Allegory of the Long Spoons

There is a story that has permeated various religions about two rooms. The first room is in hell, where the people have row after row of tables with laden with a feast of delicacies. Yet the people sitting around these tables are emaciated, moaning in hunger. In their hands, each held a long spoon, but their arms were splinted to wooden flats, so they could not bend their elbows to bring the spoons to their mouths.

In heaven, there is an identical room, with people in the same predicament of spoons. However, in heaven, the people sitting around these tables are comfortably sated. There, the people had discovered that it was only possible to feed each other, by reaching across the table with their long spoons to bring the food to each others' mouths, being fed depended on everyone being kind to one another.

Recently, Mark Bittman had an article in The New York Times called, Why I'm Not A Vegan. It's more a promo for his book, VB6 (Vegan Before 6), a lifestyle choice he made for health reasons. The idea behind VB6 is to basically eat vegan until dinnertime, although he admits to frequent cheating. It's very similar to meatless Mondays, forms of scheduled moderation for diet and health.

I've written previously on this blog about the concept of ahmisa, but today I'm thinking about community, and how eating is a communal act.

Even when a person dines alone, rarely did they grow or hunt their food themselves, or at least, not all of it. They are the end of a (typically) long producer/consumer chain. In most cases, this chain is invisible. It brings to mind an article I read several years ago about how the definition of "cooking" has changed in America to include opening and heating up a can of soup.

With its invisible status, this producer/consumer chain is not considered part of most people's communities. But what if our thinking were to change? What if we started seeing eating as a form of engaging with community - not just through dinner conversation, but through product consumption? It might mean that we want more of connection to said products - by knowing the farmers, by shopping locally, by gardening ourselves, and that a faceless corporation is not a good dinner companion.

And what if we went beyond that? Aldo Leopold suggested the idea of in A Sand County Almanac, "The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land." What if we considered the pollinators such as bees, or the microbes in the soil, part of our community? They certainly contribute to our food production. What does it do to our thinking then?

What sort of spoon could you extend?

Gratitude

Prayer After Eating

I have taken the light
that quickened eye and leaf.
May my brain be bright with praise
of what I eat, in the brief blaze
of motion and of thought.
May I be worthy of my meat.

Wendell Berry


Although this project is about veganism, I felt this poem was relevant. I didn't grow up in a home that prayed before meals. In fact, I've been fortunate, like many Americans, to take food for granted. I read a quote recently on Facebook - I can't remember it perfectly, or who said it, but it was something about how current generations haven't really experienced famine in living memory, so no wonder we are so weird about food. I don't know the veracity of this statement (my grandparents, who are still alive, lived through the Great Depression, and might possibly disagree), but I wonder if there isn't a kernel of truth in the idea.

In Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food, he points out how food science and nutrition have distracted people from the idea that we eat food. Instead, we think of ourselves as eating nutrients, and how this leads to enormous confusion about what to eat.

One thing that gardening can teach you is, growing food is work. Cooking is work. Both are pleasurable if you have the time, but are difficult to squeeze in when you are overworked, tired, busy, overwhelmed, juggling multiple responsibilities, just trying to get by. I can't speak for raising livestock or hunting, but I can imagine. (I know there is a whole other debate about how these ideas relate to feminism, but I'll save that for another post).

So, I wonder, has the confusion of science, combined with the distance from the work of making food (coupled with the accessibility of food industrialization for the busy person), and the speed at which we live, given us a lack of appreciation? Heck, do we have time to appreciate, or even taste our food sometimes? I, who for various reasons often has no choice but to eat at my desk at work, while still working, have to remind myself at other times to chew my food, taste it, breathe between bites.

This past week I've had a bit of break from my regular work schedule, and a chance to relax. My lovey husband has been taking me to places that serve amazing food, many of which focus on local food sources. First of all, I've remembered, or maybe re-learned, that when eating really good food, taking the time to taste each bite, it keeps the eater in the present. Mindful tasting centers the body and brain. Instead of my usual work situation when food is just gulped down, slowing down to eat, and eating fresh, local food, often leaves me relaxed and euphoric.

As I was eating, I was reminded that I was eating my local landscape. This is how an eater becomes part of the place they live, connected to it, intimately, as it literally makes the person. This is no new idea - in fact, pre-industrialization, there was no other way to live, I suppose.

Consider this: if your food is harvested from the side of a mountain, eating said food, you take the mountain, its soil and rain, into your body. You also take the energy of the sun, which travels through space for 92,960,000 miles to be absorbed by leaves. Think how eating those leaves, or eating something that ate those leaves, literally connects your body to the larger universe. Some may dismiss these ideas as being a bit out there, but I ask readers here to suspend skepticism for a moment. Eating food is a way energy is transferred - the way soil, water, sunlight are transformed into human endeavor. Consider this web of connections. Isn't that something to be grateful for?