The Pleasures of Eating

About a year ago, when I debuted as "The Reverent Eater," I began with a quotation from the writings of Wendell Berry. Much to my own surprise, I never returned to him.

Now it is time. For verily, I say unto you, his writing is the fundamental source of my inspiration.

Almost two years ago now, when we moved from the ex-burbs to the city, and as I began to grieve the loss of my capacity to grow my own food - for we'd moved from a 1.11 acre plot to a .11 acre dot - I turned again to the following essay for solace and a sense of the possible. Perhaps you too will find in his words something meaningful and purposeful for your life:

"The Pleasures of Eating" by Wendell Berry

Many times, after I have finished a lecture on the decline of American farming and rural life, someone in the audience has asked, "What can city people do?"

"Eat responsibly," I have usually answered. Of course, I have tried to explain what I meant by that, but afterwards I have invariably felt that there was more to be said than I had been able to say. Now I would like to attempt a better explanation.

I begin with the proposition that eating is an agricultural act. Eating ends the annual drama of the food economy that begins with planting and birth. Most eaters, however, are no longer aware that this is true. They think of food as an agricultural product, perhaps, but they do not think of themselves as participants in agriculture. They think of themselves as "consumers." If they think beyond that, they recognize that they are passive consumers. They buy what they want—or what they have been persuaded to want—within the limits of what they can get. They pay, mostly without protest, what they are charged. And they mostly ignore certain critical questions about the quality and the cost of what they are sold: How fresh is it? How pure or clean is it, how free of dangerous chemicals? How far was it transported, and what did transportation add to the cost? How much did manufacturing or packaging or advertising add to the cost? When the food product has been manufactured or "processed" or "precooked," how has that affected its quality or price or nutritional value?

Most urban shoppers would tell you that food is produced on farms. But most of them do not know what farms, or what kinds of farms, or where the farms are, or what knowledge or skills are involved in farming. They apparently have little doubt that farms will continue to produce, but they do not know how or over what obstacles. For them, then, food is pretty much an abstract idea—something they do not know or imagine—until it appears on the grocery shelf or on the table.

When food, in the minds of eaters, is no longer associated with farming and with the land, then the eaters are suffering a kind of cultural amnesia that is misleading and dangerous. The passive American consumer, sitting down to a meal of pre-prepared or fast food, confronts a platter covered with inert, anonymous substances that have been processed, dyed, breaded, sauced, gravied, ground, pulped, strained, blended, prettified, and sanitized beyond resemblance to any part of any creature that ever lived. The products of nature and agriculture have been made, to all appearances, the products of industry. Both eater and eaten are thus in exile from biological reality. And the result is a kind of solitude, unprecedented in human experience, in which the eater may think of eating as, first, a purely commercial transaction between him and a supplier and then as a purely appetitive transaction between him and his food.

And this peculiar specialization of the act of eating is, again, of obvious benefit to the food industry, which has good reasons to obscure the connection between food and farming. It would not do for the consumer to know that the hamburger she is eating came from a steer who spent much of his life standing deep in his own excrement in a feedlot, helping to pollute the local streams, or that the calf that yielded the veal cutlet on her plate spent its life in a box in which it did not have room to turn around. And, though her sympathy for the slaw might be less tender, she should not be encouraged to meditate on the hygienic and biological implications of mile-square fields of cabbage, for vegetables grown in huge monocultures are dependent on toxic chemicals—just as animals in close confinement are dependent on antibiotics and other drugs.

The consumer, that is to say, must be kept from discovering that, in the food industry—as in any other industry—the overriding concerns are not quality and health, but volume and price. For decades now the entire industrial food economy, from the large farms and feedlots to the chains of supermarkets and fast-food restaurants, has been obsessed with volume. It has relentlessly increased scale in order to increase volume in order (presumably) to reduce costs. But as scale increases, diversity declines; as diversity declines, so does health; as health declines, the dependence on drugs and chemicals necessarily increases. As capital replaces labor, it does so by substituting machines, drugs, and chemicals for human workers and for the natural health and fertility of the soil. The food is produced by any means or any shortcut that will increase profits. And the business of the cosmeticians of advertising is to persuade the consumer that food so produced is good, tasty, healthful, and a guarantee of marital fidelity and long life.

