I saw Ratatouille the day it opened. Not only because I love to cook, but because lately I have been feeling companionable toward rats.
Last year my wife and I bought a condo in Somerville, Massachusetts, the most densely populated city in New England. As soon as we moved in, we discovered that we had a rat problem. The whole neighborhood had a rat problem. A nearby elementary school had been torn down, and the resident rats had been forced to relocate. At night, we saw them scurrying among the parked cars. They liked the space beneath our front porch and carried candy wrappers and other odds and ends under there. Our condo association filed a motion of disgust and called Dennis the Menace Pest Control.
I had recently read Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma. The title refers to the burden of choice we omnivores (humans and rats) carry. We can eat virtually anything, which means we are always in danger of poisoning ourselves. Our only defense against toxins is social learning. Rats and humans are both curious about new foods but nervous about trying them. We get over this anxiety by watching others eat, and in the case of rats by smelling their breath. Both species begin to recognize odors before we are born. One study conducted in France compared newborn humans whose mothers ate anise-flavored sweets during pregnancy to a group whose mothers hadn't. The babies who'd been exposed to anise responded to the smell positively or with indifference, while the others reacted negatively. Our education continues while we breastfeed; babies raised on formula tend to be pickier about food later on. Later, as we learn to shop for groceries and order in restaurants, our choices are limited by the trial and error of our ancestors. According to Pollan, human culture may have originated in the passing of information about what to eat and what not to eat from one generation to the next. There's nothing more fundamental to our experience of the world than what we eat.
I felt comradely toward the rats and guilty about the box of poison next to the porch. We were all just trying to make it in a difficult world, to decide what to eat for dinner. Rats share the best of human behavior--they're resourceful, smart, social creatures. They display signs of metacognition. Like humans and some primates, they are capable of thinking about thinking. Metacognition is a prerequisite for advanced learning and one definition of sapience, the form of intelligence once thought to separate humans -- homo sapiens -- from the other animals.
I realize this is a positive spin on rats. It would be just as easy -- easier, in fact -- to point out their flaws. There are about a billion rats on U.S. farms, and roughly one rat for every human in suburban and urban areas. They inflict more damage than any other pest -- Cornell researchers estimated $19 billion a year -- by destroying grain, causing structural damage to buildings, contaminating foodstuffs, gnawing on electrical wires (causing fires), and transmitting diseases.
But in this as well, we're more like rats than we'd like to admit. The war in Iraq is costing us $200 billion a year. In October the British government released a report estimating that the annual costs of global warming could reach 5% to 20% of the world's GDP. That's up to $9.6 trillion dollars. If we don't take action, floods and droughts may displace hundreds of millions of people, a sixth of the world's population could face water shortages, and up to 40% of species may become extinct.
Remy, the rat-chef in Ratatouille, is adorable. He can read, walk on two legs, and make a perfect omelet. But when he and his family swarm over the cobblestones of Paris, they look like real rats. Everyone in the theater squirmed at those scenes as the animators had intended. But perhaps what separates us from rats -- their scurrying and sewer-dwelling, their hairless tails and sharp little rodent teeth -- shouldn't disturb us as much as what we have in common: the damage we do to our only world.