|
Return to Archives
That Other Four-Letter F-word
February 20, 2008
Inspired by an interview with Michael Pollan
Oscar Wilde said that a cynic is someone "who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing." When it comes to food and eating, it's someone who knows the calorie, fat, and vitamin content of everything s/he eats, knows in excruciating detail her/his weight, blood pressure, bone density ratio, and a slew of other numbers, but doesn't know how he or she feels. People who don't know how they feel are as hazardous to themselves and others as people who don't know what they think.
Here's a story about soup. My mother wasn't much of a cook, and my father's repertoire was limited to pancakes, waffles, and anything involving a grill. What I know about cooking I learned after I left home. For a long time I thought making soup was much too complicated. This was the 1970s, heavily influenced by the 1960s, and the word was that unless you collected scraps and peelings and made your own stock from scratch, it wasn't real soup. I tried it a few times; it was a big hassle and, more important, it didn't taste as good to me as canned soup. Then I figured out -- either someone told me or I read it in a book -- that you could buy good stock, or bouillon, or just use water and still wind up with good soup. Eureka! I could make soup. After I'd made a few of my own, canned soup started tasting way too salty. A lot of canned stuff tasted way too salty. Diet doctors and pop science journalists didn't get me to read the ingredient labels; salty soup did.
For a year in the mid-1970s I lived in England, where good, unsliced bread could be had at local bakeries, and even the grocery-store stuff was pretty good. I don't know what shocked me more when I returned to the U.S.: the size of the cars or the mediocrity of the bread. I bought a paperback book and taught myself to make bread. Been doing it ever since. My patience with people who don't eat bread because "it's too fattening" is not great. (Not eating wheat bread because you're allergic to wheat, however, is a good idea.)
I'm endlessly fascinated with the big picture, like why are so many of us (probably all of us, at least some of the time) so easily manipulated by these sales pitches? (Not just the ones selling low-fat diets and nutritional supplements, but the ones selling the war on terrorism and other snake-oil solutions to modern problems.) Fear for sure, but fear of what? With food, fear of getting -- or being seen as -- fat is surely a factor, but there's more than that. So many of us are afraid (again, probably all of us are afraid at least part of the time -- and why not? There's plenty out there to be afraid of) of what our bodies feel and what our minds think. We're tempted by anything that promises control. It's too bad that in our society "pleasure" is so often seen as synonymous with "sexual pleasure," because the conflation is obscuring some important connections. Preparing and eating food, alone or in company, can be a source of great pleasure, but our culture is hell-bent on reducing it to "Wham bam, thank you ma'am."
|
