An essay in the Guardian today got me thinking about the ethics and welfare associated with how we decide what eggs (if any) to eat. Chas Newkey-Burden writes:
"... the “free range” egg is perhaps the most audacious. You’d need Disney-level imagination to believe the UK can produce more than 10bn eggs each year without inconveniencing any chickens. But by slapping “free range” on the label, and perhaps a nice pastoral scene with a few chickens roaming free, most consumers never realise how the eggs came to be in the box." Read the entire thoughtful essay and discuss this at your next dinner party. And, if you find it upsetting, then perhaps eggs shouldn't be on the menu.
For my 'day job' I study marmots--large, alpine ground squirrels--that include the groundhogs we celebrate on Groundhog Day. It turns out that marmots face the same problems as we do when making decisions with unreliable news sources. I wrote the following for the Huffington Post Blog about what we can learn from groundhogs about fake news and the importance of reliability assessment.
Here's the text reprinted here.
Our ‘fake news’ epidemic reminds us that we all must be mindful of the sources of our information. Obtaining information is essential for the innumerable decisions we make daily including decisions about what to wear, when to cross the street, and whether to put milk in our coffee or tea. We also make more consequential decisions about whom to date and marry, where to go to school, or what car or house to purchase. Information has never been so abundant, but it is not all equally reliable. Yet, reliable information is essential to make rational choices. Can we trust that our milk is fresh and unadulterated? Can we believe the graduation statistics from a college or university? Can we trust the safety statistics about a car? This problem is not uniquely human and I suggest that we can learn effective strategies from other species, including the groundhogs we celebrate each year on Groundhog Day.
Groundhogs are one of 15 species of marmots and I study antipredator behavior in these cat-sized alpine ground squirrels. Like many other species, marmots must trade-off risks versus rewards when they leave the safety of their burrows to go out to forage to avoid terrestrial predators—foxes, coyotes, and mountain lions, as well as aerial predators—hawks and golden eagles. Upon detecting a predator they emit alarm calls—loud chirps that warn other marmots. Marmots hearing those alarm calls cease all activity, look around to detect the predator, and often run back to the safety of their burrows. But, while at their burrows they are not able to eat, and this is a costly situation for marmots must double their weight each summer during a 4-5 month active season to be able to survive a 7-8 month long hibernation.
A yellow-bellied marmot alarm calling in a Colorado alpine meadow.
Fortunately, individuals differ in their propensity to emit alarm calls and there are essentially Nervous Nellies and Cool Hand Lucys! Nervous Nellies call in response to not only predators, but other things as well that are not alarming. We all recall the story of the Boy Who Cried Wolf. By crying wolf when there was no wolf the villagers learned to ignore the lying shepherd boy, which had disastrous consequences when a real wolf appeared.
From the perspective of a marmot trying to decide whether to keep foraging or run back to their burrows, Nervous Nellies are sending unreliable signals. This is not much different than the problem we all face in determining whether the news we encounter is supported by facts or made up by someone on their kitchen table as click bait. If The Boy Who Cried Wolf explains marmot behavior, then Nervous Nellies—who are unreliable— would be ignored.
Humans partially solve the problem of information acquisition by relying on trusted sources. If I am going to purchase a car, I poll trusted friends and colleagues about their experiences. By doing so, I’ve saved a lot of time reading each and every review about cars and making hundreds of visits to car dealers. The problem today is that we trust our partisan news aggregators or sites and this makes highly susceptible to fake news that taps into preexisting confirmation biases.
Turns out that marmots also trust reliable but not unreliable marmots. We conducted an experiment and found that marmots hearing alarm calls from reliable callers responded immediately but then resumed their prior behavior more quickly than those hearing unreliable callers, who kept looking for a non-existent predator. In some sense, this is exactly opposite what one would expect from the story of the Boy Who Cried Wolf, but it’s very similar to what we see when we trust, but verify, our news sources.
So what to do? Marmots have it easy—a handful of predators to detect, and only a few individuals to potentially assess the reliability of. This palls in comparison to a 24-hour news and spam cycle churning out vast amounts of potentially contradictory along with some genuinely erroneous information.
We all have an inner marmot; we have evolved mechanisms to believe trusted sources. But now we face an evolutionary mismatch and our evolved evaluation mechanisms have broken down because there’s simply too much potential information to process.
Mindful of this, I suggest that we scrutinize our news sources. If it sounds too ‘good’, perhaps it is. News sources that follow strict journalistic practices and fact check their sources are, without question, going to be more reliable on average than those that simply aggregate information. The rise of fake-news means that we must re-learn to trust but verify. And we must dig deep into our pockets and support reliable journalism that properly fact-checks sources because there simply isn’t enough time for each of us to fact check everything we hear. The truth is out there and we need good information to make informed decisions.
Readers of this blog will realize that I like having a lot of small plates. Playing around with ingredients in our larder a while ago I stumbled upon this easy and delicious recipe. It works wonderfully as an appetizer or as a side dish.
In a 9 x 9" baking pan,
fill the bottom with a single layer of brussel sprouts.
add about 2 Tbs sesame oil and shake to coat the sprouts,
sprinkle on about 1 Tbs kosher salt; shake.
Bake at 400°F for about an hour or until browned on the outside and soft and buttery inside.
Serve warm.
Because the pan is on the small size, other things can be baked in the oven at the same time to efficiently use energy. You can cook it at 350° but it may take a bit longer and doesn't brown as nicely. Feel free to experiment!
I've been laying low for the past year or so--busy with work (I finished a 7-year term as Department Chair), and busy with my research. I was on my first-ever sabbatical--where I wrote half a book, and I've been trying to make time to finish writing the book (Fear and It's Consequences) ever since. And, I've also been struck with an unusual (for me) paralysis. I simply don't know what to do to help restore communication and civility in a time where we really must figure this out. The US election, Brexit, and the rise of nationalism throughout the West is alarming.
I'm an American and our country is deeply divided. I am frustrated, scared, and saddened. Frustrated because the American Dream is shattering in front of our eyes--partially fueled by inequity, and partially fueled by fear of change. Scared because the rise of demagogues is not really a good way out. And, I'm saddened because I believe that liberal democracy is a good thing and that our past century's experiment with it may be coming to an end; not just in the US but throughout Western Europe. The World will be a very different place in the coming decades and it will not be a safer place.
I've been cooking, and having dinner parties (of course), but it's been harder to reach out and have hard conversations with folks who have a very different perspective. People are emboldened to be intransigent. We follow our own news unable to conceive there are different perspectives out there. We are more entitled than ever to believe that their perspective is the only correct perspective.
But it's never been more important to do so--to communicate with fellow citizens. And, it's also not been more important in a while to work together to make positive changes.
Regardless of whether you're surrounding yourselves with like-minded friends, or or neighbors with vastly different beliefs, we all can, and should, eat our way to civility. I'm going to try to share recipes and discoveries more regularly now. Open a good bottle of wine and have some friends over. Nibble on some apps, and talk politics. Just be polite because civility and politeness is what we really need now.
In honor of the Paris climate talks, the NY Times wrote about 7 things you can do to reduce your climate footprint. Food for thought and fodder for dinner table discussions.
John Tierney, NY Times writer, is back with another very controversial essay about the costs of recycling. My position is that the less waste you generate the better and that paper and aluminum are very, very easy to recycle. Read the piece, check out the comments, and have a stimulating conversation over a low-waste dinner!
