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Key points
- A major life tradeoff we all confront is between minimizing harm and maximizing good. It applies particularly to recovery and to meat-eating.
- The gendered instinct to demand less isn't always as comfortable to challenge as one might expect, but recovery doesn't happen if you don't.
Tradeoffs are compromises made in acknowledgement of the fact that no set of aims is completely compatible with any other: Something always has to be sacrificed for another thing to be optimized. Tradeoffs are in play everywhere, and in the last part of this series we briefly considered the speed/comfort tradeoff as it applies in recovery. Another recovery-relevant tradeoff involves damage minimization (do as little harm as possible) versus enhancement maximization (do as much good as possible).
This distinction is a fundamental underpinning for many of our life choices, whether we recognise the optimization process at play or not. The two aren’t always at odds with each other: Often doing good in the world and not doing harm are comfortably aligned. But sometimes they’re not.
Sometimes you need to accept that if you are going to do meaningful things, you need to do some uncomfortable things; you need to swallow some unsavoury means for the sake of the ends. The self-minimization impulse of anorexia often goes hand in hand with choosing the minimize-harm option. If I make myself demand and consume as little as possible, then I make myself as irreproachable as possible. I protect myself from accusations (especially from myself) that I did wrong, that I was wrong. The trouble is, you then tend to become reproachable (if anyone all-seeing were standing in judgement, which they’re not) by accident: By never doing anything cool and bold and significant that demanded energy and other costly resources to conceive and execute.
Recovery (or not) from an eating disorder, and meat-eating to do so, is a great example of where these two scales separate out and become incompatible. Yes, you can minimize your overall impact on the world and thus make yourself pretty confident of doing low harm (to individual chickens, let’s say). But doing so may well scupper your chances of doing anything weird and wonderful on a different scale. The big wins—let’s say, the thing that gets the world, or your country, one step closer to actually outlawing battery farming or investing seriously in lab-grown meat, if that’s what you continue to care about once you’re well—they’re always risky, and they normally involve collateral damage. There might be a strange irony in needing to eat (expensive freely roaming happy) chicken now in order to spare vastly more chicken suffering in the future, but well, life is full of strange ironies.
A few years ago a friend decided to stop buying plastic. She got milk delivered in glass bottles, she switched her shampoo for some kind of hair soap, she did the whole thing properly. We had a chat about it a few weeks in, and I asked her what the longer-term plan was. She wasn’t sure, and we talked about the options, and one thing I remember us touching on was this idea of minimizing one’s footprint at all costs versus learning to be OK with an acceptable amount of environmental damage for the sake of living a life that will therefore have more potential for other kinds of good in it. Doing a 100% plastic-free month or three, brilliant. Attempting to live that way forever—the most significant outcome is probably hobbling yourself.
I’m not saying that the only thing that makes it excusable to be an omnivore for now is that you become a militant animal rights activist once you have enough energy to go on marches and petition your MP. No, it’s OK to eat the slow-roast shoulder of lamb or the cheesy omelette “just” because you want to, and because it will make you happier and healthier, and because it will make your life good.
Partly because that in itself is enough; partly because it inevitably generates broader benefits. Think of all the hideous cruelty human beings inflict on each other, and think how impossible all of it would be if the inflictors hadn’t been miserably messed up by other people who were also miserable and messed up in their turn (thanks, Larkin). The single greatest good we can do in the world is probably to radiate whatever aspects of non-messed-up-ness we can to the people we meet, while delighting in them ourselves (and being honest about all the rest).
My mother sometimes says that taking a deep hot bath is less morally wrong than leaving the tap running while brushing your teeth, because it gives you real enjoyment; there was some real benefit to the cost. If so, your ethical responsibility is to appreciate. If you want to do something, you should do it, and really enjoy it. The thing that makes it worth all the hot water can only be your enjoyment.
All of this is a variant on the good old “secure your oxygen mask first” rule. It applies because your survival matters, and your more-than-mere-survival also does. Especially if you’re a woman, the default mode of your gender is to believe otherwise, or to act as if you did. In many ways it’s very convenient for women to continue to make themselves small even now we aren’t always being forced to be by men. I always think of this when I go to weddings where the women have chosen to allow themselves to remain silenced and talked-about by the men.
The British tradition was always that the best man would make a speech (mainly about the groom) and that the groom and the father of the bride would make speeches (mainly about the bride). It amazes me how many people still choose this format in the 21st century, and then I realize it shouldn’t amaze me, because who wouldn’t like to get out of making a speech if they could? It’s convenient not to have to; it’s even more convenient not to be allowed to. Just like it’s convenient to not even have the option to eat meat because it’s so damn wicked and it’s so much better to be empathic and self-denying and simply “not eat meat.” In the end, though, with our laziness of thought and of action, we diminish ourselves, and the rest of the world with us.
If any creature’s suffering matters, yours does. And if anyone gets to take up any resources, any space, why not you? No one deserves anything, and all of us decide how much we’re willing to take—and to give. As ever, in the recovery context, we must remind ourselves to ask what the eating disorder privileged, and know that the only way recovery happens is by doing the opposite.
Anorexia is about shrinking away as much as possible, so recovery has to be about the opposite: getting bigger, taking and demanding more—everything from the takeout curry to the promotion. Practising wanting and taking, over and over again, is what gets you well and capable of giving more, in ways that are good for you too. People often speak of starting to hate the things they ate in recovery, like excessive amounts of raw or steamed vegetables. If you don’t honour the early inklings of distaste about yet more boiled carrot, if you don’t encourage the inklings of desire for other richer things into a more substantial existence, you probably won’t recover. You won’t train the apparently outlandish skill of knowing what you want and declaring to the world that you plan to get it.
And of course, not being able to stand the sight of boiled cabbage for now doesn’t mean you’ll never like cabbage again. The penultimate part of this series is about having the confidence to let the dynamics of recovery play out, so that post-recovery and all its lovely movements towards equilibrium can actually happen.
*Image credit: Pkgx, CC BY-SA 4.0**
