SHOW FOOD NATION

When thirteenth century Dogen Zenji wrote in his Instructions to the Monastery Cook, a simple green has the power to become the practice of the Buddha, he was extolling as well as revealing the sacred virtue of cooking and eating. “Actually, just working as the cook,” he said, “is the incomparable practice of the Buddhas." Amazingly, this seemed important enough to make Dogen Zenji’s instructions one of the earlier Buddhists texts translated into English, yet it has proved mighty hard to translate into a culture that has no business like show business. That was evident when the Slow Food Nation cooked up a San Francisco extravaganza, without irony, Labor Day weekend.

While the event was put in place, I was feeding Buddhist monks, so during the labor of slowly cooking meals both vegetarian and not, I was reminded how deeply concerned Dharma has been with eating for more than two and a half millenniums. Buddhism actually began with a meal and its scientific text, the Abhidharma, starts with the statement: All beings depend on food. Offering food is thus the oldest, most honored ritual of Buddhism, where the word for monk evolved from the word for beggar, and lay people supply food to monks, so that in a very real way compassion supports wisdom and wisdom encourages compassion. Beyond that, more than half of the Buddha’s rules of behavior codified as the Vinaya deal with food consumption, because, the late Trungpa Rinpoche said, "a lot of things are based on this idea of eating food properly, which is how to behave as a basically decent person."

Having been inspired eighteen years before by Dogen Zenji’s insistence that a good cook was the key ingredient of good meditation, I was feeding those monks. After all, an empty or disgruntled belly can be a compelling distraction. Consequently, with sometimes ridiculous zeal, I’ve been feeding not only the traveling monks in my teacher’s sangha, but those in his monasteries in Nepal and India as well as the 350 children in his boarding school whose health and scholarship have improved markedly since I first ventured into their dirt floor kitchen and tinkered with their diet. I have raised a lot of culinary consciousness.

I settled in San Francisco because it was an epicenter of both much dharma and much cooking, but except for Green Gulch Farm, they haven’t met each other much. They were definitely poles apart in the Slow Food Nation, especially when it came to emptiness (“There are no such distinctions,” Dogen Zenji wrote, “as delicacies or plain food”) and clarity. While panelists inside Herbst Auditorium railed against fast food and folks eating on the run, across the street in the plaza, vendors shoveled out fast food as fast as they could for prepaid tickets. I had a lemon grass with noodles and pork plate from the Slanted Door for $8.00. People walked around with plates in hand or sat awkwardly on hay bales supposed to supply rural purity to the concrete corridor. The organizers certainly had not put their plenty were their mouth was, because clearly missing were the family tables and slow go feasts their panelists were busy praising.

The night before my dinner for monks, I went to hear Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche talk about merit, which he explicitly defined as any act that pushes you closer to incorruptible truth. It can be tiny, he said, but what must be big is the aspiration that motivates it, the wish to do whatever it is purely for the benefit of others. He kept citing the example of turning off the faucet while brushing your teeth. If it’s mindless, there is no merit, but if it is deliberate because you aspire to stop wasting water to save some for others to use too, that is the real deal.

In this respect, being a vegetarian because it’s cheaper is not virtuous. Being one deliberately so that a living animal does not have to die for your dinner that night definitely is. You have to keep your ego out of it. So it’s tough to deny the blessings of merit to Alice Waters whose stubbornly consistent stance led her past the laurels of a legendary restaurant, to set up an edible schoolyard at a junior high, buy food from a prison garden, ignite what is now the million dollar college community food garden that feeds the food service at Yale where her daughter studied, and set up a foundation to fund such enterprises—even though she supposedly gave birth to this absurd Slow Food Nation. Clap, clap.

Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche went on to say the poison guaranteed to eradicate or prevent the rise of merit is pride. One example is showing perfect meditation posture in body while mind secretly wanders around—a genuine merit buster. Thus I was primed to see pride pushing the posturing of Slow Food Nation whose all consuming effort was showing off fancy so-called Mediterranean food that might be found on the menu of, say, Alice Waters’ restaurant: prosciutto! Pizza! Pinot Noir! Forget the rice, forget the salt, the taro that sustains half the world, don’t even mention lentils. I’m still trying to forget the enormous display of dead fish on ice—all those creatures who died just to be used for show and tell, then thrown away.

The Civic Center site was supposed to be a farmers market but was a bizarrely abridged or maybe amputated version carefully composed of specially chosen single product vendors --melons here, potatoes there. In comparison to, say, the vibrant and boisterous Marin County farmers market on Sunday morning where you can get everything from fish to fiddleheads to ficus trees and fiddlers playing, it seemed as artificial and tasteless as saccharin. The Fort Mason Taste Pavilion, $65 to get in, was to be a gustation, so there was a coffee tasting with a wine-like “flight” of three cups, over which the server poured a scripted commentary about how one tasted like onions with a hint of raspberry, but more importantly perhaps about the simple purity of the family producers, singing as they labored in Guatemala or maybe it was dancing up the foothills of Mt Kenya. When I interrupted to ask how the coffee had been brewed, because it  tasted like the crappy old supermarket stuff reviled as dishwater, I was brushed off, told with stark earnestness: “we’re only supposed to talk about how happily the beans were sustainably produced.”

