A Luxury Fit for an Omnivore with Free Will

February 6, 2022

It would have been my dad’s birthday. His nickname was “Burr,” and my family celebrates “Burr Day” every year with something he loved: sweet treats. When he was sick, but could still enjoy them, we would gather the best pastries from three or four specialty bakeries in driving distance and assemble a massive platter of flakey, gooey goodness. It is our family’s way to meticulously divide all available treats into precisely equal portions for all eligible eaters, but at some point, dividing a chocolate croissant into 9 gets a bit ridiculous. We just bought more croissants, making the meticulous division superfluous. Equal shares devolved into a free-for-all, sawing off corners and grazing our way through the best baked goods the city can offer. With an abundance of patisserie, you can indulge at will without fear that someone will miss out. And indulgence at will was the name of the game. As I had learned a decade earlier when I was sick, when your body is rebelling against you, you fight back with small luxuries: all the croissants your cancerous body desires. “To Burr!” we toast, “to the sweetness of life!” We didn’t have that sweetness  for long enough, but we all know we were lucky to have something so sweet to mourn losing, and that’s something. 

I’ve been planning to bake a “dead father’s birthday” cake, a clementine cake of no particular emotional significance other than it sounds good and I think he would have savored it with gusto, as he did all delicious things. I keep buying a bag of clementines for the cake but my kids eat through it in a day: three kids, three fruit each, and just like that, not enough left for cake and we need yet another bag. Finally I mention my cake goal to Nate and he enforces a firm restriction: leave five clementines for mom! She needs it for cake. That’s a boundary they can get behind. Finally on Sunday, his actual birthday, I simmer the five remnant fruit for an hour, preparing them to be blitzed into a makeshift marmalade that will flavor my cake.

For reasons having nothing to do with my dad, per se, I also insist on helping my children plant indoor lettuce seeds. Nothing to do with dad, I suppose, except the overarching appreciation for growing things that must have seeped into me from the verdant flower beds on all sides of our two-lot yard, which my parents cultivated together, claiming sagebrush and converting it to an eden big and beautiful enough to hold a wedding in. Which we did once, for a neighbor’s daughter, when I was a teenager. I remember feeling so proud to be the official wedding lawnmower. The very grass upon which she would take her sacred vows was in my hands, and I pushed that mower nice and steady into soothing, careful lines up and down the lawn. My parents had planted 20-some trees, which made the mowing harder, especially because many of them were fruit trees. The fallen apples were a constant source of my nemesis, bees. I was definitely stung mid-mow on more than one occasion, leaving the running mower behind and yelping my way toward the house for help. 

My parents also planted dozens of rose bushes, tall, strong, pushing out perfect, fragrant blooms for months on end. For years, every June, my parents capped off a year of my mediocre dance lessons and what I’m sure was a painful multi-hour dance recital experience by presenting me a bouquet of the most stunning freshly-picked roses, wrapped in a puffy blanket of wet paper towels and stuffed in a ziplock bag to stay tidy – a neat trick my mom passed down, and which I have absolutely copied when transporting and gifting my own flowers, albeit with less stunning roses.

The lettuce has nothing to do with my dad directly, but corralling my kids into observing the miracle of growth he and my mom consistently demonstrated feels like a worthy goal. Even if I had to bribe them with promises of tablet time, what I remember is my son paying attention, eagerly scooping cupfuls of potting soil, diligently pouring it into the takeout container we’ve punctured with holes, carefully tamping it down. It’s working! We are enjoying a mother-son activity! His enthusiastic obedience persists even through the planting stage–he chooses a beautiful blushed lettuce called May Queen, pinches some of the tiny seeds from my open palm, and spreads them over the soil. We spray with water (squeezing the spray-bottle pump is an excellent fine motor activity!), cover with the clear takeout lid to make a bootleg greenhouse, and set on a bookshelf too high for the baby to reach, facing southern sun.

Four or five days later, the first sprouts appear. A week later, his lettuce bed has dozens of tiny shoots. A few of them are just pushing open from the seed, the greenery-to-be folded into a fuzzy hat and about to burst. In others, the first two leaves, the cotyledon, are already opening into little half-heart pairs, just in time for Valentine’s day. All of them lean toward the sunny window, so we turn them around to straighten up. It won’t be long before the first real leaves appear on some, and before we know it we’ll be clipping excess sprouts so the biggest leaves have a little more space to grow. In a month or two, it will be salad. Nothing to do with my dad, but he would have been tickled by it, would have planted the seeds with joyful anticipation. I’m glad I am showing my son how to do the same.

