time, we’re conditioned to want it, specifically, again. And the next time around, the dopamine spike occurs in anticipation of consuming the food. This dopamine cascade applies to other body senses, as well, even without the prior experience; for example, sexually naïve males will release dopamine even at the prospect of sex.11

On the other side, dopamine molds our psychology to avoid painful experiences, and to actively develop aversion. Dopamine-releasing, or dopaminergic, neurons normally leak out a steady stream of dopamine, even when stimuli are absent. When we experience a sharp pain on picking a thorny flower, this steady stream of dopamine slows or stops abruptly, and our brain circuitry computes this gap in dopamine level as negative.12 As a result, we learn to avoid the complicit situation that led to the response.

In sum, dopamine can be understood as a mechanism for motivational salience, that is, modifying our behavior toward biological, evolution-developed goals. At the end of the day, the effect of evolutionary programming had nothing to do with how we felt, it simply motivated us to accomplish certain tasks. Any positive feelings or associations became an instrument toward those ends, and continues as such.

We do not even have to be mindful to find motivational salience in action. How many times might you wake up to the moment and find you have unconsciously been scrolling through Facebook, Instagram, or Reddit? I’ve even found myself mindlessly trying to navigate to Reddit while being on Reddit. When this dopamine system goes deeply awry, we’re prone to addiction, whether it be drugs, alcohol, or something else that aberrantly reinforces dopamine-release patterns. Social media companies play to the dopamine response to ensure that we stay transfixed to their platforms. These companies reap advertisement revenue commensurate to the time that we park on their platforms. Getting Likes, internet karma, or even just looking at pictures of cats can stoke our streams of dopamine, giving rise to a pleasure response that we want to repeat, which ultimately fills these companies’ coffers. Eyeballs equal advertising money. YouTube’s recommendation algorithm is a perfect example: enticing videos are predicted, selected, and surfaced to the user, and the platform will automatically play to the next one so that the viewer remains, sometimes unaware, and thereby drives up YouTube’s advertising revenue.13 Indeed, 70 percent of YouTube’s views come through the recommendation engine.14

So, if dopamine release itself does not directly equate to happiness or pleasure, are we truly experiencing pleasure by surfing Facebook? Likewise, we can be unconsciously driven toward food or away from intimidating social situations. We have feelings of pleasure that can result in the release of dopamine. But ultimately, dopamine is the result of the actual pleasure sensation. In real terms, we could conceivably modify the behavior or motivational salience of someone by administering and depleting dopamine; however, just administering dopamine itself would not generate happiness, as was confirmed by experiments in the 1980s.15 The lack of pleasure is not cured by increasing a person’s dopamine levels.

Nevertheless, in certain situations, we can correlate a person’s or animal’s pleasure to the release of dopamine, given that dopamine is often released concomitant to the sensation of pleasure. And the magnitude of dopamine should correspond to the magnitude of pleasure sensation, too. There are limits to this because it’s truly difficult to measure pleasure; the problem even has a name: “The Hard Problem of Consciousness.” We currently have no way of “measuring” someone’s conscious state in an objective, universally applicable manner, e.g., using a mass spectrometer or some chemical assay. We can’t tell if someone is experiencing pleasure nor to what magnitude in comparison with someone else. We don’t know if they’re lying, mistaken, or how their experience compares to someone who verbally professes feeling pleasure with the same experience but may not have the same feelings. But tying dopamine release to pleasure is one of the best methods we have to understand human hedonism, and per the Popperian paradigm posed in Chapter 2, that means we must accede to it unless and until we have something better.

Neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky in his book, Behave*,* highlights some disheartening findings about dopamine release and activity.16 A monkey learns that he will receive a delectable raisin after pressing a lever ten times. On the first success, the monkey experiences a wave of dopamine, stemming from the initial pleasure and surprise activation.17 The monkey assigns a positive valence to the raisin. Then on a second trial, the monkey receives two raisins, resulting in roughly double the dopamine release, or for our purposes, double pleasure. In the consequent trials, the monkey continually presses the levers and receives two raisins. However, the pleasure response diminishes as the monkey habituates to the pleasure and the lack of surprise. Disconcertingly though, eventually the monkey can end up experiencing less pleasure than when he or she received that one raisin on the initial trial. The monkey can end up less happy receiving two raisins then when he first received one raisin.

