Food: Eating Us Alive

The older I get, the less I care about eating. What a hassle! Consider the hours we waste every year feeding these fragile shells we call our bodies. It's endless! You drive to the grocery store, you shop, you drive home, you store the food. You prepare the food. You destroy the kitchen. You eat the food.  You may or may not enjoy it. You clean the kitchen. You load the dishwasher. You unload the dishwasher.

Then you repeat the vicious cycle for lunch. And dinner.

It's maddening. We're enslaved to these bodies. I'm powerless to decide when it needs fuel. It's yet another daily obligation, one of those things you have no choice but to continue, like breathing or feeding the cats. I consider the requirement to eat a design flaw in what is otherwise a pretty well-designed organism. Human carnivores, vegetarians, and omnivores can each be found daily masticating mouthfuls of morsels in many manifestations dutifully with a profound absence of any joy whatsoever. Oh, the moribund, monotonous misery.

Then there is the food industry itself. The endless rows of corn, precariously growing in fields around the world, waiting to be consumed by locusts, or destroyed by rampaging children armed with monster trucks. Tomatoes pleading for water, fertilizer, insecticides, fungicides, and all the other accoutrements required on modern farms. The mammoth, hulking harvesters trudging back and forth across the fields to collect the fruits and vegetables of our forced labor. The millions of cattle filling the air with methane, being raised from birth for no other purpose than to be murdered, cut to bits, warmed on stoves or in ovens that must also be mass-produced, only to end up gnawed on by carnivorous consumers and recycled into Milorganite and subsequently fed to vegetables. What was once about sustaining life has been transformed into the foundation of our economy.

It's unforgivable that modern science hasn't made any attempt to free us from this drudgery. As a child, I considered it a scientific promise that by now we'd have a little magic cabinet that automatically summoned food from thin air, just like the Jetsons did. Instead, science has shown a remarkable lack of imagination on the issue, instead focusing on streamlining the status quo, beyond the obvious "advances" like breeding busty chickens, developing plants which produce no viable seeds, and the creation of mysterious powders that make corn chips taste like pizza or ranch dressing.

When a feasible food alternative becomes available, dear readers, I'll be the first in line to try it. Sure, I'll treat myself from time to time with a strip of bacon or a slice of cheesecake, but generally speaking, I'll kick my obligation to food to the curb and get on with my life. Which, by the way, will be more fulfilling because I will spend less time shoving food into my mouth and with all the drudgery that accompanies the task. Please, modern science, develop a pill, a paste, a beverage, anything that simplifies the process of feeding our bodies, and that will reduce the need for all the ancillary baggage that accompanies the act. Set us free!

I wasn't always this way. Once upon a time I looked forward to meals. I'd anxiously wonder what was for dinner. I'd rejoice in finding new dives for lunches capable of turning a cheeseburger into a culinary celebration. I sampled the cuisine of distant cultures with interest and excitement. I thumped melons, smelled tomatoes, gorged myself on green grapes, and delighted in the discovery of new recipes for dishes to prepare. A new restaurant opening in town meant possibilities, not reservations.

But then, fate intervened. As a young man, having no measurable skills with which to earn a living, I decided it would be sensible to learn a trade. I wanted to be sure I always had some skill to fall back on if life took a turn for the surreal and I wasn't discovered by a talent scout or made the "Man Friday" of a wealthy financier. Learning to cook seemed a safe bet, because even as a fragile lad of seventeen I was aware that people were unlikely to find a way to free themselves from the cruel bondage of eating. So, I took a job as a cook, which led to a job working for a catering company, the owner of which paid for cooking school, which led to a job as an assistant kitchen manager. Before I knew it, my little employment insurance policy to prevent my eventual starvation was consuming me one day at a time. I was a cook. Which was fine. Being a professional cook can be a rewarding and prosperous career for some people.

