Food is Consumption and Consumption is Perverse

[lapsedmodernist]

Stanislaw Lem wrote a weird little book called "The Perfect Vacuum"--a collection of book reviews of non-existent books, the sort of offering that might be found on a shelf of a Borges library. Anyway, one of the "books"--"Sexplosion"-- describes a world where, due to some vaguely-referenced chemical accident, sex ceases to be pleasurable. Legislations are passed to ensure reproduction, blah blah blah, but the "book" and the review mainly focus on the void that is left and how that void is filled by food--the food pornography that emerges, the taboos around food that arise, the debate over teaching the gastrological processes to schoolchildren. It's kind of like "Do You Want My Opinion?" by M.E. Carr, but with food in place of individuality. Trimalchio--one, Ayn Rand--zero.

Anyway, I was thinking of that Lem story, as I realized that I am in full throes of yet another zeitgeist-bound syndrome: USAnorexia.

People, I am scared of food. When I try to grocery-shop, it's like I am channeling some Victorian child, who is compelled to masturbate, but the compulsion is accompanied by a terror of the "this will make me go blind!" variety. Except in my case, with buying food, it's probably true. About the going blind. Or maybe not blind, but surely between the

a) genetically-modified soy that I envision, in my nightmares, assaulting my hormone production centers, alternately as malicious green vines engaged in some kind of GM plant tentacle rape of my pituitary gland, or deploying Commander Tofu and his squadron through my veins to destroy with prejudice

b) mad cow disease, which leads to my boyfriend frequently complaining that I am "paranoid and controlling" because I will not procure or cook anything involving beef for him

c) G.W. Bush's complete destruction of the FDA, when combined with the fact that Bill Clinton bestowed the MFN title on a country that laces food with melamine, like the asshole drug dealer that for a while supplied my erswhile college campus with cocaine cut with Elmer's glue, soaks cuttlefish in calligraphy ink, makes soy sauce from human hair, and feeds eels birth control pills

d) pesticides, BGH, and god knows what else (but do read a brilliant book called "My Year of Meats" for some eye-opening possibilities)

if I don't go blind...I will...I don't know what, exactly, all I know, is I am having a horrible fear of contamination vis-a-vis food, which for all intents and purposes functionally reduces me to a kindred spirit of that girl from all those anorexic-ballerinas YA books, who, like, cuts a green apple into four pieces and eats them AND NOTHING ELSE over the course of the day.

I suspect the larger problem is, I feel alienated from my food. As much as I think many trends in food consumption are fads, desperate compensatory mechanisms arising from the fact that "Real Food" has become a retronym, and responding to the general anxiety about the industrial-scale commodification of food and the ensuing contamination phobia with highly specialized menus that focus around exclusion and control, working on the same principle as anorexia, I GET the whole "buy local" thing. It's like, generally, I am alienated from my food along two vectors: mode of production and geographical distance; the "buy local" thing somewhat mediates the latter. But in terms of the former...man, for Lukacs sex was really all about capitalism, and for me, taking a subconscious page from Lem's phantasmagoria, I suppose, food is all about capitalism. I feel that this system is insane and inhuman, and I somatize and embody that in my food consumption. Hence my USAnorexia. Here is proof:

1. Any time I am shopping in Whole Foods, I think about The Apocalypse. The friendlier the service is, the more moms-with-babies-in-hemp-slings I see, the more lovingly the nutritional virtues of the samples are extolled, the more I envision how all these people will kill each other over shreds of garbage in a "Blindness"-type scenario. NB: this does not happen in Stop-n-Shop. I am just afraid of the food there more, but minus the abjection. Somehow my food phobia is compartmentalized from the class issues at play in my grand syndrom of USAnorexia.

1a. In similar vein, whenever I see that commercial for Olive Garden on TV, where a woman comes in and says she is looking for her date, and ha-ha-ha, it's funny, because she means her little toddler son, I keep thinking that the light outside the restaurant is the light that I imagine would accompany The Apocalypse.