About two weeks in, the most robust of the baby sprouts are pushing against our takeout lid greenhouse ceiling. Without exception, they religiously strain their little lettuce heads towards the sunny window, like groupies reaching for a star. Each day I pull open the shade to let in sun and turn the pot around, so they’re facing away. By evening, the sprouts have reversed course and pulled back to reach toward the sunny window once again. It is simply a law of growth: face the light. 

Their cells operate uniformly, and I think, automatically, upon this principle. I don’t think there is anything resembling choice; the plants’ source is the sun, and their DNA pulls them toward it. What does choice mean, anyway? And what’s so great about it, after all? On one end of the spectrum we have the lowly lettuces, automatons in a sense, gravitating toward that which sustains them without any apparent deviation. If the lettuce resents its hand being forced, we don’t know about it. On the other hand, we have humanity. Made in God’s image, with knowledge of good and evil, fully capable of turning our little heads away from what truly sustains us, refusing, unlike lettuce, to bend to the light. Life, nourishment, growth – none of it is automatic, none of it is required. With all our great God-like intelligence and creativity, we are free to eat kale and walnuts; we are also free to invent, and subsist on, Cheetos and Twinkies, cigarettes and alcohol. We can indulge to the point of destroying our bodies in ways the lettuce simply don’t seem to be able to. 

I wonder whether any other kind organism, left to its own devices, overeats. Aside from human intervention, is there such a thing as animal junk food? That is, do animals in nature choose food that isn’t good for them, as humans do so easily? Rats in labs can succumb to addiction; do rats in the wild have similar problems? I’ve heard of livestock stumbling on fermenting fruit and getting drunk; do these one-off ragers ever result in the lifelong struggle that alcoholism brings humans? 

And what about plants? In The Hidden Life of Trees, Peter Wohlleben writes about trees as if they make choices, deciding to share precious water and nutrients with neighboring trees in need. He writes in soaring lyrical terms about trees, as if they are sentient beings evaluating options and making a decision. But I’m skeptical; for all the poetry, how can you ascribe motive and intent to what you observe occurring? There’s a difference between something happening and it being on purpose. How do we know a tree’s transfer of water to another organism isn’t just homeostasis in a communal sense? How do we know a creature isn’t just responding to an internal program, lettuce facing the sun? 

It is almost hard to picture a non-human creature eating something ‘bad’ for it, the sense that appetite is biologically programmed is so strong in my imagination. An insect downing too much nectar and getting dazed with a sugar rush, a bird getting fat off too many grubs and no longer able to lift off, a tree passing on water and sunshine while it withers and fades–it sounds absurd. I find one example of an animal who can, apparently make human-like bad choices. Seagulls are omnivores, like humans are, and scavengers. They can eat almost everything, fish and mussels, yes, but also baby seals and whales, nuts and fruit. But they seem to particularly adore junk food, and have been known to finish off a glass of wine. They may even be lured by the sugar and fat in chocolate, even though chemicals in cacao can “dangerously accelerate a gull’s heartbeat, drive them to hyperactive behaviour or life-threatening seizures.” Basically, humans are dragging down other creatures with us. So much for choice. Are seagulls unique in their ability to ruin their lives with their appetites, like we can? I wish I had the time and skill to comb scientific literature and learn more about the extent of choice in non-humans–and the consequences of these choices. 

I suppose I’m skirting the larger question as to whether humans even have free will. I’m assuming we do, fairly secure of my exercise of free-will, if only because of the active fight against the urge to use it in ways that don’t actually allow me to thrive. I may know where the sun is, but as my friend Marian Call writes in one of her early songs: “I want a smaller waist, I want donuts too.” What is the point of all this free will if we use it so badly? There’s something to be said for the apparently will-less, blind obedience of the lettuce, straining toward the sun. It’s a prettier picture than a seizing seagull, not to mention so much of what humanity has wrought. The greater the intelligence, the greater the risk the choice is abused? Yet my theological framework tells me it was no accident, that our ability to hurt ourselves, hurt each other, reject our life source, a worthwhile price to pay for creatures who can decide, and not blindly obey genetic orders, to turn toward the light. It doesn’t always feel like it.

Anyway, the cake is done. We’ll have a slice tonight, with a wee dram of whiskey. Not exactly kale, not quite cheetos. Maybe it doesn’t have to be either – or; maybe we can choose moderation, enjoy the fruits of creation and our ability to create without drowning in them. The cake smells fresh and tangy and sweet, like tearing open a perfect orange, spray hitting the nose. Something good I called forth today from my ability to choose, a luxury fit for an omnivore with free-will.