New Year Resolution
Finally, at the very end of 2011, a multi-starred restaurant chef stated the sadly obvious: "... if you are at a good restaurant, you can assume that the ingredients will be good and that they'll be cooking seasonally. That simplicity, it's a beautiful way of eating and cooking. But as a chef, it's not the most gratifying. At some point you have to ask yourself if we are talking about food as nourishment or food that is emotional and impactful."
At some other point, I guess, you have to ask yourself why food as nourishment isn't emotional and impactful--and gratifying? What is food anyway?
Actually, we all need to ask ourselves because the Gilded Age gotta-have rage, and concurrent consumer culture bubble, is food. Notice in the chef's quote how "simplicity, it's a beautiful way of eating and cooking" is so cavalierly dismissed? That's why at a moment when a quarter of the country is starving, one tenth of one percent is ostentatiously stuffing itself with $500 a person dinners. People with too much money and time are so bored now by everything else, they're playing with food.
Lack of respect for food as simple nourishment has brought us all the manically unstoppable bacteriological, biological and inhumane horrors in our food chain. The day that quote about simplicity not being enough appeared in print, another headline shouted: Planting the Beach! It heralded the sad story of how Baja, California is being systematically stripped of its soil and water simply to meet our unrelenting demand to eat distinctly seasonal ingredients, particularly tomatoes, any time of the year we damn well want to. How's wanting to have it all all the time no matter what for emotional? And impactful too.
Other headlines are screaming that emotional and impactful food for the people rolling in excess dough these days, that infamous 1%, isn't just blow torch mini-bites but humungous tray-sized slabs of meat, if not the entire animal itself on a spit. Restaurants that imitate Roman banquet orgies are a Wall Street rage, echoing in the mad profusion of steakhouses and hamburger joints spreading across urban areas. Apparently, the more animals murdered, the merrier. It's Mad's "What me worry?" all over again, because thanks to other headlines, we are well aware of the destructive impact of polluting factory farms, and exactly how animal manufacture increases the menace of climate change.
Since long before the birth of the Buddha, greedy appetites were a major cause of suffering, Shakyamuni could accurately diagnose our human problem: craving. Enough is never enough. We always want more of something out there to fill up what we can't find inside. The Buddha connected the Brahmin caste's ravenous consumption of beef with a wide-spread famine in India because all the cows that pulled the plows and gave the milk that made the ghee, yogurt and cheese, had been confiscated for their beefsteak. He never stopped teaching that because our need to eat inevitably impacts everything and everyone around us, simple eating, consumption without harm, is beneficial for everyone and everything. The generosity of not making a mess is extremely gratifying because it makes others grateful.
In my book, Veggiyana, the Dharma of Cooking, I tried to convey this ancient message that what and how we eat matters every which way. I wanted to prick the current food bubble with food framed in its historic perspective as nourishment, as life and therefore something very sacred to be respected. The ingredient degradation and agricultural destruction so frenetically in process (not progress) can't be stopped until we stop seeing food as blood sport (all those killer TV competitions), high style pornography (all those carefully doctored high gloss photos and lascivious descriptions), rocket science (all that chemical engineering with high tech blow torches), entertainment (highly stylized food that, for instance, takes you on a walk through oak leaves so you can remember your childhood), or what marketers today call "aspirational" to put a spin on social climbing ostentation.
In a brief email correspondence I had, the famed and former Zen Buddhist chef Deborah Madison wistfully noted how unusual it was these days to have a food book published without magnetizing glossy photographs. "I thought it was our obligation as Buddhists," I wrote back, "to not feed the frenzy of attachment and lust, to inflate the bubble any further." She did not reply.
