cooking

The Logic of Food

the logic of food

To eat is to have a garden.

To have a garden is to cook food.

So, to eat is to cook food.

To eat is to cook food

To cook food, is to have a garden.

So, to eat is to have a garden.

To eat is to have a garden.

To have garden is to understand how food is grown.

So, to eat is to understand how food is grown.

To eat is to understand how food is grown.

To understand how food is grown is to understand nature.

So, to eat is to understand nature.

To eat is to cook food.

To cook food is to have a garden.

To have garden is to understand how food is grown.

To understand how food is grown is to understand nature.

To understand nature is to have the world at your fingertips.

Aunt Ruth

abandoned farm

 I was remembering my Aunt Ruth the other day. Aunt Ruth lived outside of Delhi Louisiana on a farm and her son and my cousin, Bill, farmed the thousand or so acres that surrounded the old house. I remember that he was always busy repairing the irrigation systems that stood like giant centipedes along the dirt roads that crisscrossed the fields. I helped every now and then, and remember it was quiet except for the clanking of wrenches and the odd tractor in the distance. I remember the smell of diesel, of horses and hay, and of water and dirt. I also remember the chicken.

Aunt Ruth was a seminal cook; a chef, a magician of food that is rarely made anymore.   When I would help Bill on my visits to the farm Aunt Ruth would always have a table full of magic when we arrived home for lunch. There would be fried chicken (from the yard outside the house), green beans (from the garden), macaroni and cheese (homemade of course), okra (fried and sautéed), homemade tomato jelly, buttered rolls, ice tea, several pies, and sometimes homemade bread. On top of all of that Aunt Ruth would serve us all with a smile and throw in a few laughs for good measure.

These memories cropped up in me some years later after I had “grown up” and I made a trip back to Delhi to reminisce. I stayed at a hotel off the highway and drove to the cemetery to visit some family. I drove to the old house where my family had taken me to visit their families, my grandparents and to the old farm where I used to play with the kids who looked after the place. I drove past the house where my uncle who used to hide whiskey in the toilet tank and yell at the help through the screen door on the back porch. I drove through the memories that have since haunted me and still haunt me today and I drove by Aunt Ruth’s house. I loved those people and what they stood for; something that I did not realize at the time because I was young, because I was from the city, and because I did not put a price on the priceless.

Those days are gone, but I believe it is up to me to remember them, to keep them alive; something I am working towards as best I can because like so many others today I have tended to hide behind the walls of houses too often, buy ease at the store and comfort with a credit card. Those people in our pasts, that we remember, were not perfect and they were certainly not saints, but I believe that my Aunt Ruth was a rare commodity, a rare species of person that has made the idea of what I think of when I think of the freedom that America offers.

Freedom and self-sufficiency are words now that are becoming more and more popular, perhaps a bit overused. But I believe in them and am striving to live up to their ideals. However, these ideals require work, character, time and talent as well as a smile and a laugh. My Aunt Ruth gave me the memory of an old house, creaking floors and a musty smell, smiles and care, but most of all she gave me a piece of herself in the form of food not bought from a store, or made from a box. In a few hours Aunt Ruth gave me memories that would last for a lifetime. I believe I need a lifetime to keep those memories alive for a few more hours.

Being Human

human

The school semester is about to start again and it reminds me of something that is very important: learning.  Actual learning seems to be a rarity in our society, filled with instant gratification through things such as computers and food.  And what do computers and food have to do with learning? They are perfect examples of how much we do not know.

First, while it may seem obvious how computers relate to learning, as with many things we do not often discuss the topic in full.  The internet is a seemingly infinite source of facts, figures, and what is commonly called knowledge.  And while the internet is an amazing invention that has no doubt furthered many aspects of learning, it is not a place of learning.  The internet has made available information which was before either not available or extremely difficult to find.  Access to information is not learning about the information.  It is simply access.

Computers are not only a vehicle for the internet, however.  Computers allow us to live the way we do in ways most of us do not think about.  Without computers most of our infrastructures in our societies would fail; people would not get paid; lights would go out.  Computers help in countless ways, but the cost of that help is high.  Reliance upon computers has created dependence rather than independence.  Knowing that infrastructures exist, and that we rely upon them is not knowledge: the facade of knowledge is not knowledge.  It is simply rhetoric.

We do not know how the infrastructure that we rely upon works, and in fact, we often do not know when it does not work. Our food supply is a perfect example. The grocery store provides food in the same way that computers provide access. We can simply walk into the great building and there are rows and rows of “food”. Most of the edible products in a grocery store are not food in the real sense of the word. They are a combination of HFCS, salt and fat. These ingredients are often processed through means of chemical and mechanical manipulation. Furthermore, these products are not created to feed, but rather to make a profit. The cost of profit over food is unhealthy eating habits, addiction, and a lowering of all of our qualities of life. Having access to products to eat is not necessarily having access to food.

