Married to Food

I am continually thankful for Ryan's food allergies. Perhaps, it is an enjoyed thankfulness because I don't directly live with many of the negative consequences. I do, however, get to enjoy almost all of the positive consequences. I am thankful for Ryan's food allergies because they force him to be mindful and aware of food. It heightens the relational dynamic he has with it and food becomes personified in our home. Guilty by association, I think more about food, on the rare occasions I go grocery shopping, I can't just grab what looks good. Farmer's Markets, being a great source of gluten/dairy free food, also force me to come face to face with who is behind the food.

Part of the reason I enjoy this mindfulness is because I have an odd memory. To most people, it would seem like I have barely a sliver of memory at all. It is a familial joke that a finite portion of memory is continually split each time a new generation is born. My grandmother has quite a normal functioning memory, my mother's is rather troublesome and I seem to have been born without one entirely. But I do have a memory, albeit an odd one. I remember snippets, bits and pieces, emotions, colors and temperatures. I'm reminded of this eccentric memory of mine by this post because I have a memory from several years back of a linguistic idiosyncrasy relating to food. Someone once pointed out to me, that it was odd how many different names we have to disguise where our food comes from. I remember thinking it fascinating. While, I now understand that many of the substitute names are more indicative of how a food is prepared as opposed to where it comes from, I still think the intuition was correct.

We tend to distance ourselves from the 'dirtiness' of raising and growing food. Perhaps, not as much as in the efficiency, modern technological gabfest of the 50s and 60s, but we certainly would still garner a few strange looks if we ordered a cow patty with cheese. An example from our own home (nobody's perfect!), comes from just the other day when Ryan while munching happily on a bag of baby carrots, stopped and examined one tiny orange spear. He suddenly wondered aloud, how do they make these? It seems a perfectly natural question in our common attitude, but to think of plain raw ingredient (not some fancy carrot dish) as having nebulous origins, especially as mundane as a carrot is odd.

Not everybody can be a farmer and roll their hands through soil and hold the butcher's knife, but everybody does eat. Food is a central part of lives, we astonishingly! depend more on food than on our cell phones or the Internet. It takes a lot of work to run a farm or manufacture 'food products' like twinkies and tv dinners. I find peace in the symmetry of spending extra time, effort and work on preparing our meals. If I'm not out there growing food, or studying chemistry in a lab to mimic food, then I should at the very least, spend some time cooking food. And in that sense, I should spend some mental and physical energy, putting food back in the center of my life. The cultivation and consumption of food is the single most important meaning making activity known to our species, because really, what is the point of our lives if not to sustain ourselves and sustain ourselves well.

A Christian scholar at Yale Divinity School gave a sermon about restlessness, a relationship with food and land, and Christian faith. Putting respective religious institutions and organizations aside, the sermon was moving in Professor Jenkins recollection of Biblical analogies of marriage. The intimacy with which we should treat our environment and food is as the intimacy we should treat our marriages, both human and divine. I must say, I like the idea of being married to food.

A book I'm reading now reminds me how central food already can be to many Americans, Barry Glassner, a sociologist at USC wrote The Gospel of Food which chronicles along with other major food books I've read (The Omnivore's Dilemma Michael Pollan and Fast Food Nation Eric Schlosser) how fear, anxiety and neurosis are often the reason food is at the center of our lives. I proudly can say, that I put food at the center of my life because I like it. Good genes, sure, but also that American streak of getting what I want. And I want good tasty food.

This post was sparked by a TED talk (surprise!) by Carolyn Steel about how food shapes our cities. Thinking about the centrality of food markets and routes in the development and urban planning of pre-Industrial cities, reminded me of how distanced we'd become from our food. However, I attempted like a good young idealist should, to live off the grid in rural Ireland for several months. Through the astonishing and eye-opening experience, I was confirmed in my convictions about food, but also my love and need of the city, the urban center, the metropolis. And as Ms. Steel points out, many many more of us will be living in cities in the future. Check out the video and if you haven't read any of the above books, they're worth a gander.

Shall I close with a cliche? Food for thought.