Afternoon tea: beautiful and not evil |
You might have noticed, dearest reader, that we have been
unusually quiet of late. There are reasons for this – a small diplomatic
incident that has led to my Darling Julian being dispatched to the Far East for
an extended period of negotiations and to myself being confined to the Shire
for a restoring lease. Rest assured, we have neither forgotten nor neglected
our responsibilities, and we will return in the full bloom of our glory soon.
In the meantime, I wanted to share An Event from the Bank
Holiday weekend with you.
‘Goodness!’ my friend exclaimed, addressing herself to a
particularly succulent Torta Caprese.
‘You are evil.’
I looked at the cake. It looked at me. Strange, I thought. I
never realised a cake could be evil. Maybe I was wrong though? Maybe this cake
had committed acts of genocide? Had stolen from orphans? Had knowingly and
maliciously harmed others for its own twisted ends? Or perhaps it had done
something truly unforgivable, like use a soup spoon to eat dessert, or poured
port without offering a glass to its dearest Aunty?
No. I didn’t really think that either.
And it got me thinking. My friend was adamant – anything
pleasant she ate that weekend was evil. It had a moral value – and that value was bad.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I do believe that there are huge moral issues around food – how we produce it,
how we eat it, how we waste it, how we consume without consideration… but the
actual food itself? No. I don’t
believe for one second that it has a moral value.
I think that what my friend was saying was that this food had the potential to
make her fat, that being fat was evil, and as such the food itself was evil. Not
the person consuming the food. The food itself.
I would take issue with the idea that being fat is evil (but
then, I have a vested interest in that point of view). I can appreciate that
from the point of view of Christian morality, being generously proportioned is
the tangible and visible result of indulging in the deadly sin of Sloth. But I
do not think this was what my friend was saying. For a right-on Buddhist,
pagan, Earth-mother type of woman, I think my friend was buying into the media
myth that beauty equates to morality, and that thinness equates to beauty. But
this is beside the point.
Torta caprese: not beautiful, but delicious - and still not evil |
To ascribe moral values to food is to seem to escape the weight of our choices and
responsibilities about food. It is to ignore the role we play in how we produce food, how we buy, store
and waste food. It negates the
importance of how we prepare, serve, and consume our meals. It removes the
responsibilities we can face up to with every forkful of food we put in our mouths.
And yes, that is a huge responsibility, and a huge burden. And
no, I am no saint by any means. If I look in my pantry now, there is a bundle
of asparagus that was flown over from some remote province of South America,
and which is so old I am at a loss at how to use it and not let it get wasted. I
over-consume. I eat mindlessly on occasion. I am driven by my hungers and care
more for experience than I do the world. But I know that these failings are
mine – all mine. They aren’t due to a moral attribute within the food.
Goodness, my dears, anyone who knows me in the non-digital world will confirm
that I respond in the same way to all my hungers – I am hardly a creature of
moderation.
And
that’s the point, isn’t it? I am more comfortable in knowing that I am a vile
example of a decadent and wasteful society than I am in calling an innocent
cake ‘evil’. And if that leaves me free to enjoy a delicious mouthful of dense,
moist, almond-and-chocolaty joy? Well, so much the better.
Oh, testify! I've long thought that the sheer volume of discourse over the intrinsic value of any given food (when that value seems to be measured by how fat it will make you), that serious issues around food security and ethical food industry practises are dwarfed. I've heard it said that never in history has there been a time when we were more obsessed with our own health, and never in history have we, on the whole, have been less healthy. Now, that's completely debateable, of course, but there's a grain of truth in it.
ReplyDeleteTL;DR - Food is a celebration!