Food As Plaything - Haute Cuisine, Locally Sourced, Organic, And Gluten Free, America's Dietary Obsession

 America was always a meat-and-potatoes satisfying, nutritious meal.  Farmers and their families worked hard, and there was no room for frills, eccentricities, or special needs.  Food was fuel, sustenance, and the stuff of life nothing more. 

Farm families looked forward to the evening meal because he was hungry. They woke up early to feed the pigs and the chickens, milk the cows, and untether the goats, ate a hearty breakfast of ham and eggs, walked to school and back, tilled the fields, harvested, took care of babies and young children and by dinner time were as hungry as bears. 

No one ever asked what was for dinner, for it was always the same, varied only by the season, and was a function of what animal had been slaughtered, what vegetables were in the garden, and the size of the chicken brood. No one complained, for food was functional, a necessity, filling and sustaining. 

Times have changed and food for most, while a necessity, is also a plaything, a pastime, a hobby, an obsession.  Dinner is not simply to nourish but to please.  The color palette, the architecture, the fanciful mix of ingredients that suggest exotica, open the door to unique remoteness, that give off the scent of internationalism and sophisticated taste all represent America's new, prosperous, bourgeois culture. 

Millions of dollars are spent on food processors, Japanese steel cutlery, six-burner Viking stoves, sous-vide cookers, fine oak cutting boards, track lighting, center islands, French copper cookware, tinted rose and amber-colored glasses, perfectly weighted and balanced table settings, and much more. 

Trips to the grocery store have given way to three or four vendor locales - farmers markets, specialty butchers, fish mongers, bakeries and ethnic food stalls. 

Book shelves are stacked with recipe books and food travelogues.  Cut-out recipes from the New York Times, Food & Wine, and Gourmet are sorted and filed in alphabetical folders in kitchen drawers. Cell phones all have interactive food apps and social media are filled with food sites. 

In addition to this culinary revolution, a number of special dietary restrictions have emerged - waiters at restaurants routinely ask if we have any allergies or food restrictions he should know about.  Are we gluten or lactose intolerant? Vegan dishes are starred, low sodium and low-fat offerings are noted. 

Guests with any of these dietary restrictions will inform the hostess before hand to that she can prepare dinner accordingly.  When such prior notice has not been given, guests will often carefully separate offending items, the most polite of them in a way which suggests incompleteness rather than triage. 

 Locally grown products are preferred but the reasons are flimsy and illogical at best.  We live in a globalized market which has revolutionized the market - fresh fruits and vegetables any time of year, fish from the four corners of the globe - and 'local' is nothing more than imaginative whimsy.  Why fuss with Old MacDonald when the best, most well-tended, highest quality product may come from another continent?   

 

Nothing we buy whether peanut butter, ice cream, olive oil, salt or pasta is local; so why the flapdoodle about local produce?  It is an affectation, a political statement, a sign of good intentions but no more. 

Everything the food-aware American buys must be organic, when the cost is high and the benefits marginal.  The risks of cancer from a non-organic diet compared to an organic one are so low they are barely recorded.  While no one prefers a lettuce salad soaked in Monsanto, a good washing will take care of most of the offensive bits, and lifespan is barely affected by the rest. 

Americans are locked in a closed system where food has lost its basic function  and has become a part of the haute bourgeoisie obsession with ascribed value. 

Julia Child once said that the sign of a good cook was his roast chicken.  That is a simple product done to perfection; and while many households would never serve such a common, pedestrian, cheap food to guests, they have lost sight of inherent value and have turn to appearance, novelty, and fancy. 

The Paleolithic diet is a modern nutritional plan based on the presumed diet of Paleolithic humans. It is based on the premise that human genetics have scarcely changed since the dawn of agriculture, which marked the end of the Paleolithic era, around 15,000 years ago, and that modern humans are adapted to the diet of the Paleolithic period.

The Paleolithic diet consists mainly of fish, grass-fed pasture raised meats, eggs, vegetables, fruit, fungi, roots, and nuts, and excludes grains, legumes, dairy products, potatoes, refined salt, refined sugar, and processed oils. 

One of the hottest restaurants today is NOMA in Copenhagen.  The master chef is Rene Redzepi who forages for the ingredients that go into his five-star dishes. He gathers wild grasses, seaweed, leaves, periwinkles, nuts, and berries.  Although he does not bill his fare as Paleolithic for obvious reasons, he is a chef in that tradition.  He cooks his food, which is a big improvement on early the caveman, but he still has a profound belief that whatever grows can be eaten.

