Food

It is a strangeness. People have such different attitudes to the importance of food. Some forget that food is required, others plan their entire day around meals and rituals of food. There are some who have convinced themselves they do not eat meat and equally there exist folk who cannot abide the presence of green in their diet. An Australian tribe of food evangelists promote eating every second day and fasting every other day. There are people who limit their food by quantifying the energy quotient of every morsel and deride the people who consume ever increasing portions or intensities of food. For every normalcy there is an aberration and for every reasoned action there is an irrational belief. We can be certain there is no common attitude to food, no universal consumption and no norm of appetite.

There are communities where people do not have choices around food. Places where today’s meal is the same as it was yesterday, and places where yesterday’s meal and today’s meal were non-existent. Environments are endured where a mouthful of food is come by only after a massive effort. Where a meal must be caught, scavenged or found. And there are those bountiful landscapes where appetites are satiated from the abundance all around.

Food, its sourcing preparation and consumption are at our core and our relationship to food is fundamental to our environment, it reflects our standing in society. An abundance of food drives an obsession for food and an absence of food drives an equal obsession. 

That the fixation we have on food is survival based is undeniable, but the fixation is rarely survival dependent. The human frame will function for over eight weeks without food but it seizes and malfunctions in hours without fluid. There are those of the humanities who live off barren ground and who wander content, to the observer they seem uncommonly happy. For those of us dependant on a copious volume and ready availability of sustenance this is incomprehensible. For them who thrive on so little I wonder if we seem debauched, ungrateful and grotesque in our sumptuously fat-fleshed bodies.

In modern western life food idolatry has been raised to levels of presentation and nuance beyond the ability of the senses to absorb, flavour profiles are presented in ways so complex only the most genetically gifted could determine the subtlety of the dish. I wonder at the fixation we have developed for food. I wonder why celebrity is won from artistically searing a slaughtered protein or craftily chilling mammary excretions. There is the growing danger that the devoted will deify some proclaimed cook and the world will fight wars over taste sensations, textural preferences and methods of preparation.

Or perhaps that is what has already happened.