In the old European fairy tales,
the eeriest and grimmest of fairy tales, a person, a regular person not a
fairy, was safe in fairyland as long as she did not eat the food there.
Here
is an example:
Anna
goes for a walk in the woods behind her house.
She sees a warm light in the distance.
When she follows it she finds a tiny cottage and the door is slightly
ajar. Anna, curious, creaks open the
door. Behind it is an enormous hall with
an enormous table and hundreds of people with clear skin and sparkling eyes and
richly dyed clothes. They are eating
more food than Anna has ever seen before, with the most exquisite textures—the
juiciest birds, the most savory meats, the most emerald spinach and the most
crimson apples, the latter of which somehow seem to have dyed everyone’s lips. Everybody smiles at her, touches her with
cool hands. Someone pulls out a
chair. Anna sits. The woman next to her bites into a
peach. Juice drips down her neck. The man on the other side holds a turkey leg
with his whole fist. Anna hesitates and
then she bites into a gold, soft roll.
It leaves a sweet sheen on her fingers and on her lips. Immediately she forgets her own home and
history and people.
Here
the important parts are these:
1.
Anna’s life has heretofore been rather stark in
terms of sensuality.
2.
Certain traits, perhaps flaws, drive Anna more
than sensible restraint, and they’re sort of her fault and also sort of not her
fault. She becomes consumed (ha) by
curiosity and by desire, which she has already in various quantities someplace
inside her personality. But also some
external force sweeps her toward the light, toward the door, toward the table,
and ultimately, the crux of the story, toward the food. Anna loses control and she must eat.
The
next thing that happens in the story is that Anna stays for what seems like a
few minutes but when the spell is (luckily?) broken as a result of her
clear-sightedness and willpower, and the hairy backs and pointy ears and beady
eyes of the fairies emerge, and she stumbles out of the hall back into the
woods, a hundred years have passed and everyone she knows is dead.
I
think this is the most pressing problem in food systems.
In
the story, Anna probably eats something like hard dark bread and watery beer
most of the time, and then she enters into a rich sensuous world with rich
sensuous food, and she consumes it, and then she is punished for her
consumption/gluttony, and then she sees that the rich sensuous world was a lie,
and then she faces a loneliness that is usually only hinted at in the stories,
because the main point has been reached: do not trust sensuality. It cannot be real. Stick to your hard bread and watery beer.
As an undergraduate I studied for a semester
in Cape Town. I remembered this fairy
tale trope soon after I had gotten there.
The juice of produce there dripped over my skin. Dates were fresh. The first banana I had was on the University
of Cape Town campus, outside at a metal wicker picnic table, with my new
friends at lunch. It tasted like how I
never knew bananas could taste. It
tasted like a self-actualized banana. We ate peri peri chicken sandwiches for
lunch and we ate birthday cake made with springbok butter. We ate South Africanized versions of food we
ate at home: red beans and rice, chili.
We drank gourds of umqombothi. We
ate beef and antelope and ostrich at braais. We ate, we ate, we ate.
I
am here now, I thought. Once I eat this
food I am a part of this place. This
food is of this place and now so am I.
I
thought maybe there could be a different moral to the fairy tale, a different
way to read it.
We
tell the same fairy tale now, in our United States food culture. The old storytellers used to know something that
we now work hard to try to forget. Food
has power. Food is a manifestation of
place and an embodiment of place and a union of body and place. When we die we become part of a place because
maggots ingest our organs and then our bones become the minerals in the soil. While we live we are part of a place because
we eat it. We eat and we are eaten. Food is place. Perhaps my meaning was not
clear earlier when I said this, but here it is again: food is the most powerful
manifestation of place and our fear of this manifestation is the most pressing
problem in food systems.
Food
has the power to propel away our control and sweep us into connection, into
identity, into base survival. Food is an
equalizer—people of all classes need it and then shit it out—and food
determines and describes class.
Did
our fear start with some kind of Puritanical anti-hedonism? Did it start because the Catholic Church
labeled gluttony as a Deadly Sin? Is our
fear religious? Did we believe we could
get closer to God by shunning our earthly bodies and our earthly places?
Then
how conflicted did we feel at weddings and funerals and birthdays and evenings
and first dates, when we ate? Did our
eventual Armour-access to any food from anywhere year round increase our confusion
and thus our fear?
Did
we, white people in the United States, ever know what to feel about food?
We
don’t now, anyhow.
