Eating Yourself Well
practice pleasure, cultivate health
As I continue digesting my recent Italian trip (see Pilgrimage to the Holy Navel), I keep reflecting on themes of nourishment. It's not so much that I'm still savoring the trip (though I do my best--and the wheels of pecorino we brought home are helping). Rather, it's the contrast between here and there that's stirring the pot: the jolt of re-immersion in a land where nourishment is surprisingly scarce.
People assume that nutrition, or what Audre Lorde called "breadconcern," is a non-issue in places like the US, or at any rate a problem that's been solved in middle-class communities. Obviously, I disagree.
I remember driving through the corn belt one summer years ago: endless acres of corn and soybeans, commodity crops destined for food processing plants or feed silos. Not an especially appetizing landscape, but eventually you get hungry, and somewhere in Western Iowa I stopped to get a bite to eat. Wanting to avoid chains and fast food, I wound up at a family diner.
It featured local food, in the sense that most everything on the menu was made from those soybeans, that corn. High fructose corn syrup. Corn-fed chicken and beef. Soybean oil in the deep fryers. Looking around the place--I remember clearly though it must have been a decade ago--everyone looked unwell. They were big and sort of puffy, like slightly deflated balloons, and they were distinctly grey colored. That's what I remember most vividly, that ashen complexion in the faces of these rural people. Seeing that was saddening and frightening, too. There was a warning to be found in that scene, and it had to do with sowing and reaping: a sense that these people, sick or starting to sicken, were the fruits of their own agriculture. I don't think I managed to eat much.
It's a tragically common story in these United States: people getting plenty of calories yet being far from nourished. People who may even be starving at a deep level, an urgent feeling which sends them back for more food, which turns out to be empty, and so it continues, around and around, bodies ballooning and withering at the same time. A nation of hungry ghosts.
It starts with the soil. Diets are empty because the soils are empty, with extractive agriculture wringing every gram of productivity from the land, finally depleting even that rich, deep midwestern soil of its minerals and microbial life; insect populations plummeting as the critters are fumigated with ever-cleverer insecticides.
Or it starts with the mind. Our agriculture only ever a projection of our ideas, our values, our collective imagination, or lack thereof.
Either way, it comes back to culture: the kind why practice, the kind that practices us. There’s an alternative to sterile, mono, shallow-rooted (agri)culture.
In contrast to that Iowa diner, in provincial Italy the people looked generally healthy: well-shaped, animated, bright-eyed. Their health is expressed in personality, in lively conversation--in short, in conviviality. Naturally, the focal point of that conviviality is the table. Everyday people there make time to eat, and eat well. You might say they 'eat themselves well.'
An anecdote about an American archeologist leading a team of Italians on a dig. Every day the team would go off for at least two hours for lunch. Beginning to despair of ever getting anything done, the American asked if the crew couldn't bring their lunch to the work site instead. "Of course, of course," the team agreed--very reasonable. The next day they showed up with folding tables and chairs, tablecloths, multiple dishes, wine included. And proceeded to eat a two hour lunch.
Italy, of course, is not renowned for its work ethic. But its eating ethic, ah, that's something to celebrate: a culture in which anything eating-adjacent is sacrosanct.
What, after all, are we working for, if not to be able to enjoy life? If we rush through weekday meals, we may find we've lost the knack of conviviality come the weekend.
In Italia, eating well is a habit, a practice. Italian food is famous not because of any secret recipes (though there must be plenty), but because its people care enough to make time every day to eat well. Iterate that over countless generations, and what you get is a robustly healthy food culture, or more accurately a network of micro cultures, differing everywhere in its details yet unified by an overarching ethic of passion and its offspring, attention.
It's a culture in which everyone knows what wild mushrooms are in season and where to find them, or at least who to ask; which town grows the best lentils and which the best artichokes; what proportion of hog jowl to tomato is needed for a proper amatriciana.
If Italians can seem almost fanatical about eating, they're twice as fanatical about digestion. Meals must not be rushed. (Coffee is an exception, being by nature a quick ritual, but even so it's always served in porcelain, never in a to-go cup. Style counts big time.) No cheese with seafood (though this may be more about not masking the pure taste of the sea). Milk is to be drunk only before lunchtime, never after a big meal (which is why foreigners who order a cappuccino after dinner get funny looks). After a meal is the time for an amaro, a bitter liqueur (I plan to post at some point on the variety of amari we encountered, including a memorable, emerald green one made from fresh bay laurel leaves). Just don't get that confused with an aperitivo, which is for opening the appetite before the meal starts.
If it sounds complex, it kind of is. Italian food culture is both science and art. And not an elitist art; people across social classes, regions and backgrounds are all equally passionate about food. Every meal, after all, is an opportunity for a pleasurable infusion of health.
--Wait, was that 'pleasure' and 'health' in the same sentence? "Impossible!" exclaims the puritan lurking deep in the white psyche. His braying voice says indulgence is sinful: we must suffer for our health! He cries that food should be simplified, stripped down, dispensed with as little joy as possible. (The same goes for sex, lord knows.)
The so-called French paradox is enough to put the lie to this Puritanical line. The French, famously, eat extremely rich food yet have low rates of heart disease. Their secret? In part, anyway, it's the red wine. A case of two wrongs making a right? Not if neither thing was wrong to begin with.
Food culture in the States has grown a huge amount in recent decades, of course: there's more diversity available, more awareness, more simple attention to food than there used to be, even in out-of-the-way corners of the country These are all good things, even if they're countered by other, less salubrious trends. Despite the net positive change, though, "health food" is still weirdly considered a separate category from plain old good food.
I always cringe when someone suggests a health food or natural foods restaurant. Not because I'm opposed to natural foods; all food should be natural, otherwise it's not really food. I cringe because these places typically make eating into a chore, stripping all the fat and flavor out of the equation and imposing a strange, top-down set of ideas that always seem to come back to seitan and a squirt bottle of liquid aminos (I'm sorry, were you looking for soy sauce?). For the record, I prefer my hippies with hip flasks and a healthy love of bacon.
I’m comforted to know there's organized resistance to this miserable, misguided conception of healthy food. The redoubtable butter-pushers at the Weston A Price Foundation, for instance, have inspired a reevaluation of the nutritional benefits of the defiantly fatty, flavorful foods your great-grandparents probably appreciated, wherever on earth they lived. It's nice when science proves what people have known forever (and forgotten only recently)—cows are indeed more trustworthy than chemists when it comes to what to spread on your toast.
Unfortunately, science has a way of proving what the funders of a given study set out to prove. For the kind of day-to-day decisions that do actually constitute one's life, I place my trust in the gloriously subjective laboratory of the human body. The nose and tongue are pretty great instruments for detecting health-giving vitality in foods: we call them “flavor” and “aroma.” These are mysteries science has yet to decode. Anyway, any six year old could have told the guys in the lab coats that butter was the good stuff and margarine a mistake.
Nourishment may be a privilege; it's also a practice. Making bread, like making love, we’re always starting over, again and again.1 What nourishment shouldn’t be is a chore, nor is it something we need to overthink or fret about. Seeking out flavor and pleasure in food is healthy. Enjoy it. The dig can wait.
If you need further permission, consider: in these times, slowing down to enjoy a meal is a radical act.2
Buon appetito, amici.
“Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; re-made all the time, made new.” -Ursula K Le Guin
Cf. Bayo Akomolafe, paraphrasing a Yoruba elder who told him “the times are urgent—we must slow down.”