In Africa 'bush meat' - field rat, snake, monkey, lizard, or wild dog, whatever is available - is no different. Both cuisines are sensible, practical, and interesting without a lot of fol-de-rol. The Bushmen of South Africa eat hard-to-find grubs, not as a delicacy but particularly rich in fat and calories. Insects are eaten throughout the Third World.  In the bars and outdoor clubs in the quartiers of Kinshasa, dried, roasted, and salted caterpillars are eaten as snacks with beer. 

Going out of the way to recreate a subsistence diet, whether Paleolithic or African veldt, strip it down to its horny, tough, inedibility, and call it modern cuisine is an example of this fanciful obsession with food as plaything. 

Of course this idle obsession with food is for those with money. Those less fortunate are still eating cornpone, fatback, and greens, the occasional Big Mac and a Dairy Queen, candy and chips and bloating to obesity. Successive American governments have tried to encourage citizens to reform and return to healthier foods, but without success.  Cheap, processed high-sugar, high-salt foods are addictive. In a penurious two-job, low-paying trailer park existence, families have only the whammy of these immediately pleasing, endorphin-producing foods to look forward to. 

The Food Pyramid - that complicated, indecipherable image of a proper diet - was revised again and again to be more user friendly, but no one paid attention to it.  The current Secretary of Health is trying his best to wean poor Americans off their heart-stopping diets to no avail. 

So, it is only the upper middle classes who fuss with food and have turned it into this high-end plaything. Something fun to do on weekends, to share with friends.  A proper bougie meal not only shows off learned cooking skills, but shouts, 'I have been there!, to Thailand, China, India, the Azores, and Bali. Food is a sign of internationalism, progressivism, and broad thinking.  

'Toys 'R' Us' was the name of a popular toy store chain a few years ago.  'Foods 'R' Us' is the moniker, the meme, the essence of the American foodie, proud to show off his wares, his sophistication, his fancy, and his money. 

The Road To Wellness - Witch Doctors, Roots And Vines, Healing, And The American Dream

What one wants in America is a perfect fit - supply and demand - and Harlan Baker's operation was one of these beautifully consonant meshes.  He was a simple, uncomplicated man of limited intellectual resources but with a good social sense - an antenna for what works.  His clients were equally unencumbered by intelligence, insight, or ambition and wanted only the easy, naturally occurring safe haven of Harlan's garden.

Who wouldn't want to be treated by him, given his lite, lovely, unthreatened experience? At the very least is was an hour of happy times, at best it illuminated some of life's conundrums.  Nothing serious or mind-changing, but little helpful insights. 

'What a great country', Harlan said to his New York relatives who had come to visit; and indeed it was.  Here was a simple man who meandered here and there and then found his niche.  Along with the Zuckerbergs, Gates, Bezos, and Huangs, here are the little guys making a profit, keeping people happy and the cash register ringing.

Harlan Baker was a Wellness Counselor in Chillicothe, Ohio. He hung out his shingle after six months of training in Cleveland - a combination of bloodwort, 'psychology lite', and the art of healing. 

He had gotten into the profession in a roundabout way - a badly demented mother who had refused therapy and drugs and had gone completely 'round the bend when Harlan was a young teenager.  One day she put on lipstick and eyeliner, left the casserole in the oven, and disappeared, only to be found the next day in an Ace hardware parking lot on Route 7 as naked as a jaybird, singing the Kyrie Eleison. 

That and an obsessive-compulsive classmate who kept touching him and himself inappropriately, solving advanced quadratic equations, and dismissed for 'behavior unbecoming', a light sentence given the censorious tenor of the times. 

These two individuals clearly needed help when none was to be given.  Yes, there were psychiatrists but old-school, Freudian and Jungian throwbacks who had lost sight of wellness and dithered in dream theory and world consciousness.  They had few clients. The people of Chillicothe were hardy souls, independent minded people who had always sorted out their own problems; so Dr. Phipps got only those referred from Welfare Services and Family Assistance - people who if they didn't agree to psychiatric evaluation and counselling would appear before the court. 

Harlan was not much - an ordinary student, a diffident farmer, an impulsive teenager - but after he left Chillicothe Vocational School where he had learned something about drills and bits, he found himself, for no other reason than money, at his father's feed store as a stock and errand boy.  He set the rat traps, checked the dunnage, ran to the post office and the bank, and swept the floors - just about all that can be said from a rather slow, uninspiring boy with limited intentions. 

Yet even in the lesser among us, inspiration can come suddenly and unexpectedly.  'I will treat others', he said one day and made himself available at the Bright Beginnings Wellness Center, a 'clinic for all', a friendly, homey, unintimidating place of welcome and good faith.  Clients were treated as friends not patients, and given all the love and affection that they were missing in their personal lives.  

