Eat the Universe

I've been trying during the course of this experiment to figure out a way to communicate all the things I've learned about food in as simple a way as possible. I've been trying to offer rules of thumb, and lists of foods to avoid as well as lists of foods to eat. It's tempting to look for a quick fix, or a blanket statement to make food choices less harrowing. This is why people choose veganism or vegetarianism as a lifestyle. This is why people go on diets or develop rules about eating via religion or culture - they want to narrow their choices in an environment where it's almost impossible to know what a good choice is. People hope that they can find staple foods that they can feel good physically and morally about eating for every meal, so that they don't have to confront those decisions every single time they sit down to eat.

Unfortunately, I think it's this impulse that leads to our warped sense of food. Animals don't have to make complicated food choices because they eat what tastes good to them in their environment. Same with humans. However, our environment no longer consists merely of the landscape and the plants and animals that live on it. Our environment now consists of complex systems of economy and technology through which our food must pass in order to get from the farm to our plates. This is why our instincts are now at odds with our health - our instincts should tell us what is good to eat based on what tastes good. With industrialized food designed to trick our instincts, what tastes good these days is often very bad for us. The food available to us at any given moment has nothing to do with the land and everything to do with economics.

It used to be the seasons and the environment dictated what we had available to eat. Our choices were based on the life cycles of the animals and plants that were around us either by nature or by domestication. Even with people supplanting hunter-gatherer lifestyles with a sedentary agrarian way of living, the vast majority of people were still responsible for raising, growing, hunting, and foraging their own food. However, as more people became alienated from food production, as industrialization took people off the farms and put them into factories, we began to lose our understanding of the animals and plants that nourished us. Farming has slowly become a profession rather than a necessity for most people, and we have relegated food production to an ever smaller portion of the population so that the rest of us can work to support the other parts of the increasingly massive machine we call civilization. This separation may have occurred in old civilizations in China, India, and the Middle East, which is why there have been so many doctrines with strict dietary guidelines that originate from those places. When people no longer have nature to tell them what to eat, they need God or a philosophy. But the alienation from food that occurred just in the 20th century is unique in human history.

This is all just a long-winded way for me to say that we have to really start thinking about food again. Whether or not you think it's important for yourself to avoid grains permanently, I hope that this process of focusing on meat and vegetables has made you a better cook and forced you to think harder about each thing you eat. It's important that we cook as many of our own meals as possible, talk to farmers, plant seeds, and meditate over every single meal we eat. People have decried the elevation of food to the status of a religion, and indeed many people use food to underpin a certain neurotic view of the world. But food is the primary connection that all living things have to each other, and it therefore makes sense that our understanding of our health and ourselves begins with our relationship to the organisms that we need to put into our bodies in order to live. I can talk to you about macronutrient proportions and omega-3 fatty acids, we can talk about the politics and the ethics of our food choices, but until we can all stand back and have a more holistic view of how what we eat literally connects our bodies to the earth and the sun, then all we are doing is perpetuating our ignorance.

So I guess, at the end of the day, my rule of thumb would be: eat the way you have sex, the way you admire a star-filled sky, the way you sing a song, and the way you breath fresh air.