“To eat or not to eat”: Ain’t no sunshine when they’re gone

Quan-Hoang Vuong

November 11, 2022

By writing this, I fulfill my promise to my younger colleague, whose paper has just been published in a decent form [1], which basically stated that I would write a commentary about this very paper. But more importantly, I had always wanted to write about this kind of paper.

I love nature, including birds--the special love that forced me to do something I had never imagined I would do in today’s hectic life: writing fiction. But here you go, the Kingfisher stories [2]. Essentially, I have at least some evidence for that affair.



Sadly, that romance was tainted when I found myself eating a bowl of soup made from pangolin one time and steamed perfumery civet meat another. But those events were in a distant past, about 15 years ago, usually treated by my business partners in well-lit urban restaurants in Ho Chi Minh City or Hanoi. The tasty habits were stopped when I realized that I had been trapped in a dilemma of liking to eat my supposed-to-be-loved wildlife critters.

Even when I realized that dilemma, including the sophistry that tends to protect the need to eat before anything else (a hungry man is an angry man), it was difficult to make a clear-cut sense of how these intertwined and conflicting loves (for tasty foods and for having those lovely wildlife fellows) could co-exist. Deceivingly simple as it was, the answer was not. Therefore, when writing the Kingfisher stories [1], I reflected on the elusiveness of the answer by telling a story about sparrows who ended up on human dishes or a Hawk that finished difficult meetings with other bird fellows by eating them all. Now, it’s not hard to see that the verb “eat” has always lingered on.

This paper sheds light on the part of the answer: wildlife eating has its embedded cultural elements. And cultural values have different manifestations, from showing off one’s social status to giving one a chance to satisfy one’s curiosity, to having the experience of a special type of wild meat as a means for telling the next appealing story, and the likes.

The problem is perceived value is not necessarily identical to value, especially when biodiversity and sustainable ecological balance are recognized as critical factors in making our natural environment sustainable and livable. To this end, the paper has done a very good job. It both answers my own question; now I know very much linked to the cultural value system and leaves further questions open for other researchers to explore. I am sure there will be more dilemmas and, thus, more interesting answers. For example, when wildlife animals, such as some rare birds, are raised by humans and have grown up quickly in numbers, what factors will give us a threshold that shifts our cultural value system from protection to consumption?!

Anyway, I do not pretend I can answer these questions. This short piece introduces the paper and congratulates my colleague on the work well done. All that simple, in a rather formal way.

References

[1] Nguyen MH, Jones TE. (2022). Predictors of support for biodiversity loss countermeasure and bushmeat consumption among Vietnamese urban residents. Conservation Science and Practice. https://doi.org/10.1111/csp2.12822

[2] Vuong QH. (2022). The Kingfisher Story Collection. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BG2NNHY6