The Director of the Center, Barnaby Allen, thought of himself as a father or older brother.  Yes, he applied many of the precepts he had learned in training, a 'beautiful quilt' of ayurveda, the psychedelic mysteries of the Sonoran desert, the spiritual nature of Gaia and the environment, and the spiritual high of the Tantra. 

'Available' meant serving the master of the trade, an acolyte but more a sycophant in the service of a genius. However, Harlan did learn from Allen, rounded up money for the fees required at the Cleveland training college, went through his course, and found an associate position with Barnaby Allen and Bright Beginnings. 

Now, the whole affair was cockamamie nonsense - a potpourri of New Age psycho-drama, feelgood counselling, and a homemade brew of roots, tubers, vines, and leaves from the local flora.  It didn't take much to be accepted as a client, little in fees, and even less in commitment, but customers left their sessions feeling elevated and far more hopeful and positive than when they went in. 

Bright Beginnings' clientele was not a very demanding lot - idlers mostly, young adults without the brains or initiative to make anything of themselves - and so the counselling never had to probe very deeply into their psyches.  The clinic's clients were as shallow as can be, most without an original thought in their heads, and were only there because they drifted in. 

Eventually Harlan decided to go out on his own, attract a more troubled and needy clientele.  He wanted to help, to make a difference, and to make people well. After that the routine at Bright Beginnings would be just child's play. 

It took him a while to build up a following, but he became known for his patient, highly professional approach to psychological trauma.  He still prescribed his 'witches' brew' but applied for a license to dispense bloodwort, a mildly psychoactive natural substance that 'frees the spirit' and allowed the counselor to join the journey with the patient into the recesses of his past. 

This was by no means Freudian therapy - a harsh facing of facts - but a pleasant Child's Garden of Verses, mediated happiness. 

Armed with their bag of herbal cures, selections from Rumi and the Ascended Masters for reflection, and an appointment card for a return visit, clients spread the word, and before long Harlan had a going business. 

As has been noted, Harlan was no rocket scientist and 'treating people' was a pastime rather than a calling, but it now more than paid the rent and a down payment on a used Tesla. Life was good. 

Before judging Harlan too harshly, for his 'practice' was nothing more than voodoo, smoke, and mirrors and his clients only credulous, emotional wastrels, perhaps one should look at the state of America.  In such a chaotic, rootless, desperately inchoate place, who doesn't need a bit of love?

Places like Barbary Allen's Wellness Center and Harlan Baker's private practice are sprouting up everywhere.  What is needed more than Freudian psychoanalysis - fat in the fire, bringing up long forgotten, painful memories to add to the misery all around us - is a refuge, a comforting emotional home, away from bitching wives, ankle-biting children, pissy bosses, and bad pay.  Harlan loves his clients, treats them warmly, comfortingly, and kindly.  

Who cares if he cures them?  Most of them suffer from no more than living short, nasty, brutish lives like the rest of us. 

How A Very Unattractive Man Found His Political Niche - Beauty Has No Place In Doing Good

Henry Towson was ill-favored in the genetic luck of the draw.  The child of attractive parents, he came out with none of their distinguishing, notable features.  He was, for lack of a more generous and forgiving term, misshapen.  Nothing seemed to go where it belonged, so misaligned were his features and so exaggerated.  He had none of the classic facial symmetry which has characterized beautiful men and women and featured in the sculptures of Ancient Greece and Rome.  

 

His hair was untamed, a bit of the warlock, neither fully curly nor straight, but a nasty whorl.  His nose was long, but not aquiline, graceful, and Roman, but serrated and casting a long shadow.  His ears, while not exactly pendulous, were noticeable for their unusual size and oversized lobes. 

This was all bad enough in a world which prized beauty, but his parents were not just attractive, but Hollywood ready.  His mother in fact had modelled as a young woman, and his father chosen to represent his firm in their national brochure; so when they went out in public with their son, it was an embarrassment.  Of course they loved him and wished him well, and would give him all the social and financial advantages they had had, but still felt uncomfortable when friends and neighbors met them on the street, peered into the baby carriage, and could only manage a, 'Wow, what a baby', unable to gin up the usual fawning words. 

He soldiered his way through school, did his best to swallow the taunts and ridicule of his classmates, kept his head down and mind straight, but could not help but feel hurt and hopeless.  As he grew older, he watched his friends charm and win the most beautiful girls while they gave him little notice.  Many of these boys were as dumb and clueless as apes, but still were put in the front row, favored, privileged, and honored by teachers. 

There was something about physical beauty which prevailed and superseded any other more substantive characteristic or talent. 