When we understand pleasure and dopamine from an evolutionary perspective, this shouldn’t surprise us. Complacency is a bad trait: we won’t be able to be healthy enough to produce new members of human society by remaining in the same place should a volcano erupt and wipe out the food in our region. We improve the survival of the species by constantly probing for new opportunities and new pleasures, even if that sometimes makes us more miserable. Consequently, our pleasure is designed to abate and diminish for the same repeated action. Two raisins is fine, but what if this other lever grants us three raisins? Altogether, pleasure and dopamine are relative and answer the question, how much better is this new event versus the current expectation?

This effect, termed the hedonic treadmill, is well known. The consumption of the raisin eventually becomes perfunctory, and the resulting pleasure will continue to abate with each consequent trial. (Though, if the raisin is rancid, and the monkey retches in disgust, the dopamine wiring may switch polarity to the opposite direction.) Certainly, we can refactor pleasure by spacing it out over time, as professor Daniel Gilbert highlights in his book, Stumbling on Happiness. If we have our favorite food every day, then it will likely cease to be our favorite food. If we space our consumption to every two weeks or every month, however, then we can reap the same pleasure in eating it over time.18 The concept of the hedonic treadmill bears out with other data. For example, once individuals reach a certain level of income, around $75,000 per year in the United States (as of 2010), their happiness levels start to flatten as their income increases.19 Making more money does make us happier, but not in the same proportion. Our happiness would jump more if our income doubled from $75,000 per year to $150,000, than from $150,000 to $300,000.

Thankfully, the ability to habituate eases negative valence pursuits as well. In other words, in repeating behaviors we find irritating or noxious, like cleaning the house and exercising physically every day, we lessen that perceived displeasure. For example, having our children brush their teeth for the first time is like pulling teeth. But after much prodding, pleading, and pleasing, children can adopt a consistent teeth-brushing regimen without further intervention. Like clockwork, we learn to brush our teeth at night before we go to bed and again in the morning. We can cultivate similar approaches to jogging or washing the dishes. What initially was a repulsive activity eventually becomes nondescript or perhaps even enjoyable. Initially, we may have that dopamine drop, signifying displeasure. The drop, however, diminishes with regular activity. We can adapt or even eventually associate pleasure with the task.

So that brings us to the pleasure of consuming animal products. Clearly, our neurobiology values the expedient, caloric-richness of animal flesh, which has helped fuel our species’ proliferation. A number of companies and researchers have persistently studied20 the distinctive aroma, and several, among them Impossible Foods, have spent gobs of money trying to reproduce an authentic meaty aroma in their veggie burgers.21 The company’s thesis is that we should be able to reproduce the experience and pleasure of consuming meat in the consumption of non-animal products. In fact, many of the actors of the alt-food, alt-protein space believe that we’ll be able to reproduce or even exceed these hedonic pleasures.22 I agree, especially given the intractability of animal technology (Chapter 5), and I will argue such in the next chapter. Even more, I think we’ll find new tastes and types of pleasures currently not available or possible with animal technology. And, yes, I am hinting that this might be a more fruitful path for these alt-food companies. Let’s punt on that point until the next chapter though.

For now, let’s discuss the other meta question here: is it continually sustainable to look for greater pleasure after greater pleasure? What about changing the way our minds work and our relationship to the foods that we seek for pleasure? We need to step outside of the paradigm and ask if there is a better way to enrich everyone’s lives. Hedonism and pleasure are tied to how we experience and perceive the world, specifically how we consciously perceive it.

Consciousness

Why are humans conscious, that is, having an awareness of existence and a physical, outside world? Throughout the book so far, we’ve argued that any naturally occurring biology can be explained in evolutionary terms. So, we must have an evolutionary reason to have developed such a sophisticated, vivid system to grok the world. As far as we can tell, lower organisms such as bacteria do not share the same capability that humans and larger animals possess. Bacteria whip themselves toward sources of food based on simple, well-studied chemotaxis systems to arrive at the beloved sugar in their environments. They can detect differences in concentration of sugar around them, and of course, they gravitate toward the areas with more sugar.

Bacteria simply have to know where the food is. Computing more sophisticated functions is not worth the cost under the burden of the Pareto frontier. In contrast, humans are non-aquatic generalists. While smells can lift us toward desirable food, most biological goals are more complicated for us. Suppose that a hunter-gatherer ancestor sees ripe bananas hanging in a tree. Her legs and feet would need to propel her to the base of the tree. Once there, she must evaluate a path to climb up to the branches that bear fruit. Her arms and legs must then coordinate to traverse up the tree. Finally, she must find a safe, facile approach to get back to the ground again.

