Yours in the Dharma: January 2016

Monday, January 25, 2016

Don't take your expectations to lunch

A week or two ago, I read an exposé on vividly luscious food that magnetizes eyeballs in magazines and clicks on the web. Wd-40 and Microwaved Tampons: Secrets of Food Photography revealed the tricks of the booming food styling trade in which highly paid professionals brazenly manufacture charisma that makes us lust after prepared food. We salivate. We need it, want it right now. Ka-ching!

I'm sadly familiar with what honest cooks call food porn. Years ago, media plate preening, the nefarious make-up and manicure of food, made otherwise delighted catering clients question why my grilled meat didn't have the perfectly spaced black stripes of the grilled steaks pictured in popular magazines. They were so disappointed, I had to explain it was simply because I didn't paint lines on mine with India ink and a ruler. If my honey glazed fruit tart didn't glow like a 100 watt bulb, it was because I didn't varnish it--or my crusty breads. I could tell some of my clients couldn't tell if it was me or the magazines lying to them, but I reckoned disappointment had a lot less liability than death by varnished food.

That was long ago before I became a Buddhist taught to be wary of appearances. How tricky they are. This story revealed such new reality-defying deceptions as lipstick on strawberries, using shaving cream as whipped cream. Those uniformly firm burritos you see are stuffed with mashed potatoes, the glorious red glow on the roasted turkey on the cover-- totally raw inside, comes from artificial food coloring applied with a paint brush. The cereal isn't soggy because it's not in milk; it's atop soft stuff from a hardware store.

Food stylists wanted to expose these deceits not to shame themselves but so ordinary people could make their own cooking look more impressive in the camera lens. I just got a catalogue that urged me to buy the featured plates and napkins so my table could be much more Pinterest ready.

Evidently food is not always picture perfect enough, sexy enough, not photogenic enough to be acceptable in our television age. Instead we are served images of thoroughly processed, artificial, tarted up and lethally inedible food. (There was an aside in the story about somebody swiping a finger through what they thought was whipped cream only to scream in disgust and spit the Barbasol out.) The most wildly popular food blogs are consistently those with the most pornographic and high styled photography, not those by the most knowledgeable cooks.

What makes this diet of deceit so lethal is that the only thing it nourishes is expectation. It leads us to believe what's on our home plate is supposed to look as impeccably glamorous as the Photoshopped, phony food version. And if it doesn't, woe to Mom or the restaurant chef or you who made it. What's wrong with you that your tacos are so messy? You don't glue tortillas together and stuff them with cosmetic sponges?

For tastemakers, food is no longer about nourishment and survival, even sharing the love. It's about the look that generates fascination, titillation and above all, entertainment. That's what most people now expect from a meal: the exhilaration of being in a fantasy. Just read restaurant reviews on Yelp! The common key ingredient for a rave review is razzmatazz; even if the food was fine, without showmanship the customer is profoundly disappointed.

I suppose this shouldn't be surprising. The American public is so addicted to entertainment, particularly escapist movies and TV, we everywhere conflate scripted outcomes with expectations for real life. Since we no longer separate actors from their assigned roles, the Terminator got elected governor of California not long after the Gipper got elected President and a TV star became Senator from Tennesee. The brash macho reality TV boss of The Apprentice has become front runner for the US Presidency because people like hearing him shout at others: "You're fired!" More than half the country thinks our troops should shoot 'em up and be victorious like John Wayne. My grandmother blamed my mother's death from cancer on my choice of bad doctors because in the movies people are heroically saved at the last minute and she wasn't. Everything including restaurant meals has to be airbrushed with sparkly Disneyworld excitement. The downside is the millions who need drugs to dose their disappointment in the relative drabness of reality.

I work in and with food, so it's easy for me to see how we are misled to disappointment by obsession with appearances. We suffer from "should", chasing these delusions of grandeur like foxhounds. They make us afraid...of not rising to the occasion, being good enough, not getting what we pay for. We suffer from seeing as believing.

About the time I read those sickening secrets of food styling, I saw a headline about an Instagram teen sensation with 612,000 awestruck followers who abruptly cut her feed and removed her posts. It turns out that after a year of posing and preening and promoting, Essena O'Neill discovered social media "is not real life. It's contrived perfection made to get attention." She was tired of being phony. It was too much work. She wanted to find out what life was really like.

These stories turned into a genuine teaching moment for someone always trying to fathom the difference between appearance and reality. That's the essence of Dharma practice: distinguishing so we can hunker down with absolute reality, never to be fooled again. It's not hard to see how easily humans want to mistake fussily manufactured appearance--sexy virtual reality, for the real, far less glittery and less certain alternative. Wanting life to be the brass ring on every go round, we insistently bring ourselves nonstop suffering, debilitating angst over our seemingly intractable imperfections and inadequacies. We're so hooked on seeing is believing, we even berate ourselves in the kitchen when we are just trying to eat and the what we put on the plate doesn't look like what's on the page of Bon Appetit.

