explain how our needs have turned into greed
Answers
I came across this earlier
" Whether you have a Maruti or BMW, the road remains the same. Whether you travel economy or business class, the destination doesn't change. Whether you have a Titan or a Rolex, time is the same. Whether you have Apple or Samsung, people who call you remain the same. There is nothing wrong in dreaming a luxurious life. What needs to be taken care of is not to let the need become greed. Needs can always be met.. but greed can never be fulfilled. "
Answer:
Our oldest memory of killing another species for food comes from early humans who have hunted animals either for self-preservation or as a showcase of power relations. In the later centuries, this took a turn, and animals were consumed for subsistence.
The Industrial Revolution improved the condition of humans, so we moved from mere subsistence-based needs to consumerism. With the advent of modern-day capitalism, we turned out to be hyper-consumers where money became the sole value to gratify one’s needs and things around us started getting commodified, including our food. We became a food surplus world, thanks to modern technology, which also created a professional system of slaughterhouses that tortures a living being till death to entice our tongues. Humans have turned so ironic that we feel empathetic for a lonely street dog but are immune to an animal that gets slaughtered in the most filthy conditions.
Imagine at a time when movements on rights and bodily autonomy are at its zenith, a slaughterhouse pig is artificially inseminated in a loop, put in a claustrophobic crater, separated from offsprings – who too are born as another commodity and gets killed at the end of the day to become hot dogs on our plates.
But the consumerist broadened their greed, they gradually aspired to newer tastes and settled at wild animals like bats, snakes, civets and didn’t even spare exotic animals, which spurted markets like the Wet Market of Wuhan which is strikingly the ‘starting point of this mayhem’. Also with the help of modern technologies, human craving for energy and minerals are choking out the environment, changing climate, endangering species that are vital parts of the food chain.
As the saying goes, what goes around comes around, Nature too has a tolerance point. In wet markets, wild animals stacked together with domestic ones, slaughtered in the open while spilling body fluids and other internal organs became a perfect ground for the transmission of contaminants. Therefore, the virus that was once endemic to the forest mutated and started spreading from their natural hosts to the humans.
Thus we are paying the price of destroying all our lifelines for petty gains. It’s high time we restraint our greed and work towards securing our ecosystem and biodiversity. We must also strive to induce affirmative changes in our food habits, else, this spectre will haunt us unabatedly.