Eaters must understand that eating takes place inescapably in the world, that it is inescapably an agricultural act, and that how we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used. This is a simple way of describing a relationship that is inexpressibly complex. To eat responsibly is to understand and enact, so far as one can, this complex relationship.

What Can One Do?

Here is a list, probably not definitive:

1. Participate in food production to the extent that you can. If you have a yard or even just a porch box or a pot in a sunny window, grow something to eat in it. Make a little compost of your kitchen scraps and use it for fertilizer. Only by growing some food for yourself can you become acquainted with the beautiful energy cycle that revolves from soil to seed to flower to fruit to food to offal to decay, and around again. You will be fully responsible for any food that you grow for yourself, and you will know all about it. You will appreciate it fully, having known it all its life.

2. Prepare your own food. This means reviving in your own mind and life the arts of kitchen and household. This should enable you to eat more cheaply, and it will give you a measure of "quality control": you will have some reliable knowledge of what has been added to the food you eat.

3. Learn the origins of the food you buy, and buy the food that is produced closest to your home. The idea that every locality should be, as much as possible, the source of its own food makes several kinds of sense. The locally produced food supply is the most secure, the freshest, and the easiest for local consumers to know about and to influence.

4. Whenever possible, deal directly with a local farmer, gardener, or orchardist. All the reasons listed for the previous suggestion apply here. In addition, by such dealing you eliminate the whole pack of merchants, transporters, processors, packagers, and advertisers who thrive at the expense of both producers and consumers.

5. Learn, in self-defense, as much as you can of the economy and technology of industrial food production. What is added to food that is not food, and what do you pay for these additions?

6. Learn what is involved in the best farming and gardening.

7. Learn as much as you can, by direct observation and experience if possible, of the life histories of the food species.
The last suggestion seems particularly important to me. Many people are now as much estranged from the lives of domestic plants and animals (except for flowers and dogs and cats) as they are from the lives of the wild ones. This is regrettable, for these domestic creatures are in diverse ways attractive; there is such pleasure in knowing them. And farming, animal husbandry, horticulture, and gardening, at their best, are complex and comely arts; there is much pleasure in knowing them, too.

It follows that there is great displeasure in knowing about a food economy that degrades and abuses those arts and those plants and animals and the soil from which they come. For anyone who does know something of the modern history of food, eating away from home can be a chore. My own inclination is to eat seafood instead of red meat or poultry when I am traveling. Though I am by no means a vegetarian, I dislike the thought that some animal has been made miserable in order to feed me. If I am going to eat meat, I want it to be from an animal that has lived a pleasant, uncrowded life outdoors, on bountiful pasture, with good water nearby and trees for shade. And I am getting almost as fussy about food plants. I like to eat vegetables and fruits that I know have lived happily and healthily in good soil, not the products of the huge, bechemicaled factory-fields that I have seen, for example, in the Central Valley of California. The industrial farm is said to have been patterned on the factory production line. In practice, it looks more like a concentration camp.

The pleasure of eating should be an extensive pleasure, not that of the mere gourmet. People who know the garden in which their vegetables have grown and know that the garden is healthy and remember the beauty of the growing plants, perhaps in the dewy first light of morning when gardens are at their best. Such a memory involves itself with the food and is one of the pleasures of eating. The knowledge of the good health of the garden relieves and frees and comforts the eater. The same goes for eating meat. The thought of the good pasture and of the calf contentedly grazing flavors the steak. Some, I know, will think of it as bloodthirsty or worse to eat a fellow creature you have known all its life. On the contrary, I think it means that you eat with understanding and with gratitude. A significant part of the pleasure of eating is in one's accurate consciousness of the lives and the world from which food comes. The pleasure of eating, then, may be the best available standard of our health. And this pleasure, I think, is pretty fully available to the urban consumer who will make the necessary effort.

I mentioned earlier the politics, esthetics, and ethics of food. But to speak of the pleasure of eating is to go beyond those categories. Eating with the fullest pleasure — pleasure, that is, that does not depend on ignorance — is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world. In this pleasure we experience and celebrate our dependence and our gratitude, for we are living from mystery, from creatures we did not make and powers we cannot comprehend. When I think of the meaning of food, I always remember these lines by the poet William Carlos Williams, which seem to me merely honest:

There is nothing to eat,
seek it where you will,
but the body of the Lord.
The blessed plants
and the sea, yield it
to the imagination
intact.

