Talking about Food

How can we talk about food?

It is an incredibly complex issue. It is impossible to discuss diet without raising issues of economics, ethics, and consciousness that would take many books -- if not lifetimes -- to give ample time and consideration.

It's easy enough to see sex as the central issue of life. One could say that it is death that in fact sheds the greatest life upon life. But maybe a more biological perspective would be that it is food that leads us most evenly to all the central issues of life. Our very history is contained in the culture of our food.

"How is food a perfect road map of myth? In the same way that it tells the story of history. It tells of interbreeding, it tells of times of peace, it tells of rape and pillaging, of occupation, of diaspora and exodus."

"You are what you eat." Maybe so. But what led us to decide what we should eat, and what we should avoid? What level of responsibility do we have as individuals for the cultural and global repercussions of our food choices?

Most of us are not prepared for this. We are provided food as a child, and take on the habits that presented to us. Or perhaps as a teenager we rebel against these cultural habits, so that Veganism is to mainstream America in this light much like Satanism is to Catholicism.

The ethical dimension of food also brings in knee-jerk reactions. I lived in a house of 7 college students my junior year. Three of the housemates were vegan, two were vegetarian, and two were meat eaters. This lead to food wars, with bacon thrown in the trash leading to bacon put in beds lead to--well, it escalated, and got quite ugly. So food politics involve dehumanization, as well.

Those ethical issues, and the fact that culture is so blindly inherited by many people--though less so by the average Modern Mythology or Mythos Media reader I'll wager--make it deeply challenging. They charge it through with emotions and posturing and politics.

What Stories Do Food Tell Us? (Myth, Culture, and Food.)

By James Curcio

This is not an article that could possibly give a complete picture of the topic I have on my mind at the moment. This is so often the case here on Modern Mythology: we have to skim the surface, and one day we will return, again and again, and one day that might become a book - or it will have to remain a stab in the dark. Made with a needle, maybe, but if it hits the right spot, a needle can do a lot of damage.

So give me your jugular.

Today, I want to talk about food.

I love food. I don't love it the way many Americans seem to love it. I don't love an excess of quantity. I don't love the things that desensitize and distance us from our food, which seem so epidemic in some parts of the country. I feel my gall rising when I think of chain restuarants. Massive grocery stores make me want to vomit on my shoes. (Though I love giant open air markets, where tons of local farmers, butchers, cheesemongers, and the like come to sell their wares. More on that, maybe, some other day.)

I love food because, like sex, it is a great common thread that runs through all people. We all are different in how we react to these needs, how we satisfy them, and how we accept ourselves or run from ourselves. But it's a problem all of us must contend with, and those are the fault-lines of myth. Myths arise - always - at these points of necessity. They arise at the points where biology just up against culture. Fault-lines, as I said.

Food is a great indicator of myth. It is like a way-marker, and if you follow it, you can learn a great deal. You just need to dig a little, be inquisitive, and really ponder it. In fact, if you really want to understand a culture, and you want to do it quickly: eat with the locals. Don't have them take you to the bullshit place that they think you, the tourist, want to go to. Have them take you to the place they like.

I can't say I learned this from Anthony Bourdain, but it is the principle that his show capitalized on all these years, and it certainly helped open my eyes to so many more cultures I wish I had the opportunity to explore.