Food! Glorious Food!

The holiday season is practically behind us.  Literally.  Since Thanksgiving, we’ve eaten turkey, tofurkey, ham, stuffing, more stuffing, gravy, cookies, pies, and hearty breakfasts to boost our energy for another round of meals.  We’ve put on another few pounds, and now look forward to our New Year’s resolutions to lose weight, exercise, eat better, blah, blah, blah.

Americans have a bizarre relationship with food.  We’ve got a lot of it, but we don’t treat it right.  Food that’s good for us costs a lot of money, which means poor people (that’s almost all of us, in this new world order) can afford only what clogs arteries, triggers diabetes, and generally makes us fat.  Since we work so much, we have no time to exercise and less time to prepare decent meals.  (Woe betide those of us with food-related health problems, since we likely can’t afford to see a doctor or afford the cholesterol medication we’d be prescribed if we managed an appointment.)  So, yeah, we’re a bit schizophrenic when it comes to food.

But take another look.  Food, so necessary to our survival, is actually weaved into our cultural and personal identity in fascinating ways.  We’re so used to viewing food as somehow separate from who we are, what we believe — it’s an other in several important senses — that we don’t stop to realize just how much it shapes and reflects our lives.  We feel disconnected from food partly because of how easy it is for us to obtain it, partly because there is so much variety that we don’t understand what it means outside of its cultural or geographical context, and partly because we are, quite literally, removed from it.  For example, no meat or poultry packaging helps us understand the source of the item or how it came to be displayed in the refrigerated section of the market.  I’m sure few city-dwellers or suburban Americans have viewed a slaughter firsthand, let alone ever killed their own food.

We should, however, stop and consider just how intimate our relationship with the materials that keep us alive and (hopefully) healthy is.  Food has functions and symbolic significance in religious traditions and rituals.  Food reflects cultural changes as one becomes assimilated into another – both the assimilated culture and the dominant culture’s cuisine are affected.  It is a symbol of economic and social status, as are the restaurants and brands that cater to the various economic classes; we also associate food with certain gender stereotypes.  Food can serve as political and moral statements too.  Even our emotions and sense of home, well-being, and safety are often represented by food.  Food is even sexy. (A scene from the 1986 Mickey Rourke and Kim Bassinger film Nine and a Half Weeks springs to mind…)  So it makes sense not just to say, as the old cliché goes, ‘You are what you eat.’  It also is appropriate to say, ‘You eat what you are.’

It was the 18^th century French queen, Marie Antoinette, who allegedly said of starving people, “Let them eat cake.”  Given the political context in which this statement was allegedly uttered, along with the fact that Marie was a foreigner and (gasp!) a woman, the cruel frivolity of the statement solidified Marie Antoinette’s place in history.  People can survive on bugs, and many to this day gain essential nutrients from eating mud, but long before Marie came onto the scene, preparing food had become an art-form.  It wasn’t enough just to eat to survive. Food should taste good too, if you could afford such a luxury.

The material conditions in which one finds oneself determines much about the way one lives.  Whether home was in the jungles or up in the mountains, by the sea or in the desert, where you found yourself dictated what you ate and how you lived.  Marx took this rather obvious fact and made it part of the foundation of his philosophy.  Given our modern means of storage, preservation, and transport, it’s easy for us to forget that, as recently as hundreds of years ago, people ate what they found or could make out of their environment.  If you lived along the water, for example, you subsisted largely on fish.  Out of such conditions come the regional cuisine for which a culture becomes known.

Food has significance in religious traditions as well.  Catholics represent the blood and body of Christ with red wine and wafers.  (I once read a story about a child in New Jersey whose Communion was invalidated because the wafer she ate was rice instead of wheat.  Though she has an allergy to wheat products, church doctrine mandates that the wafers be wheat.)  The importance of food is one of several ideas highlighted in the Muslim practice of fasting during Ramadan.  In fact, fasting is one of the Five Pillars of Islam.  Judaism follows prohibition against eating certain types of animals, animals raised in a certain way, and all shellfish.  These are just a few of many examples of how food figures prominently in religious traditions.  Imagine if food rituals and practices were taken out of these belief systems, and suddenly the systems become foreign and confusing.  The equation of food with certain fundamental aspects of religious practice identifies food as that practice itself.

Related to religious practices, food can represent moral and political positions.  The famous lunch counter sit-ins of the 1960s in the South were profoundly significant elements of the civil rights movement.  The act of black and white patrons sitting side-by-side was just as complex and morally adamant as any speech on equality.  The idea of sitting down with another person and ‘breaking bread’ with him is historically a sign of friendship, trust, and recognition of another as an equal.

Even American politicians have used food as a political device.  Remember “Freedom Fries”?  That moniker was the result of Representative Bob Ney’s (R-Ohio) order to rename French Fries “Freedom Fries” in the House cafeteria.  It seemed a silly thing to do but betrays just how closely identified cultures (and nationalities) are with their food.

If you are a vegetarian or vegan, you likely have a strong moral conviction that eating non-human animals or their products is wrong.  An entire culture and consumer market built up around vegetarianism, which finally gained mainstream acceptance in the 1990s.  Today, many people are fighting against industrial farms — the very machine-like production of meat and poultry that makes these items pretty affordable — because of the harrowing conditions in which chickens, pigs, cows, and other non-human animals are forced to live before slaughter.

It’s not just the living conditions either, but also the food these animals are fed — food that is arguably good neither for them nor for the people who eventually eat them.  Then, of course, there is the slaughtering itself, which is almost invariably a gruesome process to behold, and likely a terrifying process for a non-rational animal (or any animal, for that matter) to endure.  Some scientists have begun arguing that animals killed under stressful conditions are less tasty because of the hormones released prior to death.  A fascinating scientist, Temple Grandin, created a “squeeze machine” designed to calm cattle at the abattoir.  Grandin, an autistic and Ph.D. in Animal Science, engineered the device based on memories of wrapping herself in a blanket as a child — a safe-house of sorts.

Food, it turns out, is at the heart of life — and not just in the biological sense.  Yes, we need food to live, and anyone who’s ever gone hungry can appreciate just how profound that need is.  But food also says something important about what sort of life we want to have, what sort of life we’re willing to live, and what sort of life we have to live.  Indeed, these issues are issues about the human condition itself.  So before you buy your next can of Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup, your next head of Romaine lettuce, or your next carton of eggs, take at least a moment to ask yourself why.

Eat well!