1989

"The Pleasures of Eating" from WHAT ARE PEOPLE FOR? by Wendell Berry. Copyright © 1990 by Wendell Berry.

Silly Goose Dog!

Well, here’s something a little different from the files of the Reverent Eater…

In honor of spring and Earth Day and the great outdoors, today we move from food preparation and food consumption back to where it all begins…food production. We return to the source…we return to the farm.

The town where we live now was once upon a time what one might reasonably call a “farm town.” But we’re talking a century ago. Today, there are no longer any working farms here. The playing field near our house was once a farm and is still named after that farm, but it’s only grass and dandelions, children and their dreams that grow there now.

However, there are still a couple of small farms in some of the towns nearby. One such farm has been in the same family for almost 100 years and is located just over our town line. It’s only probably a mile or two from our front porch to the front door of their farm stand, as the geese fly. And, in this time when farmland is so speedily giving way to development, it is a treasure. And we here at The Reverent Eater would very much like to support them in any way we can.

Speaking of geese, the farm owners and manager have been a little worried about the damage that the increasingly large flocks of Canadian Geese could do to their newly planted crops, like their lettuce seedlings, for instance. And so this past week they put out a call for goose patrols – that is, dogs and their owners who would be willing to walk through the fields occasionally and humanely chase away any geese they find snacking there.

This morning the younger of my two dogs and I answered that call. What follows is really a mama’s brag…

Of our two dogs, one is much more of an “eater,” and the other is more of a “chaser.” The chaser has always had a natural aptitude for chasing. In fact, a very important part of her morning routine has been to begin her day in “ready…set” mode at the back deck door and wait not-so-patiently for it to slide open so she can “GO!”

Her goal…her vocation…what she absolutely LIVES for…is to try to catch the squirrels that by that time of morning are already well ensconced in the birdfeeders in our back yard. And to that end, she TEARS out the back door and down the deck steps like a FLASH and ZOOMS across the yard to tree the thus far lucky little rodents. Though truthfully, between you and me, she’s never gonna get ‘em. But oh! How she dreams!

This morning at the farm, mama’s little “chaser” was spectacular! At first there were no geese. But she stayed near by as the farm manager gave us a tour, showing us what had been planted so far in the early days of the season. The peas are just beginning to come up. And when two geese did come honking by and flying in for a landing, it didn’t take much encouragement on mama’s part to get our little Goose Chaser on the job. She joyfully tore after them – they flew on a bit further – she kept after them – and they took off. And with a whistle, she was back at my side with absolute glee and delight reflecting in her eyes for some well-deserved praise and a taste of kibble. What a good dog! And what a wonderful way to start the day!

Hors d'oeuvres, anyone?

Geez, Louise! Has it really been a month since the Gourmand fell? Sorry to have been so out of touch! It's been really busy in these parts and I haven't been doing much cooking or, for that matter, much inspirational eating...except, of course, for a recent birthday fete with my beloved and a couple close friends...dinner out...and the cuisine...French and Cambodian. Delicious. But I don't have time to go there with you.

The thing that keeps me up at night these days - well, not really, but that sounds so...dramatic - is planning the food for the next birthday fete - that of my beloved. And I'm not saying which, but it is one of those "big" birthdays, so the royal "we" want it to be special. And, after consultation with our chef neighbor, the royal "we" have decided to handle the food our own royal selves.

I've only got a week now left to plan and shop and execute, and I've got a vague idea of where I'm going with this - we're planning heavy appetizers and, of course, a cake. So, if you're still out there reading this blog, maybe you could help me out...

When you go to a party where hors d'oeuvres are being served, which ones are your favorites?

C'mon, folks, help me out?

The Gourmand Falls

Last night I went to watch my goalie friend Aral play ice hockey. Aral did a great job and (finally) her team really helped out on defense. Still gotta work on offense and scoring. But this post isn't about hockey, it's about how the gourmand fell.

I was hungry when I got to the rink and I only had about 3 minutes before the puck was dropped at center ice. No time for food lines. I headed straight for the vending machines. Had a bag of cheetos. Loved it. Licked my fingers. Didn't even read the lengthy list of ingredients. Best $.75 I've spent in a while.

