some months ago i was alerted to the presence of a crazy and intelligent tempest brewing in Snarkmarket’s teapot, which is to say that lots of smart people were huddling around a blog and putting together lots of crazy ideas for 21st century liberal arts which sound like they should be at the top of anyone’s dream majors, including mine. any school which had Lifehacking, Negotiation and Effective Plagiarism would receive my application a year early, never mind my half-baked worries about the New Liberal Arts.
but failing the existence of an actual dream Liberal Arts school like this, there is its curriculum to ogle at. all 200 copies of the book sold out within 8 hours (but my sister has a copy, and it is so very pretty). like all good university prospectuses, however, it’s Available! For! Free! as a pdf in the Snarkmarket store which you should now download and spread like the H1N1.
having read it, i’m pleased to report that not only is it sleek and beautiful, it is also deliciously geeky, funny and hugely inspirational. it reads like a prospectus, of course (no pun intended), but a useful, wise 21st-century-savvy one. there’s a pitch for a course on Brevity there’s Brevity, Mapping ala Borges and Negotiation. there’s Photography (transcendental and academic), Inaccuracy, and Genderfuck. there’s Reality Engineering, Matrix-style. there’s even Attention Economics, sorely needed for the attention-deficient SEX generation. it’s the kind of book which makes you sit up and begin researching. it’s the kind of book which inspires you to learn.
i mean, i’d be willing to spend extra years in academia with courses like these. heck, i would major in at least half of them if i could. but i’m pitching it to you guys because there’s a course on Food, which i’d imagine might cause palpitating hearts and widescale salivation among the food blogging community. it’s a Michael Pollan-esque pitch by Gavin Craig, with an emphasis on sustainability, the ethics of disconnection and the aesthetics and pleasures of taste. along with courses in Photography, Translation 101, Creativity and Inaccuracy, to name a few, i may have found my perfect major. if it existed, of course. read Gavin Craig’s pitch for Food, (amusingly, in direct contrast to his other contribution, Brevity). then you should go download the book.
You are what you eat.
Food is part of every system. Humanity was created in the moment that nutrition was transformed into culture. There is nothing about this process that cannot be reversed. Food is the ultimate mutually dependent binary. Food is not food if it is not nourishing an organism. Organisms cannot survive without food. And we are organisms; there is no doubt about that.
Agriculture creates society. Cities form when there are enough surplus calories being produced to support non-farmers. The arts and sciences are born when there is time available for uses other than growing or hunting.
This disconnection between the production and consumption of food has deepened over time. Now, we, the non-producers, don’t trust ourselves to grow food. We don’t trust our soil and our rain. We’ve surrendered one of our most basic needs to strangers, corporations, and advertisers. As a result, we eat food that isn’t food: prepackaged, preservative-soaked material; pre-cooked and frozen meals re-heated and served at overpriced “casual dining” restaurants. We eat vegetables, if we eat them, that have been processed beyond recognition. Most often, we can’t even see, much less touch or smell, the food we’re buying until after we’ve purchased it and removed layers of plastic and cardboard packaging. Our ignorance is so complete that we do not even know what food is supposed to taste like. We eat meat from degraded animals killed in filthy conditions, and it doesn’t even taste good.
The reconsideration of food as a liberal art must include a number of facets: sustainability, or the ability to continue to produce calories sufficient to support the ever-increasing number of people not involved in agriculture; the ethics of disconnection, which leads not only to inhumane conditions, but to an inability to prevent contamination in the food supply chain; and the aesthetics and pleasures of taste, simple taste. Food is intrinsically connected to nature, ecology, politics, pop culture, family values, and economics.
The new liberal art of food must seek to ameliorate the alienation of consumption from production. Gardening, even just window gardening, can take place in the most densely-populated urban areas. Post-urban centers like Detroit offer an opportunity for agriculture on a larger scale, with the benefit of offering local, healthy, and inexpensive food to those in the greatest need. The farmer’s market cannot replace the supermarket, especially for those of us who live in areas with a limited growing season, but if we can grow food that we share or even sell to each other, then we are more likely to be aware of where our food comes from—and what can go wrong with it along the way.
Eating not only connects us to the natural world and to ourselves as organism, but also to each other. In considering food as a liberal art—something which can be examined, known, and enjoyed—we must also become aware of those for whom lack of choice is not just a cultural condition but a socio-economic reality. Encouraging local production at even the smallest, individual scale is not a luxury; it is a means for social justice. Fresh produce and minimally-processed foods must be for as many as possible, as often as possible; not just for the wealthy, or for suburbanites with easy access to supermarkets and giant, garden-ready backyards.
It may not be necessary or beneficial to demand that we each grow all of our own food, but we must know what we are eating and why. We must know and be able to accept how it was raised and harvested or killed. The answer is not a new FDA-approved supply chain, where food is still produced, processed and packaged out of our sight, in conditions that we are left to trust are clean, safe, and humane. Rather, the answer is participation on as many levels as possible. We grow. We market. We buy. We prepare. No pleasure without responsibility. No responsibility without pleasure.
on another note, and this was completely unexpected, totally out of the blue, but i found out about 10 days late that Shannon (one of the rare teen-food-bloggers i’ve encountered. makes delicious looking cupcakes and has access to all kinds of berries, alas) passed me this “lovely blog award”. which is, you know, a shocker. in a pleasant jolt-to-the-throat kinda way. in a carpe jugulum kinda way, but without all the blood and all of the, uh, well, you know. so i’m going to pass it on.
1. Michelle of The Romanticist (l-o-v-e-l-y)
2. Molly of Orangette (spent much of my teenage years reading this)
3. Iain Thomas & John Ellis of I Wrote This For You
4. Keiko of Nordljus (sublime photography)
5. rAchel of A Historian’s Craft (you’ll want to see the bookporn.)
6. Inhae of My Milk Toof (the cutest thing)
7. Joycelyn of KUIDAORE (the archives, the archives)
8. yvonen of eye fight (inspires you to live and love)
9. Pia at Pia Jane Bijkerk
10. Nikole of forty-sixth at grace
hmm, I like durians!
I was reading an article on it, and it said that there compounds in durian, have different intensities to different people. I have one, but I didn’t think of using it. Thanks for the suggestion though! Your english is SERIOUSLY good by the way. I’m intimidated! :O