2. I recently had a dream where all food became this one substance that was sold either in, like, bullion cubes or in cans, it was called NATURELLE and had an ambiguously ethnic woman with charcoal eyebrows an assault rifle on the label, and ALL food was that, it was like the food equivalent of that scene in "Being John Malkovich" where John Malkovich goes through his own portal. So supposedly all food was the same, but there were special stores where you could buy NATURELLE made from a mixture of fish kelp and crumbled brick, which were the two certified "natural" substances. The stores were you could buy this mixture were called BRICK AND MARTYR.

3. I have a strong paranoia that ever since Walmart started selling Organic, that label became meaningless, thus I am scared of ALL meat now, not just non-organic meat. I am also scared of everything that could possibly contain wheat gluten and thus melamine. I am scared of fruit with pesticies, and I am scared that fruit without pesticides is, in fact, secretly sprayed with pesticides.

4. I went to Whole Foods the other day and I bought ingredients that even Iron Chef couldn't make one full meal involving all major food groups from. I was buying ingredients that fell into the category of "these don't scare me," which is an ever-shrinking category.

5. I want to build a homunculus goat and keep it in my study and drink its milk, but I am not sure a homunculus would be considered organic.

6. I want out of this country before I malnourish myself.

7. Do you have another globe?

Comments

[angiereedgarner.livejournal.com]

1. You have the best dreams. Ever.

2. Maybe relevant to read up on orthorexia nervosa.

3. Lately I am contemplating a life where I don't get fresh produce 2/3 of the year, and it is sad. :(

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

Finding examples wouldn't be difficult. I could pit the rules of various food theories against each other: Spicy food is bad; cayenne peppers are health-promoting. Fasting on oranges is healthy; citrus fruits are too acidic. Milk is good only for young cows (and pasteurized milk is even worse); boiled milk is the food of the gods. Fermented foods, such as sauerkraut, are essentially rotten; fermented foods aid digestion. Sweets are bad; honey is nature's most perfect food. Fruits are the ideal food; fruit causes candida. Vinegar is a poison; apple cider vinegar cures most illnesses. Proteins should not be combined with starches; aduki beans and brown rice should always be cooked together.

this is uncannily similar to what it's like inside my head.

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

a) you're right, but

b) it was never better (or never much better), though

c) it should be; but

d) I tend to avoid organic produce because the hardier the hardier the variety, the more it's producing natural pesticides which can be really ugly and which aren't only on the skin but all the way through the food.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

oh, I am not one to fetishize "the good old ways of olde tymes" but I admit
I long for a return to the times when ingredients in a meal were all recognizable. I would file that under "much better." Much better than what? A sighting at a NYC bodega, shortly after 9/11 of some packaged hostess-type cakes that read "100% INGREDIENTS."

Crap, now you've got me scared of organic foods too. I am going to stop eating entirely. All that is solid melts into air, and so will I.

[the-macnab.livejournal.com]

the hardier the variety, the more it's producing natural pesticides which can be really ugly and which aren't only on the skin but all the way through the food.

Do you have some sort of citation for that claim, particularly for the implication that the natural pesticide the plant is producing is more harmful to humans than the pesticides put on conventional produce?

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

Well a while ago I read about this in the Times -- about potatoes bred to be withstand insects and blight, which then were completely toxic. Digging around a little I also found this; digging around some more I found that the right hates organic food so much that they make lots of bullshit claims, but that the government doesn't seem to have really examined the question either way. My general principle is, go with the statistics. People are living longer now than a hundred years ago, so the pesticides can't be that bad. I wonder if people who only eat organic but drink and smoke, etc. in the same numbers as the general population live as long, less long, or longer.

[never-the-less.livejournal.com]

have you considered a csa? i am pretty sure there is one in cambridge -- i'd imagine that now that you have a lot of people to cook for, you could probably use all the veggies.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

I have totally considered a CSA except that I feel like things need to get a bit less chaotic for me to really be able to use everything that will come in a box. Also the baby isn't eating human food yet :)

When are you leaving for Berlin? I wish I were in Europe now, I would eat some beef. I forget, are you then going to Prague with your mom?

[never-the-less.livejournal.com]

I leave on Thursday! And yeah, I'm going to Prague for a few days with my mom. Shall I smuggle you back some beef?

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

mmmm. I am trying to think of yummy places for you to go in Prague...I wish I could remember the name of the restaurant that is around the corner from the Jewish Cemetary that serves this really yummy potato soup in a bread bowl...along with PIG KNUCKLE SOUP.