After the game I went back for a bag of Smartfood. It was okay. It was a little healthier. But I should have had a second bag of Cheetos. And a Barqs. Every once in a while, the gourmand just wants Cheetos and a Barqs. And last night, the fall was very satisfying.

The Souper Bowl

Hey Friends, I wish I had more time to do this post justice, but it's...like...Super Bowl Sunday, and there are chicken wings to bake for Doug and chili to make for a party I'm going to later.

So, this is going to be a quick one.

I've heard that 140 million people around the world watch the Super Bowl every year. A pretty stunning number! Well, there was a church youth group somewhere in South Carolina that got to thinking about that number and about the fact that so many people in the world are hungry or "food insecure." And they thought, "Hey, what if each one of those 140 million people gave just a dollar - that would be $140 million dollars! That would sure take a bite out of hunger!"

So they started this great thing - The Souper Bowl of Caring (www.souperbowl.org) - and every year church youth groups from all over the United States stand at the back of their churches on Super Bowl Sunday and collect a dollar here and a dollar there and forward the money on to the local hunger relief organization of their choice. I don't know if this is happening in your neck of the woods today or not, but if so, why not throw in a buck or two. If not, then maybe you'll want to take my Souper Bowl challenge...choose a local hunger relief organization and, once the Super Bowl is over and chicken wings are gone and the beer is imbibed, add up the total score of the game and send in a dollar for every point scored to help tackle hunger in your region. It's just a little thing, but if everyone did it...

Peugeot

To the left is the pepper mill I was blessed to receive for Christmas. We were desperate for a new pepper mill. I'd been cooking without one for, oh, let's say 4 months. It was trying. You may not be able to relate to this, but work with me, if you can. It was like trying to cook beef bourguignon without...a dutch oven...or, for the rest of you, like trying to flip a grilled cheese without a spatula...very difficult. Trust me.

So, I put "pepper mill" at the top of my Christmas list. And Chef Santa was good to me. This particular model is a Peugeot - yes, the same Peugeot people who manufacture cars. They actually have been making pepper mills longer than they've been making cars, since 1810. It all started when the Peugeot brothers transformed their family mill into a steel manufacturing outfit. Good job, brothers Peugeot!

This is pretty near the top of the line when it comes to pepper mills. I can adjust the size of the grind - 6 options: finest, finer, fine, course, courser, coursest. I might use finest in making a sauce, coursest for coating a ribeye steak before grilling.

Or a tuna steak. Tonight we had pan-seared yellow fin tuna au poivre. Pretty simple to whip up, really. Take a couple of nice, thick, fresh hunks of tuna; coat both top and bottom with a significant amount of coursely ground black pepper and sprinkle with salt. Sear in a little bit of olive oil on medium high for about 3.5 minutes on each side. Remove from heat and keep warm.

In the same pan I made a simple sauce of butter, onion, chicken stock and brandy, reduced, thickened, and flavorful, with just a little salt and pepper (finely ground) added at the end. We had our sauce over the tuna and over a blend of brown rice and quinoa, which adds a delicate nutty flavor (and some fiber) to the rice. Plain ol' steamed broccoli on the side. Delicioso!

It was so good that it all most makes up for the Bruins' loss last night and the increasingly tenuous lead that the Duke Blue Devils still maintain over the women from UNC. Go Duke!

Banana Dog

For whatever reason, I haven't been a very inspired cook lately. My plate has been full with work since the beginning of the new year. I've been trying to eat more fiber, but haven't been terribly creative about how to do that. I'll steam up some brown rice to get through the week; open a couple of cans of organic pinto beans and saute them with some onion, garlic, salt and pepper; steam some broccoli; and then take a little of all of the above with me to work. Then, for supper, more of the same to accompany some chicken thighs or fish - whatever's in the larder. Like I said, not terribly inspired or creative, but wholesome and healthy and fiber-filled.

Well, it's snowing today here in New England and I'm at home enjoying a day off, hanging out with the dogs, cozying up with a nice fire in the woodstove, and anticipating a good deal of shoveling before the day is done.

And I'm hungry. I need a little something that is inspired by the day. Something filled with the energy and calories I'll need for keeping warm while tossing snow around and for bringing in armful after armful of wood. At the same time, I need something playful, a treat - the sort of thing a child might look forward to eating on a "snow day."