The promotion of food styling and the rejection of social media imagery underscored the Buddha's great insight, his main teaching that mistaking appearance for reality is what keeps us drowning in the ocean of Samsara, or if you prefer, spinning around and around into dizzy ignorance. He says we are already perfect with everything we need to be good to go; we don't need a look, just a little food from time to time. The Buddha wants to help us get over separation anxiety as we sort tamper proof truth from all the balderdash and leave the latter behind like a childhood toy. I reckon we can start easy without all the metaphysics and Madhyamika, simply by not taking Photoshopped expectations to lunch.

~Sandy Garson "Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/
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Labels: food porn, food styling

Monday, January 18, 2016

Learning Curve

In preparation for a milestone college reunion, my classmates and I were asked to reveal life lessons learned after university ones. Oddly the questionnaire did not allot much space. Even though I found this all seriously ridiculous, I did start to think about life lessons learned: stuff a university never teaches. And what rushed to mind were those squishy truths you sit on hoping to squash, the ones you learn the hard way because they won't go away. Here are the ones I can still remember.

The Dharma teaches that all humans absolutely have Buddha Nature, but life teaches Buddha Nature can be wickedly difficult to imagine in some of those human beings.

Mother Nature is a comedian: aging brings wisdom at the same time as short term memory loss.

Learn from mushrooms. Plenty of people and policies that look glossy good on paper are actually poisonous in real life.

Evolutionary change is possible to see. The absolutely hands down scariest, worst drivers on the planet are no longer in New Jersey. They are all in California. The information highway has obviously not yet reached there. Everybody treats the left lane as the right one for sashaying at bicycle speed.

We all come with a lifetime guarantee. Like those complex Wall Street default packages, nobody knows its actual face value.

Trungpa Rinpoche said the greatest luxury in life is to sit still while so many idiots are mindlessly running in circles chasing phantom ideas. Mary Oliver says water is so discontent, it is forever moving on to another spot while a rock, a rock is content to sit still and soak up the sun. This is welcome inspiration now that air travel has become the most widely used form of government sanctioned torture.

Everybody wants to be an entrepreneur in the booming mistake business. Most of us who've passed through middle age wish we'd known back then what we know now, but nobody still back there wants to hear what we could tell them.

If product liability and tort law had been adopted when God created men, he'd have been out of business in less than seven days.

Those who have the status will inevitably go nuclear to protect the status quo. (And there you have domestic violence, monopoly capital, the Saudi royal family and the Clinton campaign.)

The most terrifying word of this new millennium isn't ISIS or Al-Qaeda. It's should. Struggling to conform to some vague and probably passing corporate marketing idea of how you or events or others should be rather than facing how you and they actually are unleashes the most terrifying, cancer causing stress. Trust me: You are far less likely to be blown away by some bearded Arab asshole than by your own terrifying suspicion you aren't good enough.

What the hell! is never the wrong answer.

Never pass a chance to drink bubbly. Celebrate everything all the time. What's wrong with joy?

Humanity is divided between those who define the word "share" as a noun and those convinced it's a verb.

The best thing that can happen at college is to make friends who continue to be faithful friends for life because they liked you before you had any power to affect their ambition.That's how you can trust they really just plain like you.

People who go on big ego trips usually stop at every available food fetish.

God's ways remain mysterious. I have no clue why as I age, hair has permanently fallen from my eyebrows and forehead but not my legs.

Don't crow too loudly about human progress, especially in this self-congratulatory technological age.The people of Jericho built a wall that Joshua tore down. The Chinese built a great wall against the Mongols who invaded anyway. The walled cities of southern France did not keep out the Romans or Brits. Now our answer to immigration in the age of gigabytes and space stations is to build a 2,000 mile long wall along the Mexican border.

If you live long enough, your hips and thighs do get thinner. This is because your waist expands wider than they are.

We live in what may seem the worst of times but testosterone has always been with us. We may actually be living in the best of times yet because we have more available antidotes. The Dharma message of compassion and self-control has become contagious around the planet. Last year 10,000,000 less animals were killed for dinner because we are changing how we eat. More people than before have begun to connect cause to effect.

Everybody wants longevity. But nobody wants to be around those of us who have it.

Like flowers, human beings are heliotropes. We always seek and respond happily to sunshine and warm temperament.

It's so much easier to blame others for what happens to you than to look in the mirror to see how you did that.

Modernity is trying to answer Henry Higgins question: Why can't a woman be more like a man? Buddhism is trying to address the Buddha's insight that men need to become more like women.

Back in college, we all wanted to change the world. We didn't realize what we meant was we wanted to make the world conform to our idea of how it should be or could be. We didn't know then what I know now: it's so much easier to want to change the world than to change yourself. That hard slog takes real courage, wisdom and warriorship. It's a day job, a night job, tenured position you can't resign. But you are the only thing you have the power change. Btw: Change yourself and you've changed the world.

And finally, I do hate to contradict the Buddha but some things are just not impermanent. People still need to eat real food and get plenty of sleep. People still want to get married and have kids. Your bladder still doesn't care that you want to sleep through the night. To thrive human beings still as always need lots of love, attention, physical safety and nourishing memories. So keep giving generously. The life you brighten will be your own.

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