Do you eat to live, or do you live to eat? It’s a philosophical question that often requires some thought due simply to the fact that the respondent probably hasn’t previously contemplated it. On the surface, it’s a question of whether a person loves and savors food or whether they see it as a means of survival. The person who lives to eat is much more likely to see food as a philosophic and political focus; the person who eats to live likely eats only to sustain themselves, doesn’t particularly care what they eat, and does not see (or perhaps simply does not care about) the philosophic and political aspects of food. Notoriously, most of America eats to live and doesn’t even understand the difference.
My own relationship with food, now thirty-three years long, is varied and, as I’ve come to realize in recent years, somewhat unique. First off, I grew up with a stay-at-home mother who managed the household, raised the kids, did all the cooking, cleaning and laundry and was, for the most part, pretty damn good at it. When I was little, we lived in New England and I remember having hot dogs and Burger King for dinner, but there was also homemade macaroni and cheese and fried spam sandwiches. Not to say that fruits and vegetables and homemade dinners were uncommon or rare; they absolutely were not. But all of our food came from the grocery store, and much of it came from bags, boxes and cans. But things changed drastically after we moved to Oregon.
In Oregon, my grandmother and uncles were running a small commercial organic vegetable farm and fruit orchard on five acres of land. They had chickens for eggs, specialized in gourmet lettuces (before such things were popular), had somewhere near 30 different types of fruit (and a couple of almond trees), and sold their goods to local gourmet restaurants, of which there are many in southern Oregon. Their outlook on food was quite a bit different than my mother’s; they ate food they grew themselves, they bought plain yogurt and added their own fruit to it, they didn’t eat hot dogs because they were too busy barbecuing turkeys and salmon in herbal rubs they grew themselves. While we were piling Mom’s uber-gooey mac and cheese onto our plates at the kitchen table, my uncles were dining on pheasant and salads separated from the ground not thirty minutes before, garnished with edible flowers (another specialty of the farm’s) and served in the open air under the trees of the orchard with a locally brewed beer.
When we moved to Oregon and joined in on the turkey barbecues, my mother’s cooking style changed drastically. Fewer things came from boxes and cans and most of our vegetables came from our own backyard. For a few years, she and a friend even raised their own chickens (and turkeys, a few times); by the end of the summer, they would each have fifty chickens apiece in the deep freeze to help get our families through the winter. She started using herbs instead of breading, which I did not at first appreciate. We grew so much zucchini that I grew to thoroughly loathe it (something that took me 10 years of adulthood to finally get past). Everything we grew was organic because pesticides, at the very least, get into the ground water. You can rinse your veggies off, but you can’t rinse your water off was the thinking that seemed to support the practice.
My family weren’t food politicians in any sense; when they needed a vegetable they didn’t have or couldn’t grow, they bought it and it was rarely organic, locally grown or necessarily in season. My parents grew vegetables and raised chickens because it was cheaper than buying them and we were dirt poor. While my parents had found a way to save money, my uncles had found a way to make money. They hired me to work on the farm during the summers, helping to pick and wash the orders, mow the orchard, pick fruit (blackberry duty was much dreaded) and be the go-for person when items needed to be retrieved. I probably wasn’t needed, but my uncles did me a huge favor that I admittedly didn’t recognize at the time by paying me to help.
I came to deeply appreciate good food during this period and in my first years of adulthood, when I neither cooked nor knew how to cook, I always thought nostalgically of my family’s cooking. Though my mother had threatened me with cooking lessons, I had always made sure to avoid them as I had no desire to be stuck in the kitchen with my mother telling me what to do. So of course, when I moved out had absolutely no idea how to cook for myself and began to live off things like pasta and cheese (not even macaroni and cheese – this was just pasta with grated cheese sprinkled over the top), Subway sandwiches, ramen, rice-a-roni and Kraft macaroni and cheese. Eventually (and inevitably), I got sick of this diet and was too poor to continue buying Subway almost daily. I started making bread because of strong memories of my mother and grandmother making bread on a regular basis when I was a kid. I also knew I could get a lot more loaves out of a bag of flour than I could out of a bag of bread. I started using Pasta-roni mixes and adding things like chicken and fresh mushrooms to them. After a while, I started figuring that I could make the same things without mixes, so I started experimenting with cooking from scratch.
My early experiments, though almost always delicious and accompanied by fresh salads or steamed vegetables, weren’t exactly healthy; I’m amazed that there are survivors of my twice-baked potato and buttered steak dinners. But over time, I slowly came back to the food principals with which I had grown up on the farm: Eat fresh, eat healthy, eat well. This captivated me. In order to do this right, I realized that following recipes wasn’t going to cut it; I needed to learn about food, I needed to know how food worked, where it came from and what it was for. As an anthropology student in college, I initially intended to study ethnomusicology. But I quickly found myself getting more interested in the food served at the festivals and rituals I studied than in the music being played at them. At the same time, I found myself avoiding homework by playing endlessly in the kitchen. Within a couple of terms, I changed my focus and instead studied American food culture. I learned about fast food and slow food, I read Michael Pollan, Eric Schlosser, and MFK Fisher. I read my cookbooks like they were NY Times bestsellers and absorbed the Food Channel’s eye candy (including Giada De Laurentiis) like a sponge.
I became a person who lives to eat; I view food holistically as a philosophy and way of life. Some things about our food are so fundamentally human (bread making!) and others are so completely wrong (GMO Round-Up Ready Corn by Monsanto), but I think many are just forgotten by the average American practitioner of nutritionism (a paradigm that assumes that it is the scientifically identified nutrients in foods that determine the value of individual food stuffs in the diet). I don’t believe that vegetables come in bags, that everything we eat needs to be laced with corn and sodium or that feed lot beef is healthy and good for you. I firmly believe that until recently, humans coexisted with the Earth symbiotically and that Americans are now eating ourselves – and the planet – to death.
After close to a decade of studying food, food culture and food politics, I hope that I might be able to impart some small amount of wisdom regarding our relationship with food. In the coming weeks, I intend to post a series of blogs on food, our relationship with it, and its current place in the world through topics such as corn, fast food, nutritionism, GMO’s, and the cultural contexts of eating. I hope for these to be a catalyst for discussion and food for thought; maybe you’ll even stop eating to live, and start living to eat.