Well, I think I've found it. This morning in one of the "local" papers, I read about something that sounds kind of fun: the banana dog. Simple, healthful, and a little more playful than your average foodstuff. Perfect for the blizzard we're having - good sustenance for shovellers and sledders. Here's the basic recipe:

One slice of whole-wheat bread or a whole-wheat hotdog roll
A tablespoon or two of your favorite peanut (or other nut) butter
One banana

Think "hotdog." Assemble as pictured.

I'm thinking - and here's me beginning to get creative again - that you could spice all this up with some finely chopped apple, either by itself or in the form of a "relish" made with some raisens or chopped up prunes, just a touch of maple syrup, and maybe some cinnamon. Applesauce would work nicely if you already had some handy. You could sprinkle a few walnuts on it, too, if you feel so moved.

Sounds good with a glass of milk - or kefir - or, in my case, I think a cup of coffee.

I'll let you know how this little snow-day experiment works out.

In the meantime, Happy Shoveling, New England!

Food and Meaning

Just after Christmas I ordered a copy of Ronna Kabatznick's The Zen of Eating. I'm about half way through it and I must say, I'm very pleased. It is both a good introduction to Buddhism - to the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path - and an enlightening reflection on how our attachments to food-related desires can cause us suffering. Our attachment to our desire to indulge in food can cause us suffering, and so, too, can our attachment to our desire to restrain from eating food.

Earlier this week I finished the chapter on Right Aspiration, the 2nd of the 8 steps along the Eightfold Path. Right Aspiration is about cultivating wholesome attitudes and behaviors regarding food and avoiding unwholesome attitudes and behaviors.

Our attitudes about food and consumption are so very important. As Kabatznick writes, "It takes more than a desire to make changes in your behavior. It also takes putting these changes into a meaningful context. If the context is not meaningful enough, turning down food is difficult."

She explores, for example, the difference between dieting and fasting. We often have a very difficult time restraining from eating certain foods when we are trying to diet, and she says that that is basically because our motivation in dieting is usually very self-focused. We want to lose weight so that we feel better and look thinner. It's all about us.

Fasting is easier, she contends, because our restraint is motivated by a higher purpose, often religious. "There's satisfaction in knowing that what you eat (or don't eat) actually means something more than how it is going to affect a number on the scale or how your clothes fit." Fasting, or following religiously inspired dietary restrictions, can move us beyond the boundaries of our tiny, little circle of self-centeredness and into a larger and more expansive relationship with something far bigger and far more important - God, the interdependent web of existence, our community of fellow religious practitioners, or the hungry children of the world, to name a few examples.

Kabatznick gives some ideas about how to make our relationship with food and eating more meaningful. Saying grace before meals is one way. Learning about the context of our food - where it's from, how it came to be before us, and whose hands helped to produce, distribute, and prepare it - is another.

An idea that is somewhat new to me is that which she calls "Dedication of Merit." It's not an entirely new idea to me, actually. I have learned about it before in the context of Buddhist practice. Buddhist monks usually say a gatha or blessing before eating, which ends with their saying, in essence, that they are eating the food before them for the benefit of all beings. In other words, that they are eating not first and foremost for themselves, but instead to sustain their practice, so that others might ultimately be saved through it. They dedicate the merit that comes from eating to all sentient beings.

What was new to me was Kabatznick's application of this concept of dedicating merit to a non-Buddhist context. She describes it as "the practice of offering any benefit that comes from your commitment to healthful eating to specific people or groups of people." She explains that a friend of hers who is a survivor of cancer dedicates the merit from eating well to her husband and daughter. As her friends says, "What I put in my body is my future, and my future affects my family." Thinking about the impact of her food choices on her loved ones makes it easier, she says, to eat well.

In the same way, we can choose to make our relationship with food more meaningful by dedicating the merit from eating well to our partners and spouses, our children, our grandchildren, even our as-yet-unborn grandchildren. Or we can dedicate the merit that comes from eating locally grown produce to the wellbeing of the farmers who grow it. Or the benefits of eating well to lose weight to all those who themselves struggle with weight loss.

Great idea. Great book.

Think about this at your next meal: to whom will you dedicate the merits of your eating today?

Now, eat well and be well...