I experiences a bit of a petulant moment on Saturday as I was out shopping, whinging to myself, quietly, under my breath, about why there was only one store in Knoxville I could count on for having Belgian endive in stock (or escarole for that matter). Both are vegetables that I would consume regularly, perhaps weekly, if they were widely available. But, as is usually always the case with these small annoyances in life, the situation is as much about ourselves as it is about the situation itself. Of course my formative adult years, ie. my formative cooking years, occurred in the Hudson Valley where both escarole and Belgian endive were indeed widely available in most grocery stores. It was a different time and place, with a different population, holding different expectations. It is on me, when moving, to realize that expectations and norms are different in different spaces. I should be grateful that I can find Belgian endive, and that the store in question is on my list of preferred stores (following last spring's spreadsheet comparison). I do in fact know where to go to get the things I want, and there are in fact probably many things in the store that are considered essential in this region, things that I never buy. In the end, it seems it is all about how one looks at the world, and how willing one is to adapt. And therefore I musk ask myself: Why whinge?
(chilled tomato soup with an endive and shiitake salad, a soup I've been making for over 20 years)
Of course I live in an age that celebrates the individual, which has not been the case for most of human history. I am not always convinced that this is the best course. Not that I don't believe that all people should be treated fairly and with dignity, but because I doubt that a society can successfully survive on individuality without developing a class of winners and a class of losers, or in fact whether even a person can live life solely based on his or her own desires without hurting others in the process, even inadvertently. Then I move on from there, thinking that we are not really living self-actualized individual lives at all. That each of us is a slave in one sense or another to this vision of society and culture, and that there is no way for some people to make it to the top without forcing other people to be on the bottom.
Oh dear, this is not at all where I thought I was going with post this morning. And yet here I am.
I realize the precariousness of my position because my life, and the very things I waste energy fretting over (endive?, landscapers?), where and how I live, are all a part of this same view of society that I am currently questioning, and I am unquestioningly not on the bottom of the heap. And so it seems I must hold my own good-fortune lightly, recognizing that were it all to disappear tomorrow, both the gain and the loss would be but a blip on the course of human history, and in fact should have nothing to do with the joy and purpose to be found in human life. Perhaps even my insistence on endive is a failure to adapt, an insistence that the past, my past, was somehow superior to the present, a dogged persistence in holding the ideals of the individual over all the rest.
Oh there is the rub. But how did I even get into this reflective state of mind? Blame it on books, because a lifetime of reading has shaped me, both fiction and non-fiction. Fiction makes us more empathetic, more human (and yes people have studied this); non-fiction forces us to think about the world in new ways. And the books I have just read, both non-fiction, have put me in a questioning mood. But to blame my own inclinations solely on books is also misleading -- there is truth there of course, but such a simplistic explanation is acceptable only to a fool. Of course books alone do not make the person, so do our environment and the people we encounter, both willingly and unwillingly, but books force us to perhaps look outside ourselves, to open ourselves up to greater encounters with others. Although l cannot blame books entirely for who I am and how I think, they play a role.
Perhaps this is why books are so often banned? Thinking truly can be subversive, the ability to look outside of one's self and one's circumstances revolutionary. Or madness...... Or adulthood. Who was it that said the difference between looking at the world as a child and as an adult is the ability to step outside of one's milieu and self and look upon the self as if an outsider? But that too is revolutionary because the path of self-actualization of seeing the self as it truly is also means letting go of the idea that the world can revolve around one's own needs. The life of self-gratification is the life of a child.
Admittedly one of the books I have been reading, Debt, by David Graeber has perhaps provoked some of my more radical questionings, but I do not think radical questioning of one's basic assumptions is such a bad thing. Debt, has, in fact, been one of the most intellectually stimulating, enjoyable, and thought-provoking books I have read in a long time. It is not so much an economics text as it is a study of the history of debt as in idea, both economic and moral or cultural, and Graeber is best when he looks at the historical and anthropological record and pulls big themes and ideas together. He gets a lot right, but he is also sometimes a little loose with the details. I am not convinced that is important here as the aim seems to be to provoke and challenge the reader to think and perhaps stand up on his or her own opinions. I certainly don't agree with everything, but I do agree with some of what Graeber says and he has made me think and reconsider many a treasured bias, which proves useful even if I return full-circle to my previous position, now more fully informed. I think it is a book everyone should read, but which most people won't read, as it is too full of philosophy, history, and just plain old challenging and upsetting ideas.
The other book is in many ways less challenging but still thought provoking. It is not so much a book about nutrition as a book about the way corporations and the drive to constantly increase corporate profits have reshaped the way we eat and even the way we think about and crave food. This is not necessarily to our benefit, or to the earth's although Moss doesn't go into that in detail. He does talk about how sugar specifically, and the combination of sugar, salt and fat are used to create desire, and to change the nature of what and how we eat, of the very way we experience and think about food, and this is sobering. And he discusses how a drive to increase corporate profits has lead to the way we eat today, across all fields, not just prepared food although that is increasingly the bulk of what we eat, but also dairy and even meat production. He doesn't really go into the implications, or the way the corporatization of food has altered the environment in ways that we, willing sheep that we appear to be, have allowed because we assume that this is the way things are and must be.
I suppose I am channelling a bit of Graeber here but also my own natural inclination to question everything even if I don't find answers right away. Graeber tells us that we aren't asking the right questions. Moss as well, although not as explicitly. He shows us a problem and leaves it up to us to decided if we want to ask those tough questions or not. As for me, as I stated I have long thought that our ability to question is one of our greatest strengths. I also tend to think there our choices are rarely binary. If we see the world as black or white, yes or no, this or that, or even this is the way it has always been and anything else is chaos...... then, I've long been with Graeber -- we are asking the wrong questions.
