The Omnivorous Fish

I went to elementary school with a girl named Jamie Moran. I can’t remember what year it is or anyone’s birthday, but I remember her vividly, because she was absolutely convinced- and endeavored to convince me- that eggs were made of milk. This was not an attempt at irony, or some confusion with a Cadbury product, she believed, and may still, that eggs are made of milk.

For real.

Thinking back on it now, it doesn’t really come as a surprise to me. Americans have no idea where the food they eat comes from. I’m not talking about farm kids here; I’m talking about the majority of people in this country who live in the suburbs and are walking type-two-diabetes-time-bombs. This is not by accident, agribusiness has added this element of opacity to food production for a reason. I’m quite certain that they don’t believe people want their animals treated inhumanely, want their meat stuffed full of rBGH and antibiotics, want their food supply endangered by biologically modified plants or want every independent farmer in America driven off of their land. There is a chance that some of these things might bother people.

I can’t help but wonder if this distance from something so elemental to us as humans hasn’t contributed to the distance that’s between us and one another. Stay with me here. I don’t think people respect cooking as a social institution anymore. I’m not talking about going out to dinner in a restaurant, that’s not- by definition- cooking. That’s not making something for the people in your life. I once said to a friend that I was only capable of two emotions: rage and cooking. Perhaps that’s slightly overstated, but in a sense, cooking is, or at least was, a mode of affection. I can understand why people may have lost interest in cooking. As our attention to celebrity chefs and food porn has grown, the ingredients this mania espouses have become more expensive and largely lowered in quality. Maybe you can find heirloom tomatoes on supermarket shelves, but if they’re hard as rocks and it’s February, who cares? Moreover, if all you do is watch or read about David Burke making foie-gras-beluga-truffle-platinum dumplings, you may rightly wonder why anyone would want to come to your house for spaghetti.

I’m sure this is the beginning of a lifelong rant, but I will leave it here for now. Food for thought.