[pdanielson.livejournal.com]

"I was buying ingredients that fell into the category of "these don't scare me," which is an ever-shrinking category."

Hmm, I recommend buying things that fall into the category of "these are delicious." If you're going to die of something eventually, chances are it's not going to be food, so you might as well take pleasure in it while you can. Mmm...food...

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

The thing is, the unheimlich feeling that I am being poisoned detracts from the deliciousness.

[jasminedreame.livejournal.com]

You are not alone. Everytime I read a new article about how women who eat more red meat get more breast cancer, how mass-culled chicken contains variable (non-regulated) traces of arsenic, etc. etc. I become more and more terrified of the grocery store. I don't buy fruit other than oranges and bananas, becuase those you can peel. When I go to the local Safeway here, I literally skip ALL the aisles from vegetables to paper suppplies, and I only buy organic whole grain bread from the local bakery. It is totally crazy. I even go to the local organic grocery store and troll the meat counter, craving a nice grass-fed hamburger, then turn away every time because I feel like it's going to give me breat cancer. Totally crazy! But even beyond that level, I feel everything makes me fat, too. It's like, ten neuroses piled into one. So I usually end up eating organic salad or like, organic steamed vegetables with organic steamed dumplings from the organic grocery store. And I still feel bad! And yes, I also imagine the apocalypse at every turn, one of the first things I thought of when coming to Montana was "well, if there's a nuclear war, we'll still mutute, but we'll live a little longer here." Eek. xoJ

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

I always suspected you were a kindred spirit.

Yes, on all fronts. I totally have thoughts like that about location, too. I seriously google locations of nearby nuclear reactors and how likely they are to blow when I move to a new place.

[twotoedsloth.livejournal.com]

Have you considered gardening? And canning, of course. That, and having your own tilapia tank.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

in my dream I have a house with a garden somewhere in Europe...way out in the rural Europe...but I am really not sure how to make that dream into reality. I figure my ticket to Europe or elsewhere abroad is a job...how many jobs are way out in the country, rather than cities and university towns? Also I don't know how to garden. I would learn, though.

[theorybitch.livejournal.com]

My Year of Meat is an amazing book. And yeah, you have the best dreams ever. Maybe the scariest dreams.... So, sure, it's Foucauldian, and sure, it's bound up with a whole bunch of sublimated fears/desires around consumption and capitalism, but your anxieties aren't irrational. Fuck, food is important. Good food is important.

I think I'm probably lucky to live in Australia and have access to pretty well-grown food, relatively, but it seems that really what you're most worried about is not knowing what's in the processed food that you eat, right? Or not knowing the processes that what you eat goes through. So, eat what's less processed. Get a breadmaker. Is there a way to access free-range and/or organic meat, near by? Are there organic farms that produce meat you can access? Friends of mine have an arrangement with an organic farm where they buy a whole cow once or twice a year and deep freeze all the joints -- they know the farmer, they know what the cows eat. Same with eggs, chicken. Fish is harder, I guess.

On the other hand, you're reacting to the fetishisation of 'wholeness' in alternative/organic contexts, which is definitely bullshit. And the myth that we can control what goes into our bodies, or that we can know exactly what goes into our bodies, and what it's going to do to us. It kind of reminds me of the movie Safe. I don't shop at organic or wholefoods shops; too expensive and too much fetishisation. But I sometimes shop at the university food co-op. I'm not sure I believe in everything we are sold as 'wholefoods'. On the other hand, free range chicken tastes better, and I can actually cope with eating it, whereas 'normative' chicken makes me feel ill. Go figure.

You could always come live here. It's full of racist assholes who say 'Mate!' and it's hell to fly to, but the air is cleaner, GM stuff is not totally everywhere yet, and the quality of the food available is really really good.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

Australia seems just...too far away in my expat dreams. I really want to live in Europe or in Canada. But you are making it sound quite appealing (minus the racist assholes who say "mate").

I was thinking of "Safe" too when I wrote this entry, and how it was a different variation on the same phobia...although the anxieties in it seem more...innocent, and, like, evocative of the nuclear age. Man, that is a fucked-up sentence.

[twotoedsloth.livejournal.com]

ps. in Mexico, Naturelle is a brand of sanitary napkin.

