Mother nature is a vengeful bitch.

And humans' love of profit & wealth make it easy for her.

There's this one passage in The Art of War where the author laments the taboo against eating human flesh, since that would ease the pressure on supply lines, that always stuck with me. I think this is the kind of "pragmatic" attitude the Chinese brough to capitalism.

The version I read had a great annotation on the Chinese history of dealing with food shortages by eating whatever "walked, crawked, swam or flew".

Sure we can be snobs about it but we never had to deal with famines.