As you note, there’s more philosophy in the question than at first meets the eye.

It’s not just about the food, as usual. The food is the mirror.

Is it something we eat that fits to a T the so-oft quoted phrase “You are what you eat” (?)

(I actually just saw a book with a chapter in it titled “You are Not what you Eat” which made me very happy. I wanted to read it but have to decide whether to spend the $130. for it which would leave me eating hot dogs and beans for the week but would it matter? It would prove that I am not the hot dogs and beans!)

Is food sacred?

Is it profane?

And if it is sacred (or if it has aspects about it that would lead us to think of it in this fashion) then who are we, when we consume it, kill it, cook it, heedlessly – in order to live?

If (as I just recently read in ‘Thousand Tables’ by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto) it is true that

the only objectively verifiable fact which sets our species apart from others is that we cannot successfully mate with them

. . . then where does that leave us as the species who thinks of themselves as above all other species?

I don’t know why but a Woody Allen line keeps coming to mind:

“Why does man kill? He kills for food. And not only food. Frequently there must be a beverage.”

That sort of ruins the idea of sanctity within the whole thing though.

I don’t think I am the only person who at the moment is very confused about how modern city dwellers can get more in touch with where their food comes from. I find myself in a lucky position having grown up on a working farm, and lived in rural areas in Nigeria and Mexico, so that it’s never been a problem for me. I even have problems imagining what it can be like to have no idea at all of farming.

And I’m not sure most of the proposed solutions–school gardens, farmers’ markets, or exposure to slaughter–are more than palliatives. In fact, I suspect they give an even more unrealistic view of the whole.

This is a rumination I’ll return to often.

I agree with Karen that watching the last scene of the play is not really “knowing” your food in any robust way, but that seems to imply a very narrow range of what is going to count as politics when we’re talking about animal. Are we willing to be quite as critical if were talking about growing vegetables? It seems to be somewhat of an unreasonable standard to judge the appropriateness of a politics of food to suggest that “true” knowledge or understanding can only come from producing food in the context of survival. Yes, we live in the modern world (some might disagree, but that’s another argument), but we can’t go back to some sort of primitive existence can we?

I’m not sure if those foodies and chefs who are doing this are necessarily legislating it as much as interrogating their own personal moral codes and pushing themselves where they can. Perhaps the writing about it is where the situation gets a bit more dicey and where the masturbatory element starts to emerge, but I suppose I’d ask how else are we supposed to have a conversation about this topic.

The relationship between people and animals in the US (and probably much of Europe) is horrifying. And not just for the animals. Rachel I agree with you that the visceral reaction is perhaps not the same as understanding the operation of the food system, but in my mind that seems to imply the thinking and feeling aren’t on the same register, no? I certainly don’t think that disney-style agro-tourism / slaughterhouse operations are a very good idea. Commodifying death in this way is very troubling. But, given that slaughter is probably as close to the end of the meat supply chain as most of are going to get it seems that dismissing the visceral reaction as not good enough leads to the separation of thinking and feeling that I think are at the root of how we got here in the first place. (I don’t want to get into a discussion about ontology here, but this does touch on some fairly important ontological debates.)

Anyway, I’m curious to see where you take this Rachel.

Yes.

Karen, what interesting answers to that survey. I think most children here in Mexico would be more like the rural children surveyed. Even if they don’t hear the village pig being slaughtered, the markets are full of very visible evidence of animals as meat. I think only the relatively well-to-do urban children whose parents regularly shop at Mega or Wal-Mart could escape it. Even there, trotters, heads and innards are much in evidence.

A couple of weeks ago I went to the baptism party for our accountant’s baby daughter (a lovely, happy occasion, by the way). All the 250 guests enthusiastically welcomed the appetizers of pickled pig’s trotters that preceded the main meal. And very delicious they were too.

Which is to say, I suppose, that there are many ways of coming to terms with what we eat.

Though they can at times.