Ok- so I have recently finished Alice Waters and Chez Panisse; The Romantic, Impractical, Often Eccentric, Ultimately Brilliant Making of a Food Revolution by Thomas McNamee. The book was quite the fuel for my fire in so many ways. Not only is food our physical sustenance, it is a part of our spiritual sustenance as well. We take part of the world into us, and it creates us. We share this part of nature with each other, and share our work at its production. The process gives us a better understanding of needs being met.
I loved this book because of Waters' recognition of our holistic relationship with food. It is life. This life is the life we crave.
“...Alice expressed the Pagnolian dream that sustained her: ‘an ideal reality where life and work were inseparable and the daily pace left you time for the afternoon anisette or the restorative game of petanque, and where eating together nourished the spirit as well as the body- since the food was raised, harvested, hunted fished and gathered by people sustaining and sustained by each other and by the earth itself’ (215).
How un-American. How gorgeous!
This idea comes to be known as The Delicious Revolution. An all encompassing, conscious view of our place in the world.
“It’s important to encourage all the other values that are beyond nourishment and sustainability and the basic things. Beauty. When you set a table, you know, take time to do that- teaching the pleasure of work- that’s probably one of the most important lessons. It’s also about diversity. It’s about replenishing. It’s about concentration. It’s about sensuality. It’s about purity. It’s about love. It’s about compassion. It’s about sharing. how many things? All those, just in the experience of eating, if you decide you’re going to eat in a very specific way. It changes your life, and it changes the world around you.
This is the first generation of kids who haven’t been asked to come to the table. And we’re seeing the results. They’re out there not knowing where they are. They’re wandering around, disconnected. Shockingly so. And when they’re not being sensually nourished, nothing’s coming in except the McDonald’s information. Fast food not only comes with poisons inside the food and destruction of the environment, but with values that are part of it. It says food isn’t important. It’s cheap, you eat it fast, and you don’t have to eat with your kids. Food is for entertainment, and it should be all the same. It’s okay to drink Coke and eat hamburgers every day of the year. Things that aren’t advertised lose value. Only things that are advertised are really what’s important” (260).
Alice Waters changed the way we eat. She changed the world. She says, “Think. We need to know where our food comes from. We need to know how to feed ourselves, and we need to know how to communicate with each other. Because we all live here together. Three- quarters of the kids in this country don’t have one meal a week with their family. That’s a breakdown in our whole culture. How do we pass on our information, our values, to our children? Around the table!” (259).
No comments:
Post a Comment