Just What We Do

Snow. Pigs. Skis. The Hick.

I think I’ve mentioned this before, but occasionally it occurs to me how infrequently I write about food. I mean, crikey, we grow somewheres north of 90% of our food, and you can’t do that without having it be a pretty big ole part of your life. But I hardly ever write about it. Or maybe I do, just peripherally. I mean, chores are food, right? Both literally and metaphorically, I suppose.

Anyway, I was pawing thorough the freezer last night, resting my gut on the rim of its open maw to take some pressure off my poor back (it’s getting better, thanks for asking), and I had to chuckle. There was beef, and pork, and lamb, and chicken, and chicken broth. There was beef broth, and blueberries, and wild blackberries, and venison, and strawberries and jars of  butter. There were quart containers of chicken livers and a bunch of the maple sausage we like to make, and still a number of packages of bacon, thank goodness, though our current porcine companions are beginning to take on the sheen of succulence that has me looking at them with ill intent. There were bags of frozen peas and green beans from the garden, and a couple of muskrat hides the boys haven’t yet fleshed, and big bag of chicken feet for making into stock and… you get the idea. Behind me, across the basement, was the door to the root cellar, and in there sat kimchi and potatoes and carrots and lacto-fermented green beans and salsa and applesauce and probably a few jars of some long ago fermentation experiment gone bad. I really need to clean out the root cellar.

For some reason, as I pawed for today’s lunch (lamb stew, yumilicious) I got to thinking about how once in a while I travel to an urban setting, usually for some book-related event or another, and how on some of these trips I end up in a Whole Foods looking for something food-ish. And how it’s actually happened that I’ve become so overwhelmed by the scene that I’ve turned tail and walked out the door empty-handed. I mean, there’s food there, to be sure, and some of it’s actually pretty good. Not most, not even a slim majority. But some. Still, the sensory overload: The swirl of colors, the intermingling smells, the disorienting rush of shoppers jabbering on their phones as they fill carts with free range organic toilet paper and certified humane pre-marinated soy cutlets (oy, that was kind of mean. But funny, you have to admit). Having shopped primarily out of our basement and fields for the past 15 years, it’s just too damn much, and so the poor overwhelmed country hick flees the scene.

I wonder if this is the origin of our current obsession with food. Too much choice. We’ve all got sensory overload, so we’re trying to make sense of it all, and in the process, we obsess. We eat like this, and then we eat like that, because eating like that is supposed to be healthier than eating like this. Until it’s not. Paleo. Raw. Vegan. Fruititarian. Zone. Organic. Whateverthehellisthecooldietnow. And we talk about it and we write about it and we all but fetishize it, and it’s like food is this thing we can’t quite pin down. We can’t control it and we can’t quite figure it out. Here, I’ll help: Yo, it’s food. You eat it. With any luck, it tastes good. It keeps you alive, and if you’re fortunate enough to have access to food (not just food), it actually keeps you well. 

Compounding all this, of course, is the simple fact that so many of us can’t afford real food, and even many of those that can, wouldn’t know it if it bit them in the ass. Or maybe just don’t care. Or maybe have never even known what real food is, what it looks like, what it tastes like. I mean, you got government agencies spending hundreds of millions of our tax dollars convincing folks they should be drinking skim milk and eating gobs of fortified whole grain cereals. Guess who profits from that advice? Well, yeah, the food industry, of course. But the pharmaceutical industry’s got their palm out, too, and it’s a pretty big palm. Biggest one you’ve seen in a good long while, I’m guessing.

Anyway. I suppose what I’m saying is that I don’t write about food that much (at least not directly) because I don’t think about food that much. It’s sort of like breathing or brushing our teeth, I guess, which you ought be thankful I don’t write about that much, either. It’s just what we do.