Vocab - The Pleasures of Eating

The passive American consumer, sitting down to a meal of pre-prepared or fast food, confronts a platter covered with inert, anonymous substances that have been processed, dyed, breaded, sauced, gravied, ground, pulped, strained, blended, prettified, and sanitized beyond resemblance to any part of any creature that every lived.

When food, in the minds of eaters, is no longer READING SELECTIONS 2 | THE POLITICS OF FOOD CSU EXPOSITORY READING AND WRITING MODULES associated with farming and with the land, then the eaters are suffering a kind of cultural amnesia that is misleading and dangerous.

When the food product has been manufactured or “processed” or “precooked,” how has that affected its quality or price or nutritional value?

If they think beyond that, they recognize that they are passive consumers.

Only by growing some food for yourself can you become acquainted with the beautiful energy cycle that revolves from soil to seed to flower to fruit to food to offal to decay, and around again.

3 I begin with the proposition that eating is an agricultural act.

8 But if there is a food politics, there are also a food esthetics and a food ethics, neither of which is dissociated from politics.

The trap is the ideal of industrialism: a walled city surrounded by valves that let merchandise in but no consciousness out.

For them, then, food is pretty much an abstract idea—something they do not know or imagine—until it appears on the grocery shelf or on the table.

READING SELECTIONS CSU EXPOSITORY READING AND WRITING MODULES THE POLITICS OF FOOD | 5 15 The pleasure of eating should be an extensive pleasure, not that of the mere gourmet.