This entire activity of climbing up to grab the bananas is the coordination of many subsystems within the hunter-gatherer’s body: an intellectual evaluation of the best path forward, motor cortices to direct the movement of arms, wrists, and elbows, among others. Even parts of the brain not directly under her perceptional control need to be privy to the situation, so the cortex responsible for breath modulation may automatically oxygenate the muscles so that they don’t prematurely tire. Her breathing patterns may even change without her being aware, similar to how our breath quickens after exercising or doing something strenuous. We don’t direct our body to breathe faster; it just happens.

The hunter-gatherer clearly needs a way to broadcast all of this information—the banana being up in the tree, the potential route to climb up, when to rest, etc., to the relevant parts of her body. She needs a central bulletin board accessible to all of her various subminds. She needs consciousness.23 This staging area analogizes to a conference of board members that determines the long-term, sweeping actions of a company. It may sound absurd to say “minds” when referring to one person, but a multiple minds model accords with neuroscience research.24 Our minds are layered and hierarchical, comprised of homunculi, or smaller minds. For example, the motor cortices of the brain can be somewhat physically demarcated via electrical stimulation experiments.25 Regions of the brain can be associated with control of the tongue, elbows, etc., though there is significant overlap, and jurisdiction for control can transfer after injury.26

Beyond just our motor cortices, there is evidence that the thinking part of the brain also subdivides further, an idea suggested by the thought-provoking, split-brain experiments. As background, brains divide between the left and right hemispheres. If we close our eyes and visualize a brain, these are the two lima beans glued together. Each of these hemispheres has been associated with particular thinking functions. The right hemisphere controls the left hand, whereas the left manages the right hand. The sole connection between the hemispheres, a structure called the corpus callosum, was severed in patients as a potential treatment for crippling epilepsy in experiments led by Roger W. Sperry.27 Our knee-jerk reaction is that the treatment would be disastrous, but the patients demonstrated normal behavior after surgery. Sperry and team could probe each hemisphere’s thought processes individually, for example by asking the messenger hand to write out something (e.g., left hand for the right hemisphere). As philosopher Sam Harris writes in Waking Up, a young split-brain patient was asked what he wanted to be when he grew up.28 His left hemisphere verbalized out loud, “a draftsman,” but his right hemisphere brain spelled out “racing driver.”29 Harris points out:

In fact, the divided hemispheres sometimes seem to address each other directly, in the form of a verbalized, interhemispheric argument.30

The two hemispheres seem to differ in temperament and seem to have distinct personalities, distinct consciousnesses. The corpus callosum bridges the two to create a unity and integrates both into the same boardroom, the same consciousness.

The corollary is that each hemisphere actually subdivides further. If there were ways to separate the equivalent corpus callosums within, we would obtain even more fractured subminds (fractal). And each submind would have its own consciousness.31 We don’t have a way to actually sever such connections nor would that be ethical or advisable, but this already plays out in a fully interconnected mind. When an input first presents itself, each submind has its own congress, each of those elevate to a higher congress up the chain. Some conjecture-refutation mechanism exists, determining whether a thought gets elevated up the chain. The thought may be modified before reaching the consciousness that we as individuals experience.32

This is why we can solve a problem long after we’ve consciously stopped thinking about it. Have you ever had a hard problem from work, school, or home life for which you couldn’t immediately propose a solution? But then, you start mowing the law or you take a shower and a clever, enveloping solution just wallops you? This revelation is our subminds at work. Their actions aren’t privy to our main conscious boardroom, but they’re present and dutifully working. Even as I write this book, I notice that I hit a writer’s block after a few hours of working. But if I come back a day or two later, even without actively working on or thinking about content, my creativity reservoir is full again, and I write out fluidly or easily solve a problem that utterly flummoxed me before.

And as discussed earlier, our conscious perceptions do not have to exactly accord to reality. They merely have to be evolutionarily useful. For example, we all have a blind spot in our eyes, but it is unbeknownst to us because of the way we process vision mentally: if we close one eye and look straight ahead at an apple, then move ourselves close enough to the apple, the apple will suddenly disappear. There are many websites demonstrating this phenomenon.33 The Pareto frontier means that we’re only going to perceive reality to the point of functional, evolutionary usefulness and no more; our consciousnesses are not going to be optimized to grapple abstract, mathematical concepts. As we saw earlier, the biggest disconnect occurs as we push the boundaries of physical science. In Appendix A, we discuss the Multiverse theory as the best explanation for quantum theory physics. Biologically though, we are not able to perceive reality this way, and accordingly, the Multiverse remains a “fringe” theory.

