REAL FOOD IS INCONVIENT.
Last night I was visiting friends, Dory, John & Randall. They hosted MOUNTAIN FIRE for Terra Madre last fall at Sunswept Farm. They are big thinkers. For me it was a retreat over the mountain, the Spring Creek area is another world, making Asheville seem a metropolis. When the sun sets, there are no lights.
After we got done laughing about “getting an egg from a carrot”, another story; a chicken story, the discussion stumbled down the mountain path to food. The discussion reflected our shared view: we are in unsettled times and the ability to produce and prepare our own food puts us in a unique position. Most cannot. We fiddled around the topic. John tossed out the idea “we are radicals. Radical means “root”, a fundamental thing.” Whoa, I had to remember that, I did not know that was the word’s definition and it sent me to the dictionary.
Radical; adjective: “of going to the root or origin; fundamental: a radical difference. Forming a basis or foundation.” As a noun: “a person who advocates fundamental reforms by uncompromising methods.” The antonym is superficial.
Next, look up fundamental: “emphasizes the idea of going to the root of the matter, and this often seems immoderate in its thoroughness or completeness.”
The power in the precision of language amazes me. Here in two words, radical and fundamental, are the basis of understanding the unsettled world surrounding me. I am neither a radical or a fundamentalist. I am not a radical, as I realize compromise is the way to move forward and I am not immoderate, as I can compromise. It comes with a caveat. I will not lose sight of the bigger goal; there is a moral, ethical, humane path and all our actions need to lead back to that. Though I may compromise to get there.
There are two arguments as a society we have blindly come to accept as truth: convenience and bottom line, narrowly defined as corporate profit. (We “buy into them”). Both are the antonym of radical. Paul Roberts in his book, The End of Food makes the statement,” food itself is fundamentally not an economic phenomenon.” Another “WHOA.” Having operated a restaurant for 40 years, I have data to support that premise. My radical idea is this: real food seems inconvenient, it takes many hands to produce good, healthy and just food. Hands are not machines, hands are people, not subject to the efficiencies of industrial mechanization. (If corporations are people, do they have hands? Is handedness a requisite to be people?) Even in the 21st century we cannot escape this fact.
Food was the first source of acquired human wealth. Today it is Big Business, global. None of us can long exist without food. In our rush to Somewhere, our relationship with food has become, well, weird. It is a status symbol, a fashion statement, a means of control and in its absence; a cry to riot or war. No matter what deception we wrap around our view of food, we are not far from the essential essence of food: it is what noursihes. The biggest deception is its inconvenience. This is the “tinny sound of the tiny drum” I beat.
The quest in the post-industrial revolution is expecting food to be cheap. This system has brilliantly succeeded in just the opposite. The real cost of food, if accounted for honestly, includes the health cost of obesity, diabetes and other disease, the social cost of families destroyed by convenience, the environmental cost of unsustainable energy and chemical inputs and the impact of bad food on our spirit; the brown and white meal most eat in the absence of a family table is astounding. That real cost trivalizes any national debt. The debt we are going to have to repay is the loss of the human connection to food.
All these ideas made their way around the fire circle. (If you want the smoke of the fire to blow the other way tell it: “I hate rabbit.”) My friends fly the banner “The Dawning of the Age of Aquarius” over their mountain enclaves. They are optomistic. They ride in the Calvary of the Mountain Irregulars, independent of associations, fiercely loyal to kin and neighbors. Mountain Irregulars subscribe to the Front Porch theory of society: come set awhile. They wish to be free of the subjugation called government. (In the War Between The States, they were neither Yankee or Rebel.) They are not anarchist, they are locally ruled, their values rooted in tribal earth. I was a senior officer, now an emissary.
Crossing back over the mountain, food thoughts bumped side to side in my head, following the curves in the road. I had to understand those two words. In my research, I stumbled across another discussion of foods’ inconvenience, a New York Times piece: Could Farms Survive Without Illegal Labor? Now those bumpy thoughts became radical thoughts. More hands.
The fundamentalism of food is there is no substitute for hands if the food is to be good. Hands should not be cheapened. Using our hands is not inconvenient, it is beautiful.
Good food is not really inconvenient, it is essential, it forms the basis of a healthy, vibrant and humane society.
-Mark Rosenstein, Calvary of the Mountain Irregulars, 1st Officer
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