So
we tell the fairy tale, with the moral that Anna made the wrong choice to eat
the fairy food. Our resulting fear looks
like my parents, Atkins one half-year and vegan the next. Our fear looks like our obsession with weight
loss and with eating disorders and with liposuction. Our fear looks like fat-free sour cream and
frozen TV dinners that are SINFULLY DELICIOUS but GUILT-FREE. Our fear looks like the gap between what we
yearn for—connection, fulfillment, identity, pleasure—and the bland
universality we confine ourselves to and that we confine each other to. Our fear looks like our judgment of other
people’s eating habits and fatness. Our
fear looks like nutrients-not-food. Our
fear looks like tapping on our smartphones while we eat, fast. Our fear looks like our fad diets and our
nutritionists/prophets. Our fear looks
like my friend Debbie who ate only spinach for a week so that she wouldn’t have
a muffin top when she ran into her ex-boyfriend. Our fear looks like the phrase “muffin
top.” Our fear lurks in our language. Our fear shows in our girdles and our
secretive bingeing and the breach between what we eat in public and what we eat
in private. Our fear is gendered and it is racial.
Food
has power and we are afraid of it. So we
strip it of its place in hopes of stripping it of its power.
In
some ways, I don’t quite know what all this means. I don’t know what local means. I don’t know where place ends and someplace
else begins. Food, both its physicality
and its tradition, is usually from someplace else: bananas are a New World
food, and I ate them in Africa. Peri
peri is influenced by Indian cuisine. “Braai”
has Afrikaans origins, which has Dutch origins. Umqombothi beer is Xhosa, and
the Xhosa walked to South Africa from the Great Lakes in Tanzania in 1400. So where is the beer from? Is anything local? How can food be a manifestation of place, a union
of our bodies with place, if it isn’t actually from the place?
Maybe
it’s all in the preposition: of versus
from.
A food could be of a place
without being from the place.
What
distinguishes the prepositions is the individual food’s history—where was it
grown and harvested and sold?—and also its role in the area’s culture—do people
in that place identify themselves with it in some way?
The
banana and the dates were grown in South Africa. South Africa claims peri peri, braais, and
umqombothi. South Africans own those
foods. They own them like they own their
feet or their hairstyles or their languages.
Those foods are inherently, unambiguously, South African. Peri peri in India has different spices and a
different name. There are no braais in Holland. Xhosa people are their own people in South
Africa as they were not in Tanzania, and umqombothi is theirs. In these ways—where they are grown and who
takes cultural ownership—these foods are of South Africa without necessarily
being from South Africa.
I’m
not sure how this works in the United States.
It’s harder for me to see my own culture, and to distinguish cultural
ownership. Easier to label a food as
locally grown—but even then, I’m still not certain where the local map ends.
So,
add that as a sub-problem: how do I define place and locality? How do we begin to talk about food and place?
But
we must, in order to begin to conquer our fear of food as union of our bodies,
our identities, our culture, with place.
This is an international squeamishness, but
perhaps it is most salient here in the United States, where hard, attractive
food grows in supermarkets like videogame Life Points: snatch it, hear a ding,
add to the Life bar at the top of your personal screen. We do not know where it is grown. Our cultural ownership of foods is mysterious
to us. We eat non-jiggling yogurt on our
way to work and frozen pizza at night.
In this way, food is rendered harmless.
In this way, we barricade ourselves from the sway and the seduction of a
place and a people. We can walk in the
woods and see no cottage and return to our lives unaltered. We can stay in
control. We can remain
untransformed.
In
this way, we do not risk our lives or our identities, and we remain
unruined. In this way, we aren’t lonely
but we aren’t fulfilled. We never meet
the Others. We die without the sensual
wisdom of place and without having found who we could be. And now we are sick with heart disease and
cancer and diabetes and general ill-being, we are disconnected, and we don’t
know how to fix it, from a scientific or cultural or spiritual or folkloric or
personal standpoint.
We
have made a food culture where we do not have to risk an accidental fairy
feast.
There
is, though, another way of reading the fairy tale. Lately, we have found that stripping food of
its place does not successfully strip it of its power and further we have found
that perhaps we really don’t want to strip food of its power. If we strip food of its power what is our
power, what is our identity, what is our pleasure, what is our connection, what
is any possibility of magic? We have
begun tentatively exploring, in farmer’s markets and in our kitchens, what food
could mean, again or anew. We are
wandering in the woods again and there is, for some of us, the possibility of
coming across a cottage that, if we say yes, could perhaps envelop us in
something we haven’t known in a long time.
We aren’t at the cottage yet, but its possibility is in our weariness
with fad diets, in our exploration of local foods, in our acknowledgement of
food as something more than sustenance/guilt.
The cottage’s possibility is in community gardens and small farms and in
ranchers we have met. It is in our
kitchens and our bellies and our classes and our talk.
Our
culture will accommodate the cottage if we make room.