Food
Food became invention. Food became entertainment. Food became progress. Food became convenience. Food became packaging. Food became far away. Food became corporate. Food became fast. Food became competitive. Food became ideas of food. Food became gross, sterile, tasteless, overly sugared, fatty, synthetic, and weirdly chemical.
Food stands at the center of life. To honor the place of food, not only by giving thanks but by paying careful attention to the provenance, quality, and preparation of food is crucial to any sense of human well being. Cooking is the daily human art, an opportunity to be in touch with the riches of the earth and the savor of being alive. When food is degraded, when people have no interest and no time to prepare, consume, and pay attention to food in any informed, considerate way, then carelessness becomes the model for life. That carelessness may be sweet as a can of Coca-Cola but still is carelessness. Many millions of dollars have been spent making sure that people keep consuming Coca-Cola. Since Coca-Cola is not a food such advertising makes sense.
When people feel less alive, when they are suborned by machines, tasks, duties, clocks, responsibilities, purposes, regimens, they need all the more to be reminded that they are alive. Ads pummel the woozy psyche with tantalizing possibilities. A seeming lack is filled with a steady diet of cajolery about eating this and drinking that. Such telling represents food not as something that informs a life in the most personal way—my body not someone else’s—but as a random series of delectable (or not so delectable) events. Hungry or not, the wanting is all.
Somewhat stupendously, this telling manages to ignore the earth that the food comes from, an extraordinary falling away from reality but one that came to be taken for granted, as if the earth were somehow secondary to the merchandising. The literalism of consuming comes to be an end in and of itself: the main thing is that you put something, however dubious its origins, in your mouth. To be sure, if you haven’t eaten for a day, where the food comes from is secondary. Human beings need not live like that, however. If there would be a common goal for the human race, it would not revolve around some laudable abstraction like freedom or justice but around the need for every human being to have adequate, wholesome food that is connected with the sustainable earth rather than a corporate huckster.
Once upon a time, food had that connection but food was controlled by those who owned the land, hence, for instance, the British exporting food from Ireland during the Potato Famine. When the Communists adopted the slogan of “Land, Bread and Peace” they were articulating an age-old concern for most of the human race. They reneged on the slogan spectacularly but that does not undo the crucial matter of people having the chance to grow their food, make a livable wage from that growing and connect with others who are eating the food they grow. It is far from utopian to suggest that farmers should come first in the scheme of any society because food comes first. Intellectuals have often dismissed farmers as dull sorts irreparably tied to the earth, ignoring the fact that if no one is tied to the earth then there will be no food on their book-strewn tables.
“Build soil,” Robert Frost counseled. He knew, as a poet, that culture is tangible and that building soil is the culture upon which other cultures—literary, musical, scholarly—rest on. To build soil is to link the generations, to honor the earth, to ensure the vitality of creaturely existence (human and otherwise), and give human beings an eminently practical yet inspired focus to their daily doings. Building soil is among the most crucial tasks human beings could set for themselves since it involves an intense engagement with the world they are born into, that they will leave, and that will be here after they are gone. To build soil is to engage time in a palpable way and find some perspective concerning the brevity of a human life. However dizzy our heads are with notions of eternity and epiphany, the spade by spade work of building soil can bring those heads into firm contact with an unassailable reality, both the bounty and the trials: the plagues of insects, drought and flood.
The preparation of food, the labor, the rituals, the lore, and the sharing constitute a generous height of human feeling. One of the beauties of the Jewish Sabbath is the reverence for food. One finds this hospitable reverence in any traditional culture, but one does not find it in what the poet Randall Jarrell called “a sad heart at the supermarket,” where a terrible disconnectedness is raised to the nth degree. As is common in modern times, a specious excitement rules rather than any genuine feeling. People have bargains, coupons, and products instead of awareness and the savoring of how much goes into the cultivation of food.
To not know how the animals are treated which a person consumes and where they were pastured or what goes into the bread that is going into one’s mouth or to believe on faith the latest scientific notion of improvement—a trail littered with uncounted “mistakes,” to say nothing of cancers—is to experience a fundamental degradation. No amount of talk can undo that degradation. The only answer is to change the mechanism of how food is grown and delivered and consumed. As modern times wane, that is happening: people want to live healthy lives by eating fresh, tasty food not small print on a piece of throw-away packaging.
People do things because they can do them and modern times have seen large scale abuses of agriculture: losing topsoil, inviting chemical pollution, promoting mono-cultures, brutalizing animals in factory farms, and relying on science to undo the errors of science. The notion of food as a manufacture makes sense if one trusts the genius of machines to speak to every inch of life. The notion of food as a series of genetic patents makes sense in a world devoted to property. The notion of food as divorced from the earth makes sense if the earth is an afterthought.
To ignore where our food comes from is to ignore life, ourselves. A tragic state of affairs.
You nailed it, yet again.
Thank you.
Thank-you for this essay, Baron. Especially the quote from Randall Jarrell. "A sad heart at the supermarket."