Blonart2.pap -
Foodearth200calendar01pap
200. Rozin, P. (2001). Food and earth. (Introductory essay for Food and Earth Calendar, Brussels, Belgium: Blonde).
FOOD AND EARTH
Introduction to accompany the FOOD AND EARTH calendar
for Frans Blonde (editor/publisher)
Earth and the ambivalence of eating
Paul Rozin
University of Pennsylvania
Eating is an activity full of conflict and contradictions. One of the great ironies of food and eating is that the act of eating entails the destruction of life, in order to sustain another life. When we come to food and earth, we face another contradiction. The earth nurtures our foods, provides a vital home for the plants we eat, and the plants eaten by the animals we eat. Earth is the essence of life. But just as from earth we come (good) and to earth we return (bad), the earth, the essence of nature and nurturance that brings us our food, is at the same time the thing that spoils our food. When Earth is in the ground it is “mother” earth. But when earth is on the plate or in the food, it is, as Mary Douglas would say, “matter out of place.” Earth becomes dirt, and the mother of our food becomes its contaminant.
The dirt we see or think we see on the skin of a potato is polluting; an unwashed carrot is contaminating; dirt on a dish is disturbing, and soil on spinach is suspect; the spinach is soiled. Even the word, “soiled,” comes from soil and means spoiled!
The course of food, from beginning to end, is from earth to earth, with our body in between. We are our foods, and both are cycling back and forth to earth. Earth is beautiful and earth is bad. The gardener, growing the food, puts her hand in the earth and feels at one with nature. But the same earth, later in the cycle, is an intrusion of nature into our refined culture.
We cannot shake our rooting in the earth. We have picnics on the earth. The chinese bury eggs in the earth, the Indians build their tandoor oven submerged in the earth, the pit barbecue sinks into the earth. And yet the color of the earth, the rich brown, is something we generally shun when we eat. Most people prefer white to brown rice, white to brown eggs, the peeled to the full potato, the white to the whole wheat bread. It is interesting that there is now a return to the earth among some affluent Westerners, in the adoption of organic foods. There is an emerging preference for brown bread and rice, and the earthy brown of the organic vegetables. But these are the few, perhaps the vanguard of the future. For most, the white is pure, the brown is soiled. Most feel better about food buried in snow or sand than about food buried in earth. And if we do the latter, most are careful to insulate the food from the earth; to let it comfort in the earth, but not be touched by it. The walls of the tandoor separates the nan and the meat and fish from the earth. And yet, in cooking, we create again the color of the earth; meat shifts from red to brown on the fire, and potatoes and onions, whitened by our purposeful peeling, are browned again in the pan...and taste much the better for it. Brown is the color of earth. And also the color of some of the most favored drinks in the world, coffee and tea, and that most delectable of human food productions, chocolate. Yet brown is so often a bad color for food, a sign of dirt, a sign of spoilage. Therefore, the color of earth, like the earth itself, is laden with conflict and ambivalence.
One of the things we learn about food and earth is the ambivalence of foods and eating. Animals are further from earth than plants....they ultimately eat the plants that grow in the earth. But this greater distance does not protects them. Meat is the peak of ambivalence among human foods; it is delicious, full of taste, highly nutritious and the most nutritionally complete food. But the realization that we destroying life is most obvious when we eat animals. Their likeness to us may suggest our eating ourselves. There are many moral vegetarians, but no moral “meatatarians.”
We are ambivalent about both food and about eating. Eating is part of our animal nature, a pressing and frequent need that calls us every day, and numbers of times each day. In this respect, it differs little from toilet functions. But what a difference we have created. We, and here I mean almost all humans, do our toilet in seclusion, but we rarely eat that way. Eating is a social activity. Indeed, it is a center of social life, a communal celebration built around our satisfying one of our animal functions. Our others, excretion and sex in particular, are sheltered from the public (or most of the public). Our most pressing vital function, breathing, is done steadily and without note. But eating is a marked occasion, so much more than breath, so much more than a clandestine trip to the toilet.
As Leon Kass (The Hungry Soul) has aptly described it, in civilized eating, we celebrate our refinement with the performance of an animal act; where can we experience more contradiction? Our civilized sensitivities incline us toward protecting and hiding our animal activities, as we do so well at toilet. But in eating, we cut our food delicately, take small pieces, use implements, keep the eating area clean, all in contrast to the eating style of our animal brethren. The napkin...what a non-animal idea. The eating from one’s own plate! The restraint we manifest at not taking a favored morsel from another’s plate. And most remarkably, as Kass notes, we sit opposite one another, looking at each other’s faces and mouths as we stuff the food in and process it in our mouths. We socialize and converse simultaneously, using the very same mouth, behind whose lips is moistened, unsavory mass of chewed food. It is indeed a feat of great and unheralded virtuosity that we can fuel ourselves without offending our eating partner, a person who is virtually staring down our mouth, yet so easily offended if he can see in. As Kass notes, the basic rule of civilized eating is “No participation in someone else’s digestion.” We are not to see the food in our companion’s mouths, as they place it in there and chew it while looking at us. We are not supposed to even see the inside of their mouth. And we do it, as Kass would note, as a celebration of how high we have risen above the animals.
So, the relation of earth to food is emblematic of our complex, love-hate relation to food and eating. And now, in the 21st century, when food is plentiful in the first world, when with our computers and cars and books we have forged a greater gap between us and the animals than had ever existed before, we now feel the urge to return to the earth, to eat the earthy foods, to celebrate nature and the earth that gives rise to our sustenance. We have come 360 degrees, and we are more inclined than we have been in centuries to celebrate the earth as the source of our food, to pluck our food from the earth and eat it promptly, to favor the brown over the white.
Our ambivalence to earth is clear in the food domain, but not only there. How many people in the world live in earthen homes, on earthen floors? The earthen brick is one of the foundations of civilization. Humans have for milennia baked the earthen bricks as they have baked their food. And yet, for many, to clean the house is to rid it of dirt, that is, to a large extent, earth. We sweep away the dust of earth as we use it to build the walls that shelter us.
Just as the virtuosity of our eating and talking at the same time goes unnoticed, so do the conflicts I have written about. We go seamlessly through life without reflecting much on our mortality, the ambivalence of eating, of earth, of humans as worshippers and destroyers of nature. There is much business to be done in living, and that includes eating. So this essay is meant to raise our consciousness, but then put these very concerns and contradictions to rest, as we wend our way through life, chomping away on a leg of lamb.