Many of the products available to “consumers” (the word to describe those who buy and use) are ready-made, pre-packaged, and designed to be quick and easy. Michael Pollan wrote that it is not thought that differentiates human beings from other animals, but cooking. These ready-made, pre-packaged units (the word used to describe what a vender is selling) take the necessity (and knowledge) of cooking away, and hence a bit of our humanity away. Adding water or turning on a stove is not necessarily cooking; it is preparing.

And so what do computers and food have to do with learning? Learning is a process that takes time; there are no shortcuts. There are no shortcuts because the process has to do with understanding, and to understand one must study the long and short-term implications. Computers create easy processes that do not rely upon long and short-term implications. This is not to say that computers are not useful tools for learning. But it is to say that the process of learning does not change even though a computer is being used.

The same goes for food. A credit card can buy a shopping cart full of products, but these products are not necessarily food in the real sense of the word. Furthermore, grocery stores and corporations that sell and provide products for consumption are not always interested in the consumer knowing the difference. Learning the difference, however, is a key component of knowledge: the byproduct of learning. Finally, and perhaps the most insidious implication of our ignorance, or perhaps indifference, towards learning is that we lose our independence without ever realizing it. Cooking is the key foundation to independence, for without it we are truly no different than our not-so-distant cousins in the forests and jungles. Simply being a human being is not being human. It is what we learn that makes us people.

 

 

 

 

The Freedom of Food

Recently I have embarked upon path towards freedom.  This word, freedom, so often misused and thrown around as to have lost its meaning, is such an important concept to so many people but to be free means to limit one’s freedoms.  In my case, I have begun to limit myself to that which I can do myself: self-sufficiency.  One of the areas, and the most important in many ways, is the ability to feed your self.  To eat is to cook; cooking is a simple and yet necessary activity that has, in the past one hundred years or so, become defined not by us as individuals, but by faceless corporations and conglomerates that do two things: tell us what to eat and provide us what they think we ought to eat.  In one sense, these corporations and conglomerates have given us freedoms: we no longer have to cook; but, in another sense, these corporations and conglomerates have taken away our freedoms: we no longer can cook.

It is not only cooking that counts, it is the ingredients as well.  These companies have not only begun to cook for us, but they have also provided and created the ingredients that they cook with.  This may sound as simple and innocent but alas, it is not.  I was in Denmark over Christmas with my Danish family and had the pleasure of “cooking” with my nephew.  We made lasagna (a classic dish).  My nephew took out a jar of pre-made sauce (with meat), a box of pre-made béchamel sauce, and boxed platter pasta.  He poured each of the packaged ingredients over the pasta platters and set it in the oven.  Oua’ la!  I do not mean to downplay my nephew’s willingness to make a family meal, but what he did was not cooking.  However….

According to Michael Pollan in his book, Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation, the definition of cooking has been dumbed down.  My nephew’s activity is considered “cooking” by many.  Of course language is a social phenomena and we as a society are free to define terms as we see fit.  Historically, words of all kinds come and go, get redefined and defined again.  But to redefine a word that encompasses a quality of freedom that is only found in the transformation of ingredients to food is to devolve linguistically.  To dumb down concepts is to lose freedoms.  The consumerism society created by corporations is not concerned with our freedoms, but with profit and profit alone.  And so, to redefine words (such as cooking) to fit their ultimate goal of profit at the cost of a higher form of freedom is in fact taking away the freedoms of us as individuals.

Today, most are aware that agriculture, the production of food products, is by in large defined by the production of corn, typically GMO (Genetically modified Organism).  The three ingredients that my nephew used were all corn-based (probably not GMO; we were in Europe) in the form of high fructose corn syrup and corn starch.  And so once again, what we perceive as freedom is not freedom at all, just like what many perceive is cooking is not cooking at all.  Cooking food from scratch, with basic, non-processed ingredients is not the illusion of freedom, but a higher form of freedom.  Choosing to buy basic non-processed ingredients also allows others (farmers in particular) to have true freedom and not the illusion of freedom that corporate farming offers.

It is just recently that I have learned the correlation between what I cook, what I eat and my freedom, but as I continue to learn I find that my expectations of what freedom is continues to rise as does what I am willing to eat.  For starters, I am not willing to support farm and corporate practices that include CAFO’s (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations), GMO’s, non-organic pesticides.  The list of what I will not support continues to grow as does the necessity of my taking responsibility for where I spend my money, what I do with my time, and what I put in my mouth.  In other words, as I limit myself, my freedom grows.

Often these issues are perceived as political, and in a way they are, but so is the concept of freedom.  By limiting what I will accept I have found that the freedom that I have (through the continued path towards self-sufficiency) grows ever deeper and wider. Michael Pollan puts it appropriately.

“Of all the roles the economist ascribes to us, “consumer” is surely the least ennobling.  It suggests a taking rather than a giving.  It assumes dependence and, in a global economy, a measure of ignorance about the origins of everything that we consume…” (Cooked, 407)

If we truly are what we eat, then food is freedom in the end.