Learning to Love Turnips

I have been reading food books and blogs for quite a while now- and it just now struck me as fairly absurd to write about a sensual experience. I guess that is what my friend Anne Lane calls food 'porn'. Just what are we searching for in our new found fascination with food? Why is an entire section at the bookstore now devoted to our life with food? (Don't get me wrong- you know I love it.) I go back and forth between optimism (we now value authenticity over convenience) and horror (the cereal I bought today promised me 'inner harmony'- I just wanted the ginger and cranberries.)

Anyway, I found part of the answer in Terri Gross' interview with David Chase (the man behind 'the Sopranos'). She asked why he thought so many people were fascinated by the mafia, and he speculated that it might have to do with our desire for a tribe. In some way, local food has brought back a sense of tribal life. Our food comes from a real place, and was cared for by a real person. We celebrate our relationship to the seasons and to sharing food again. Our cooking rites bring connection, between ourselves and those we feed, as well as between the natural world and our bodies. Finding this intimacy is helping us to find our tribe. Choosing what and how we eat impacts the world in a greater manner than we could ever imagine. As Gary Paul Nabhan says, in his gorgeous book, 'Coming Home to Eat':

“The real bottleneck to the revival of native, locally grown foods is a cultural- or more precisely, a spiritual- dilemma. If we no longer believe that the earth is sacred, or that we are blessed by the bounty around us, or that we have a caretaking responsibility given to us by the Creator- Yahweh, Earth Maker, Gaia, Tata Dios, Cave Bear, Raven or whatever you care to call him or her- then it does not really matter to most folks how much ecological and cultural damage is done by the way we eat. It does not matter whether we ever participate in the butchering of our meat, the harvesting and grinding of our grain, the foraging and drying of our herbs. Until we stop craving to be somewhere else and someone else than animals whose very cells are constituted from the place on earth we love most, then there is little reason to care about the fate of native foods, family farms or healthy landscapes and communities” (304).

Okay- go and eat your greens!