Work of a Lifetime

But who doesn't love to eat?  I mean, seriously.  It is the essential experience of our waking lives, all of us.  We don't eat, we don't live, at least not for long.  The need, the want, the desire to eat impels us all to action, and is with us, from the moment we leave our mothers' wombs.  Why do newborns cry?  Ninety-nine percent of the time, it's for one of three reasons:  they're sleepy, they're poopy, or they're hungry.  Okay, cold; maybe sometimes they're cold.  But the point is eating – receiving the comfort of food, relief from hunger – is one of the most fundamental experiences of our whole lives.  And it is fundamentally about pleasure: the pleasure of connecting with other humans and with the good of the earth, the pleasure of receiving care, the pleasure of having our needs satisfied.  It is the pleasure, in other words, of love.

So why should it seem like such a "radical" thing to say that food is worth the devotion of my life?  Or, maybe it's not such a "radical" thing merely to say that.  Words are cheap these days.  Verging on worthless.  What's more genuinely jarring, from the perspective of the implicit norms of our modern techno-infatuated, money-obsessed (enslaved?) society, is to actually devote one's life – one's time, one's physical and mental energy and well-being, etc. – to food.  And not just to its (hopefully) pleasurable consumption, but likewise to the pleasures – and the perils – of its production and preparation.

If all of us must, and do, eat, and if, as I am asserting, food is a (the?) quintessential expression of love, then why does the unspoken script in our society relegate food production and preparation to the "lowly" bin?  Why is there so little legitimate social prestige, as opposed to patronizing lip service, accorded to farmers? Why would it constitute a status risk for an Ivy-league educated attorney, like myself, to turn to farming, at least long before I have the "financial freedom" to do so by any conventional standard of financial security?  Why would it seem like a "sacrifice" for me, at the outset of the most promising years of income-generation in my profession, to turn my law practice into a side gig so that I can put the practices of soil health, animal husbandry, and gardening – of cheesemaking, for Pete's sake – at the center of my life?  

There are many reasons for this dynamic, which have been explored and explicated well and at length by cultural historians, sociologists, economists, and others.  These reasons are beyond the scope of this immediate reflection. But they all converge around a basic theme:  that the culture that both crystallized in and grew out of the European "enlightenment" – the culture that, for anyone living in North America and Europe (and Australia), is as unavoidable as the water in which fish swim (and is almost as invisible . . . almost) – holds a certain disdain for bodies and everything related to care for bodies.

To put it simply:  we in the cultural "West" have a dysfunctional relationship with bodies – our bodies, other peoples' bodies, animal bodies, etc.  This dysfunctional relationship is one instance of our dysfunctional relationship with the material world more generally.  And nowhere are the dysfunctions of that relationship, as well as the potentially devastating consequences of those dysfunctions, more apparent than in our habits and attitudes and assumptions and practices around food and eating.  These warrant further examination.

But to cut to the chase for the time being: if food is love, but our relationship with food is dysfunctional, this means our relationship with love is dysfunctional.  To put it bluntly:  when we are not in right relationship with food, we are not in right relationship with one another.  I aim to do whatever is within my power to rectify this state of affairs.  I have begun with my own household, but the journey is already beckoning me outward, to reach beyond my immediate circle even as I seek to deepen these labors of love within and for and with my own family.  This is work worthy of a lifetime . . . and more.