The local newspaper, breathlessly reporting on its home team, carried news of the event’s Taste Pavilion sell out with a squib about the young couple who flew in from Wisconsin without prepaid tickets. They stood at the door with a banner blaring how far they’d come to eat “great food”, so wouldn’t somebody please let them in. They got into a great gorge fantasyland. All the favorite food groups had the exclusive at Fort Mason: ice cream, chocolate, cheese, salami, pizza, jam, pickles and olive oil—and you could wash them down with espresso, beer, wine or booze, all organic of course. Food had at last been turned into a Disney theme park and the gold card crowd came in droves to binge. Hunger for entertainment is so insatiable in America, 50,000 had tickets.

The lines were long, the food consumed on the move and so loaded with cholesterol, I calculated that a lifetime supply of artery clog could be consumed in under an hour. Obviously nobody’s mother was watching over this event. With fanciful architecture adding fizz, it added up to such ado about nothing, I hungered for a real meal, served at a table. I felt sick over not coming close at that moment to Trungpa Rinpoche's description of a basically decent person. I resented having people push in my face what they thought the best of whatever it was that money could buy and bring, especially when most of it came from California, home of the Hollywood food makeover I think of as American Victual.

Slow Food Nation seemed in fact merely more of San Francisco ad infinitum, sickening self congratulation over its “local” California food supply, as though the rest of the world does not exist—except for Tuscany. Perhaps it stuck in my craw because the best food I’ve consistently eaten comes from the state of Maine where it is hard won, thus loved hard and tastes truer for not being sugar coated in blind hype. Ask the five-star chef Sam Hayward. I carried in my purse during all the Slow Food hoopla the remains of a bag of red peanuts hand roasted a month before in an antique machine in the woods of Maine and sold without fanfare at Main Street Variety, and they beat everything in that pavilion for the merit of being what Dogen Zenji would call no big deal. “The true bond,” he said, “established between ourselves and the Buddha is born of the smallest offering made with sincerity rather than of some grandiose donation made without it. This is our practice as human beings.”

It was quickly obvious the self-centric people of the Slow Food Nation weren't going to much change the world anytime soon when Dogen Zenji says: "As long as your mind is not limited, you will naturally receive unlimited fortune.” None of its members knew or cared that already in the early 1990s Massachusetts and Maine forced food stamp recipients in the Women and Infant Children program to spend at least 15% of them at farmers’ markets so they’d learn about fresh foods while supporting their neighbors. Nobody knew about the campaign mounted back then to protest not having Massachusetts strawberries on Massachusetts tables. And how could they know I ran a catering business in the 1980s buying food from the local farmers and 4-H kids when all they could talk about was themselves and foodies around them in California.

Even while I was nibbling my three cheese sampler, having stood in the line of the relevant section, the cheese coordinator took a microphone to brag how she’d screened the country for the best of the best and here were fifty Wow samples of America’s greatest fermented milk. That boast compelled me to tap her afterward as she passed by and say: “Last year the state of Maine won 17 first prizes at the artisan cheese show, yet I don’t see one Maine cheese here.” Clearly she was flustered. “Well, we put out a call for participants nine months ago,” she blurted. Then she shrugged. “Maybe they didn’t want to be here.” When the pure fresh butter guy from Minnesota came by a second later passing out a piece of rye smeared with his perfect product which he said you could buy at such and such an outlet, it occurred to me that those in the Slow Food Nation were there to gain, and the five letter word beginning with m wasn’t merit. Slow Food had pulled a fast one: the nation was an infomercial.

In one brief shining moment of pop-up truth at the bull session I attended, the youngest panelist by a decade sat up and without warning interrupted the talking heads. “You are all busy saving heirloom turkeys and being very proud of that,” he said with passionate sincerity. “But what are you doing for all the people who can’t even afford the factory turkey you despise? What are you doing to feed those in America who need food most?” It was breathtaking how fast he was cut off, by the sanctimonious moderator, a woman who decided to ignore the questions of the audience in favor of her own musings. 

That young man’s question flavored all the fast food in the Slow Food taste pavilion and all that expensive vetted produce at the Civic Center. The other voices of his nation released a lot of hot air about human rights and inhumane government, about how hard it was to get officials and bureaucrats to get it that fast food was fast killing Americans, especially our children. Nobody jumped up to jump in with the dough, the bread, the lettuce, to change anything. Everybody had very obviously come to put their considerable money were their mouth was, spending a holiday weekend milling around munching rapini pizza made with $30 a bottle olive oil, drinking Mendocino Sauvignon Blanc, stuffing themselves with chocolate and sardine seviche while out of sight others starved. As my dharma brother Greg said when we walked out: it was a real Roman orgy with everything but the vomitorium.

~Sandy Garson
"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
http://www.sandygarson.com
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