Our main consciousness boardroom can only handle one thought or sensation at a time; this limitation prevents us from breaking the hedonism trap. As mentioned, sometimes this occurs without awareness as when I’ll find myself grabbing a snack before even having a chance to stop myself. Given that our evolutionary biology needs to assess our actions, we experience a resulting feeling, such as “wow, that dark chocolate just enlivens my soul.” We often caricature into automatons that carom from one rousing activity (e.g., video games) after another (e.g., fast food) to then crash (e.g., burnout from work) and to seek reprieve from the unhealthy feelings associated with the trap (e.g., vacation). Do we want life to just be a series of sensations and feelings, i.e., remain in the hedonism trap?

In the long run, augmenting and fixing human psychology deserves our attention. I am not merely arguing that we continue to do psychological and psychiatric research on human behavior. There’s another important step: we’ll want to remediate “natural,” evolutionary tendencies. As stressed throughout the chapter, the way evolution shaped our psychology is purely instrumental toward the proliferation of our species, not adapted specifically to solve global problems, generate knowledge, nor make us happy, though those may incidentally occur. Many psychological traits are more problematic than helpful today.

Let’s just assume for the future’s sake that we don’t want to be solely guided by feelings and reptilian automaticity; instead, we want to be guided by considered intention. Consider the power of acting in complete intention: this superpower would immediately kill every diet fad. We would all eat better. And regarding animal products, this means that the “nice” part of the four Ns would no longer hold so much sway over us. People wouldn’t be steering into a McDonald’s drive-thru on a dopamine whim. It’ll be easier to give up animal products or to switch to replacements. It’ll be easier to herald a healthier future after meat.

Even though I think humanity will learn how to surpass its outdated evolutionary psychological baggage, I expect change will be met with resistant headwinds from nearly all consumer-related companies. As we saw, Facebook’s and YouTube’s revenue is fueled by some of the worst evolutionary traits of human psychology. Fast food companies use many tricks in the dopamine playbook: addictive sugar, providing goods at speed and convenience, and using branding to associate pleasure in your brain.34 And every consumer-facing company benefits from selling more, not less. Therefore, I’m not expecting a startup or company to “innovate” ourselves out of the hedonic traps, as that’s a solution seemingly against every company’s directive and bottom line. The solution to this problem must come from outside the private sector.

Thankfully, we can lessen these impedimenta and cultivate acting with intention using the practice of meditation. Meditation fosters intentionality by developing one’s mindfulness, the ability to precisely interrogate one’s consciousness boardroom.

Meditation

Unconscious behavior is diminished by becoming less mindless—doing things out of habit or on autopilot— and is also known as being more mindful. If I can gain more perception of reality as it is in the moment (being more mindful), the break from the constant discursive narrative in my head grants me the space and time to intentionally decide my next steps. If we take snacking for example, if I can perceptibly feel the cue from my body that I’m craving cheese on crackers but I’m not really hungry, then it’s easier for me to just say no. If I notice my anger rising due to the actions of a coworker, I can steer away from saying something nasty and instead consciously decide to pursue a constructive outcome. Thankfully, gaining the ability to be mindful—to be more aware of our present state and surroundings—is akin to strength training. It’s like a muscle that can be exercised and nourished to increase functionality and daily ubiquity.

We can cultivate more mindfulness through the practice of meditation. During a meditation session, one sits still and tries to focus on the breath, a mantra, or some other bodily sensation. Often the focus on the inhalation and exhalation is easiest for new meditators. Greenhorn meditators will notice that this is not easy: the mind will demur and derail, thinking about deadlines at work, a conversation with a loved one, or an errand to run. But as the meditative “muscle” strengthens through repeated exercise, then an adept meditator will develop higher levels of metacognitive awareness, and she will be able to maintain minutes of intentional presence in the moment. With even more practice, the minutes become hours. The meditative presence additionally seeps into the rest of her life. For example, her stomach might grumble, and her mind will release dopamine at the thought of grabbing a salami sandwich, but her meditation practice will remind her this is just a thought, that it will come and go, and she won’t.