[dcart.livejournal.com]

That Olive Garden commerical really gives me the creeps.


I have taken to assuming that all the food I eat may well be laced or fully dosed with all kinds of bad shit and that's going to be the case for anything I don't grow myself or buy directly from someone I know personally who has grown it. Since I do not grow my own food, do not even have dirt where I could grow more than herbs, I'm kind of reconciled to my fate. I haven't personally known people who grew food I could buy since I left Tallahassee in 2001.

I haven't participated in the growing of my own food since we moved into town from the countryside in 1983.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

I am glad someone else has has seen that OG commercial.

I see you have the Stephen Colbert ice-cream as your icon, awesome!

[tolstobrov.livejournal.com]

anthrochica, you totally rock!

Indeed the only predictable way out for you would be moving somewhere far from the civilized world.

I doubt rural Europe would be the solution for you. There still gonna be those Time articles, TV commercials, etc.

Why not stop reading them and throw away your TV instead of moving out of US?

Trust me, I tried it. It didn't work out.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

why thank you.

hold on, you tried throwing away your TV or moving to rural Europe?

I am envisioning something like the dacha of my childhood in Zagorsk, but, like, somewhere with socialized health care. And maybe a couple of hours by elektrichka to Paris or Berlin or London rather than Moscow. Also preferably with a toilet inside.

By the way that link you have for the book of cliches is brilliantly cynical.

[bing-crosby.livejournal.com]

yeah, you might be overdoing it a bit. There is still real food out there-- if not by CSA, by farmer's market at least. Even with "regular" food, I think it's hard to tell how much it will kill you. A generation grew up eating DDT and only some of them died. Centuries of people ate off of lead glazes (and still do in some countries). I do think things are generally worse now than they were, oh, 50-100 years ago, but I also think you have to seek out what WILL nourish you rather than what will NOT. And, too-- if you figure how much we are screwed via other things as well (paint fumes, power lines, plastic everywhere leaching) you realize we are of this artificial world-- there is no escaping so it's more about making rules that work and living with them.

[paperthinwalls.livejournal.com]

#2 is like 'soylent green'! the next thing you find out, surely, is that--'it's people! naturelle is PEOPLE!!'

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

EXACTLY

[klingrap.livejournal.com]

Move to Vermont or Western Mass. Where I grew up in southern Vermont, it was quite possible to subsist almost entirely on food grown or raised by people we knew. Vegetables from our own garden canned and/or frozen to last the winter, milk and eggs from the dairy farm down the road, lamb and beef also raised on small farms in the immediate neighborhood.

And there are LOTS of universities in southern Vermont and Western Mass.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

I like Vermont because it is close to Canada. Maybe I could convince my boyfriend to live right on the border in Canada. Except it's too cold for him there. Me, I like proper winter.

I like Western Mass, but it is neither near the ocean, nor borders Canada (two big plusses in my book).

[mjmj.livejournal.com]

you might like this book:

"diet for a poisoned planet: how to choose safe foods for you and your family -- the twenty-first century edition" -- by david steinman

well someone beat me to it

[hermetic-seal1.livejournal.com]

I have to say, someone beat me to the soylent green analogy sadly. Came across your Journal from abandonded places. couldnt help but commenting on this topic.( hope you dont mind my posting as we aren't known quantities to each other )

Part of the problems we face daily is the speed at which we must all operate to keep up with bills and such. It leaves little time for " Real Food" and more open to " chemicaly alterd foods with added salt and perserviatives that arent really needed ( except to keep profits up )Look at the use of " corn syrup" over "sugar" cheaper = higher profits, but now they find that the sugar substitute apparently has had a bad effect. suprise suprise!( and look at all the things they put that stuff in! )

Try checking out what is in a " MRE" sometime, and i ate many of them in my time with the service.I am willing to bet they dont list " all " of the ingredients in them.

as for #3 walmart destroys all things, why not the organic label as well. everything should be suspect in this day and age unless you grew it yourself, or knew the grower personaly. I live near a few working farm's with farmstands, at least i am sure i am getting reasonably fresh stuff when i do manage to get there.

anyway, nice post, awsome dreams, and great pictures. Glad I stumbled across them.

Cheers