Food Culture

Against common sense, I picked up another book, leaving (for tomorrow or the next day) several half-finished. I anticipated this book’s arrival because everything I read by Barbara Kingsolver is interesting and lovely. I watched the book line the shelves at the wholesale bookseller’s for whom I worked once upon a time. But because I tend to shrink away from anything that grows in popularity, and environmentalism and organic anything have a status all their own, I let the book go unread.

But now I have the library’s copy of Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, and it is incredible in only the first 30 pages. Kingsolver writes about food culture and America’s lack of one. She also weaves in scientific advancements and their historical effects (which, in another life, I would love to study at the graduate level).

My fourth grade environmentalist tendencies wore off a little, especially in the face of some judgmental environmentalists (and some think Christians are bad). But, alas, I may jump on the bandwagon. Or at least take baby steps toward it.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the ways in which we’ve sucked the life out of many of the advancements of the late 19th and 20th centuries, to the point that we seem to be regressing rather than progressing. For example, Kingsolver mentions the use of chemicals, and all the ways we morph corn from a nice vegetable into unpronounceable items.

Food isn’t the only area. We’re financial wrecks, lazy, and scared of hard work. Perhaps I idealize a time I know only through the history books and oral legend, but it seems like way back when (notice my imaginary history doesn’t even own specific points in time) people worked hard, ate well (nutritionally and not in excess), and lived lives of integrity.

Let’s not critic my ignorance. Rather, let’s forget looking to the past and imagine the future. Another book I left unfinished in 2006 (Walter Brueggemann’s The Prophetic Imagination) introduced me to the idea of prophecy as the act of imagining a better future, more or less. We can’t rise above our circumstances or change our generation unless we can imagine an alternative.

So I like to imagine us living in harmony with nature (as realistically as possible) and one another, taking the time to educate ourselves, and accepting responsibility for our actions. I’ll stop the la-la language before I sound like the Boulderite I never fully became. Don’t listen to me; read both books.