Metacognitive awareness is direct perception of the contents of consciousness, or being able to see the boardroom wholly and attentively. Observing the cascading of the breath, a sensation of warmth that runs over our back, or anything else that the different subminds conjure up to the primary consciousness. Even the arising of thoughts and their supplanting can be observed with enough training and experience. With even more training, sensations may bubble up without descriptor, e.g., a sharpness in the legs. Instead of reacting with a pain reflex, an unfiltered white noise might make its way to the consciousness boardroom for presentation without any narrative bundled to the feelings. Therefore there is no dopamine baggage to initiate a habituated response.

On the path to increased metacognitive awareness, meditators must develop equanimity, or the ability to attribute neutral valence to sensations. A painful sensation can be recast as just sensation. An urging to look at email can be acknowledged, and the associated tingling or tightness in the chest can be observed. A visually striking example of equanimity comes from the image of the Vietnamese monk, Thích Quảng Đức, who self-immolated in protest of the Ngo Dinh Diem regime (Figure 16). Journalist Malcom Browne captures Quảng Đức sitting upright, cross-legged, while maintaining perfect equanimity; even though Quảng Đức experiences what’s often described as the most painful way to die,35 Quảng Đức is still and steadfast in protest thanks to his Olympian-level meditation training.

Figure 16

Figure 16. The power of advanced meditation. Thích Quảng Đức self-immolating without apparent suffering in protest of the Diem regime on July 11, 1963.36

Equanimity is not the same thing as numbness. It’s not the elimination of feelings; meditators still feel happiness and pain. Instead, it’s being able to reframe sensations as nothing more than existing and present. While my meditative abilities have a long way to go, I’ve been able to consume raw, bitter spinach leaves more easily by just focusing on the sensory inputs and summoning awareness and equanimity. In the same way, I can quell deleterious desires: I don’t have to eat cheese or spend money on frivolous trinkets on a trip just because my reflexive mind thinks I should. My mindfulness is omnipresent enough that I find social media mostly banal because I have less automatic attention-surrender. But I’m not emotionally bereft; I can still feel happy and motivated. At the same time, I’m also susceptible to procrastination and trepidation in writing this book, but those negative attributes have palpably alleviated and diminished in my life with ongoing meditation practice.

The net effect of meditation is being less enslaved to thoughts, ephemeral feelings, and valences—all of which underlie suffering, as posited by early Buddhists. They observed and made explicit, falsifiable claims about the mind and the inner workings; for example the subminds and the various congresses of consciousness.37 These doctrines have been iterated over the years, thankfully with variants denuded of the unfalsifiable, supernatural overtures. And today, many resources exist to help one cultivate a meditative practice, including a litany of books, guided meditation, retreats, and mobile applications.

In the last section, I argued that having the ability to do exactly what we intend would be one of the most useful abilities realistically imaginable. So far though, there is no pill we can take to magically produce action, though we can get closer with meditation practice. Therefore, I claim that if one wants the increased ability to act according to their intentions, they should cultivate mindfulness. And right now, the best way to develop mindfulness is through meditation practice. I claim that meditation is one of the best activities that anyone can start right now.

Yuval Noah Harari, furthermore, talks about the elements of novel experiences,38 for example, why we seek out adventures. Harari proposes two variables: first, the novelty or stimulation of the experience itself. Second, our ability to fully take up the experience; for, if lost in thought or distracted by feelings, then that’s less experience imparted to us. More mindfulness enables us to imbibe encounters more fully.

This means that we can reap more satisfaction from our trips or spending time with loved ones. Also, it means that we suffer less. The construction noise outside of your apartment no longer seems grating; it just fades into the background. And germane to the book topic: fleeting, hedonic pleasures such as those derived from certain foods will possess us less. Inherent hedonism will continually lose steam as humanity cultivates its mindfulness abilities. Given the primary benefit of mindfulness, i.e., having more intentionality in our lives, I argue that we (humanity) will want everyone to practice it. We’ll see commitment to meditation akin to how we view devotion to physical exercise today: as an activity largely and categorically beneficial to anyone’s wellbeing and something your doctor will routinely prescribe.

The only drawback with meditation that I see is the time required to cultivate it. Certainly, this time could be spent doing other productive, palliative pursuits such as physically exercising, learning a new skill, or volunteering, but I suspect for the most part meditation might replace or supplant activities that we approach for respite, such as watching television and engaging on social media platforms. In my personal experience, meditation practice has abrogated my desire to play video games. I cannot summon that experiential fusion that I had with video games as recently as three years ago, where I would lose myself in the world of the game and was ensorcelled for hours. I view this as a good thing—ten to fifteen hours of video game time per week has been supplanted with five to seven hours of meditation. The dividends of that investment have yielded more time and mental wherewithal to attempt more fulfilling projects—such as writing this book.