But for me, serving hundreds of meals a day did tend to bake any tiny fragment of joy out of food. I'm sorry, but for me it wasn't love at first bite. In short, within a few years I had prepared the equivalent of a lifetime of meals, and still had a lifetime of meals to prepare for myself. So I turned my back on the culinary arts as a career path. Besides, I'd never meant to make a life of it.

But food is never far away. In addition to the physiological demands, we're culturally obsessed with eating. Cookbooks, magazines, classes, clubs, kitchen gadgets, even, to my ultimate horror, not one but two television networks dedicated to nothing but food. This is, in my opinion, a possible sign of the impending apocalypse. We've gone beyond watching cooking shows for instruction, and crossed some kind of invisible line where we are actually entertained by watching others cook. There is a simple explanation for this cultural phenomenon:

We are insane. And gluttonous.

Possibly the worst side effect of this cultural insanity is the creation of the "celebrity chef," people who have gained fame simply by virtue of preparing food on television. I'm not talking about Julia Child here, people. No, I'm talking about rank amateurs promoted to the status of icons because they can sauté vegetables and babble incoherently. Case in point: Rachael Ray.

Rachael Ray is everywhere. She's the poster child for everything that is conceptually wrong with a cooking channel. She has two cooking shows. She has a talk show. She's on my Wheat Thins box with photoshopped eyes every Christmas season. She's posed for racy, digitally altered photos in FHM suggestively sucking a strawberry and licking chocolate sauce from a spoon. People...she endorsed an album of Christmas music! How does the ability to boil pasta qualify you to make Christmas music selections? She is worth $60 million. Why? It cannot be rationally explained. I suspect her profoundly annoying habit of using the abbreviation "E.V.O.O.," followed immediately by an explanation that she's referring to "Extra-Virgin Olive Oil," is actually some kind of fiendish mind control trigger designed by a government agency to hypnotize the masses. Perhaps the arrangement is more Faustian than that. Maybe she met the Devil at the crossroads at midnight and he handed her a spatula.

Her show largely consists of collecting whatever random ingredients she can gather from her kitchen and combining them like a witch dumping mysterious components for a potion into a boiling cauldron. She's got thousands of recipes for goulash which can be completed in less than a half an hour. It's sinister and suspicious. Once, I actually saw her make hot dogs on her show. Hot dogs! Do we really need schnitzel suggestions, people? She, like the rest of her network cronies, always takes a moment to sample her creations at the end of her show, making the obligatory "Mmmm!" sound after every bite, as if this somehow verifies the concoction is not only edible, but delightful. Eventually, if you subject your taste buds to enough abuse, they'll accept anything. Someone once told me they enjoyed Rachael because she cooks like their mother does. Do we really need a show to teach us to cook like our mothers do? That's what your mother is for, people! Rachael Ray is a threat to national security and should be immediately placed into solitary confinement until we manage to regain our collective senses.

For centuries, basic recipes passed from mother to daughter sustained us as a species. It was a simple matter to assess which ingredients were available to us and combine them into edible, life-sustaining meals without televised guidance. The "Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook" was the source of enough inspiration to keep us eating. All of this food-based fanaticism is little more than an attempt to convince us this daily digestive drudgery is actually a pleasure rather than our being held captive by our own metabolisms and a cautionary tale about the potential pitfalls of capitalism. A cage, no matter how gloriously gilded, is still a prison. A meal is just a meal. It doesn't have to be a transformative experience to sustain life.

This food obsession has long since gone beyond the realm of good taste. It's ostentatious. It's indulgent. It's gluttonous. It's mass consumerism at its hungriest. It has been said that in America, even the most poverty-stricken citizens can be overweight. I haven't researched the subject, but I'm willing to go out on a limb and assert that the Food Network is not included in the basic tier of the Cambodian cable TV package. There are still people in the world not obsessed with how to prepare and combine things to eat, but with merely having enough to eat to live through another day. A third of the world is starving. The W.H.O. estimates that 15 million children alone die worldwide every year from hunger while we're watching people cook hot dogs on TV.

We're gloating. It isn't seemly. It's in decidedly poor taste.

Then again, I could be wrong.