If you are at all aware and awake to this frenetic fuss over food as consumer gilt, going to the supermarket, or better yet the farmers' market, becomes authentic Dharma practice. Standing there selecting food to digest makes you aware of your choices and decisions, your motivations and intentions, your being connected to a greater whole. That tie-in to the greater whole is the literal meaning of the Latin religio, the English religion. I wrote about the power of sesame seeds and the historic meaning of rice to show how people have struggled for millenniums to figure food as fuel for their body so it runs. Humans have thought about food as long as there have been humans because without food there can't be humans. That's really all you need to know: food is what every single being has in common. It is what truly unites us and ties us back to the Earth, re-ligio, religion. It is sustenance, and what sustains us needs to be sustained. A shared survival resource is not a play toy.
I started my life as what was derogatorily called a stomach Jew, somebody who pulled the rank of religion only to get good corned beef sandwiches and pickles. And I can still pull rank to tell a cream cheese schmearing Tibetan they don't know from bagels. But I've spent many of my adult years proud to be a gastronomic Buddhist. I cook and write about food to nourish minds that feed bodies that support the mind. I think I may be the only one or nearly so with this compulsive focus, but I don't think I'm crazy. Two thirds of the Buddha's rules for monastic behavior are about food. "Many of the 250 monastic rules given by the Buddha,” the late Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche told his Western students when he started teaching, “are connected with how to eat properly. When you eat properly, then you can walk properly, think properly and relate with other human beings properly. A lot of things are based on the idea of eating food properly, which is how to behave as a basically decent person.”
This is why I've been dismayed that the earliest and most widely disseminated review of my Veggiyana book, despite its positive encouragement to buy the book, complained under the heading "What is Dharma?" that I stopped short of actually delivering much Buddhist philosophy. Here are the exact words: "I assumed a book with "Dharma" in the title would include lots of guidance (that I need!) on pursuing enlightenment or at least serenity. Something along the lines of 'present moment, wonderful moment'. I was hoping for tips on how to keep my mind in the present while chopping vegetables...My dear friend...an ordained Zen priest...defines Dharma as...'teachings of awakening'. I don't see much about awakening..."
Talk about no awakening! The reviewer called me a Zen Buddhist when most of the text starting with the dedication made clear my Buddhism is Tibetan. She called pomegranates and daikon hard to find, exotic ingredients that belied my promise of universality. And despite my revelations on how profoundly Buddhism has influenced how and what we eat, even my stating right in the introduction that I hoped to raise awareness of our relationship with food, she said I offered no guidance on pursuing enlightenment.
If Dharma, as she says, is nothing more than step by step instructions on how to stay serene while stirring soup, that woman, PhD in science, is clueless about awakening. That's sad, especially if others also think Dharma is just about minding the moment you cook or clean. One of the great Tibetan Rinpoches, watching Zen students obsess over kitchen chores, pointed out how exaggerated mindfulness becomes a distraction, in fact a roadblock on the path to discovering the enlightenment in your own mind. I wrote almost two years ago about sadly watching Theravada mindfulness students obsessively focus on their footsteps--now my knee is bent, now my leg is stretched, now my foot touches the ground-- as they walked outside on a gloriously green spring day. They were so absorbed by their body movement, they were pathetically oblivious to the glory of mixing their minds with the clear blue sky and the liberating joy--the peak experience-- of Dharma.
Resolution, the word most associated with New Year, actually has meanings beyond the one traditionally trotted out on January 1: aspiration to begin something new, do something differently in the time ahead. One of those meanings is to bring something to an end. A resolution can be an outcome. For this New Year 2012, the resolution I am praying for is the bursting of the food bubble, and re-awakening to awareness that food is Dharma practice. Because Dharma practitioners have to eat, we could wake up to the food supply alarm. Awakening this year can mean the simplicity of eating seasonal, sustainable food that is nourishing and beautifully cooked, as well as the gratification of not being emotional or "impactful" in any way. Wouldn't that usher in a nutritious and delicious new year for everyone.
~Sandy Garson"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
http://www.sandygarson.com
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/
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posted by Sandy Garson @ 12:52 PM
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