The bias in favor of physically attractive people is robust, and has been proven again and again by researchers, most notably Pierce, Hendriks et al with attractive people being perceived as more sociable, happier and more successful than unattractive people   Attractiveness biases have been demonstrated in such different areas as teacher judgments of students, voter preferences for political candidates, and jury judgments in simulated trials 

Recently researchers at Harvard investigated the “beauty is goodness” stereotype in U.S. films and found that attractive characters were portrayed more favorably than unattractive characters on multiple dimensions across a random sample drawn from five decades of top grossing films.  

The authors also found that participants watching a biased film (level of beauty and gender stereotyping) subsequently showed greater favoritism toward an attractive graduate school candidate than participants watching a less biased film.  In the area of employment decision making, attractiveness also influences interviewers’ judgments of job applicants. 

Just as there are bell curves for intelligence, talent, and athletic ability; so is there one for beauty.  The marvelously beautiful and the pitifully ugly lie near the asymptotic ends of the curve, and are small percentages of the population. 

Unfortunately Henry Towson fell very close to asymptotic end of the curve.  He was definitely not grotesquely ugly or even moderately so, but no amount of finagling, fancy dress, or hours at the spa, could move him up and out from the awful penumbra of brutal unattractiveness. 

He was stuck with his his genetic legacy - attributed to Great Uncle Lawson who no matter what the pose, the lighting, his outfits, or attractive, modifying backdrops of his photographs came out as ugly as sin with the same lack of symmetry, misshapenness, and naturally glowering looks of his descendent. 

At some point, Henry decided to accept the bad hand he was dealt, and still find ways to win at life's poker table.

At his university, the protest movement was in full swing.  The progressive faction of the student body had their fingers in every social disorder.  They were at the barricades demonstrating for social justice just like their parents and grandparents had been in the Sixties.  They were outraged, angry, and full of hatred for the oppressive, racist powers that be.  The world was a viperous nest of malignity - a population which dismissed the coming climate catastrophe, which consigned the black man to perpetual dysfunction, which marginalized the gay man, lesbian and transgender, and which demanded closed borders to keep out deserving asylees. 

Curiously and surprisingly, Henry found that the most radical student organizations were represented by men and women like him - sorrowfully unattractive - and yet there was something heady and happy about the gatherings, the marches, and the protests.  Ugliness disappeared in an atmosphere of joyful purpose.  Young men and women hugged and kissed, embraced with love and unity, sang songs of protest but with love and emotional power.  

When they returned home from Washington and the National Mall, they reverted to form -  dowdy, disheveled, and brutally ugly.  The meandered through the days, an undesirable breed apart, and only when it was time to show their reformist colors were they transformed into happy couples.

They were dismissed and marginalized by the elite of the university - those attractive, desirable, privileged classmates with classically handsome and beautiful looks; the young men and women who, observed by the researchers from Harvard and Duke, would always be the first to be chosen, feted, honored, and obeyed.  To these Adonises, members of Harry's group were little more than apes in the monkey house. 

Not only were they insignificant and irrelevant, they were so ugly they were avoided, shunned, and disregarded.  As a result they banded together even more, and became a cluster of unattractiveness. 

None of this mattered to Harry who like everyone else, wanted to feel at home someplace; and this progressive cabal was just it.  So generously inclusive was it that he forgot his misfortune, and felt accepted, happy, and positive. 

He had been so convinced of the rightness of the political causes espoused at the university, that he continued on this path of social justice after graduation.  Not only would he still be a member of a particular, if peculiar social group, he would be working for social betterment. 

In the progressive movement both ideas merged.  Not only were the objectives of social reform existentially important, but that beauty was a symbol of the settled, ignorant, idle bourgeois class. Those classmates who had summered on Nantucket and wintered in Gstaad, those blond airheads of inherited wealth and privilege were the faces of the enemy.  Ugliness was a symbol of commitment, political honor, and righteous belief. 

The life of a progressive was the mirror image of the Mount Olympus of physical beauty.  Unattractiveness was the ticket to political and social success, but just the opposite of that of the rich, talented, and beautiful.  Henry's life was to be one of significance, not airy indifference. 

And so it was that he made his way with what he had - or more properly exploited his physical misfortune like a savvy miner.  He found the seam of gold in a society of black coal...Or so it was that he thought of himself. 

He made his way up through the progressive ranks, being more and more recognized as a liberal's liberal, undaunted and outspoken on every social issue, eloquent, persuasive, and insistent.  So much so that his audiences forgot his miasmic ugliness and only listened to his words. 

He had found his home.  He married a girl from the movement, and unlike his parents who had produced a physical outlier, they produced one of their kind, a 'Wow, what a baby' boy who if he was lucky would follow the same anointed trajectory of his parents.