The Sanctity of Food

I try to read a book a week and have been reading lots and lots of books about the production of food in this country and/or its relationship to the growth of fast food chains in this country.  The more I read the more I am sad that large agribusinesses and fast food giants are indeed robbing us of our relationship to food and its interconnectedness to family and community. 

That is why I am lucky to have experienced the gathering of my Italian relatives on Sunday to eat the pasta and sauce that was cooked from scratch in my grandmother's basement.  For any of you growing up in western NY you can most likely relate to Italians having kitchens in the basement to stay cool when cooking in the summer or warm in the winter.  The love that poured into that pasta starting from the local farmer who grew the ingredients, to the merchant who made them available for sale, added to what was grown in the garden, to the loving hands of my aunts and grandmother to make the sauce and pasta made for the healthiest and most delicious meal ever.  That is why I want to throw the remote through the television when I hear that bullshit line from Olive Garden, "When you are here you are family."  Please do not disgrace the memory of my aunts and grandmother with that bullshit tag line.

I am currently reading a book entitled "The World Peace Diet:  Eating for a Spiritual Health and Social Harmony" written by a most enlightened human being, Will Tuttle.  I highly recommend it as a summer read to prep for the coming academic year to put what it is we are truly doing as educators into perspective. 

I am using this book for the first year honors class in our newly formed College of Health and Human Sciences.  The goal of the book is to expand the minds of the students to seriously contemplate the pathetic way in which we raise livestock and produce in this country and how it is contributing directly to the health crisis in this country.  Case in point, if you do not live along the gulf, do you think that you are far removed from the ecological disaster the oil spill is causing?  Think again!  The fact of the matter is that if you purchase seafood from the gulf from this point forward you are in fact going to be eating the oil that is pouring out of the BP well.  The Wall Street Journal recently broke down the food chain of the microrganisms that will eat the oil -- which is decayed organic material -- and traced it up the the ladder to, let's say for sake of example, that shrimp that is surely to be in your gumbo.  Yum!  On the bright side, the good news is that you will have done your part to help clean up the spill!

Here is the author's description of eating an apple to give an idea of his thoughtfullness in the book:
"What is so simple as eating an apple?  And yet, what could be more sacred and profound?  When we eat an apple we are not just eating an apple or a separate thing.  That apple enters us, dissolves within us, contributes to us, and becomes us.  And each apple is a manifestation of so much more!  We are eating the rain and the cloulds and of all the trees that have gone before to bring this tree to manifestation, and of the tears, sweat, bodies, and breaths of countless generations of animals, plants, and people that have come the rain and wind that feed the apple tree.  When we look into one apple, we see the entire universe.  All the planets and stars, our sun and moon, the oceans, rivers, forests, fields, and creatures are in this apple. The apple tree is a manifestation of an infinite web of life, and for the tree to exist, every component of the web is vital...Eating an apple with awareness can be a sacred feast, and yet it is usually done casually while we are preoccupied with something else."

At the end of the day, I guess the message in today's post is to encourage those of us in our learning community to do all we can to keep ourselves and our students as close as possible to our food roots as a culture, and the roots of the food that sustain it.  Educating students sincerely in culinary arts and hospitality is much, much more than growing the bottom line for investors or producing a grade distribution for administrators -- it is about contributing to the physical and spiritual health  and well being of the students and their eventual customers for social harmony, as suggested by the title of Tuttle's book.

I miss you grandma!  What I would give to spend one more Sunday in your basement with you and my aunts as you all talked loud, fast, and lovingly while making the pasta.  Of course, after my uncle's kneaded the pasta dough all the while being yelled at that "You're not doing it right!"  No wonder I love to watch Cake Boss!