Asking everyone to meditate is easier said than done, and I’m in a privileged position to cultivate my own practice. My recommendation might be like that out-of-touch rich guy who implores everyone to take an extended vacation in the Maldives every year. However, I argue that we want everyone in the world to have more mindfulness, similar to how we want everyone to be healthier and to suffer less. Perhaps a nootropic drug can eventually conjure the same effect as 10 thousand hours of meditation. That would be a worthy endeavor, and I hope that we eventually figure out a facile, scalable way to improve everyone’s mindfulness. But until that point, I will beat the drum that some meditation activity is better than none, and no one is remiss for having more mindfulness, all things being equal.

In terms of hedonism, I’ve harped on the advantages of meditation and mindfulness toward reducing humanity’s reliance on animal technology. There’s another mechanism at play though toward the underlying topic of this book: the generation of knowledge. In Chapter 2, we discussed how humans are natural knowledge generators. Our thinking process mirrors that of knowledge generation by conjecturing and refuting ideas.

When we have more mindfulness, unhelpful thoughts—grievances, possessiveness, egoism, and jealousy—capitalize and overcrowd our consciousness boardroom less frequently. This allows new thoughts to crop up for consideration because, remember, our boardroom can handle only so much at one time. Some studies highlight the ability to observe and attend (as granted by meditation) to perform better on creativity-oriented tasks; for example, children who performed mindfulness-boosting activities created higher-rated art versus the students in the control group who had no mindfulness activity.39 In general, mindfulness has been associated with increased concentration,40 reduced self-consciousness,41 and increased openness to new experiences.42

The consequence, of course, is we’ll be able to generate knowledge faster and more easily, and better ideas will displace lesser ideas more quickly. As claimed throughout this book, I see knowledge generation as the largest determinant toward a future after meat. If we globally improve our innovation capability, we’ll reach that point faster.

Getting back to the hedonism argument: you may still be skeptical whether humanity can learn to control or wield hedonism more effectively, and for that reason, you think animal products are here to stay. Earlier, I hinted at the fact that non-animal products will be more hedonically pleasurable in the long run. In the next chapter, we’ll explore this argument fully and completely dispense with the “nice” in the four Ns.

Chapter Terms

  • valence: the association of positivity or negativity to a sensory input
  • hedonism: the pursuit of sensory pleasure
  • motivational salience: programming of an individual toward an objective or perceived outcome
  • hedonic treadmill: continual diminishment of pleasures as they occur more frequently or become overshadowed by more potent pleasures
  • consciousness: a central bulletin board/conference room/staging area for many subminds to access relevant information about the environment or bodily state
  • chemotaxis: possibly construed as very proto-consciousness in microbes. Specifically, it’s the detection of changing chemical concentrations to help microbes locate food.
  • homunculi: historically referring to a small human. Here, it’s used to mean subminds, each lacking the full functionality of a complete human mind.
  • fractal: self-similarity that occurs at different levels. For example, zooming in on a snowflake’s edge reveals a patterning similar to the body of the snowflake. Evidence such as the Split-Brain experiment suggests the possibility of our brains being fractal.
  • mindfulness: awareness and cognition of the current moment
  • metacognitive awareness: mindfulness of current thought processes and entry into the consciousness
  • equanimity: being able to attribute neutral valence to a sensory input, thought, or anything else relayed into consciousness

Chapter Summary

What tastes good to an individual is a subjective experience associated with a positive valence. That subjectivity can vary over time or in context: what was good can sour and vice versa. We can understand positive and negative feelings, including those coming from food, as evolutionary programming to modify our behavior—motivational salience—to meet the evolutionary proscribed objectives including pursuing sex or eating rich foods. Every behavior and action is evaluated relatively. Is a new activity better than the current one? If so, expect a flush of dopamine so that we continue to pursue the new activity but less so with each repetition. This paradigm creates the treadmill effect: we strive to get happier and obtain greater pleasures, but are never satisfied, leading us to pursue more. Mindfulness can break the zombie-like chase our desires lead us on to ever-higher pleasure and curtail this evolutionary vestige, enabling more worthwhile and problem-solving pursuits. Meditation cultivates mindfulness and brings about intentionality and diminishment of ego. Societies will eventually learn to value mindfulness, simultaneously leading to better knowledge generation. Mindfulness practice will also diminish the esteem of animal products, which have partly endured for their hedonic value.

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