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Gretchen Bailey
Pr. Yero
English 1000-112
21 November 2014
From Lunchables to the Chopping Block:
Finding My Place in “Foodie” Culture
It may not appear glamorous, but this crusty old pan is one of my greatest treasures. It’s
big, black and heavy, the kind that wives wallop their husbands with in cartoons. On the outside
it’s rough and flaky, but inside it’s smooth and shiny. “Seasoning” is what people call the layers
that build up on a cast iron pan as it is used over time. The fat or oil that you cook with seals the
metal and creates a non-stick surface. Rather than needing to be scrubbed off, the old timers say
the more seasoning your pan has, the better. I love to think about the history going into every
meal I cook. I took this pan from my mom’s house when I moved out. According to her, my dad
brought it to the partnership. My mom doesn’t know where he got it, but he had it when they
met. So that makes upwards of 40 years at least this pan has held food for my family. And rarely
does a day go by at my house that the pan isn’t filled with something delicious like buttermilk
cornbread, cheesy vegetable frittatas, or garlic-heavy refried beans.
I think about food a lot (as my partner can tell you, I even start fights about food a lot),
though it’s easy these days to not think much about it. You can eat out, and other people will
make food and serve it to you. You can buy frozen, canned or deli case meals. Even if we get all
the ingredients and make a meal ourselves, rarely do we grow, gather, raise or hunt them—they
are all waiting on the shelves of the store, organized into sections for us, and we exchange
money for them. To get this money, most of us have to have some kind of job. But for most
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living beings, including humans of the past, acquiring and eating food is one’s job! For us
modern humans, genuine interest in food is considered a hobby.
People who are passionate about food these days are known as “foodies.” This label
includes many subcategories—there are the urban serial restaurant-goers who are always
searching for the next amazing hole-in-the-wall, the hip chefs experimenting with expensive
comfort food, the adventurous eaters who go out of their way to eat alligator and truffles. You
could say I’m a foodie, though I don’t identify with the aforementioned types. I find the label
itself distasteful—besides being an annoying word, it further defines a group who chooses food
as its hobby, rather than a central aspect of life that is connected to all others. Engaging with
pop-foodieism is a fun indulgence, but food for me is more central, more every-day and yet also
more sacred than that. One of my food heroes, Jamie Oliver, has a mission to demystify cooking
and empower the average Joe to learn basic techniques and buy fresh, seasonal ingredients.
Eating this way, he says, is healthier, cheaper, and tastier (“Food Philosophy”). Not to mention
its environmental and political effects. Good food is possible for people with busy lives and tight
budgets, as well as those who have the ability to dine on fancy fricasseed pig’s foot.
I grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, a city with every convenience, not having to think
much about food. At the same time, I was lucky because unlike many of my friends’ parents, my
mom and dad made homemade meals for us. My mom, like her own mother, was into fresh fruits
and vegetables, fish, soups and stews, whole grains. She introduced me to a wide variety of
healthy foods—she liked light meals and never cared for dessert. My dad was the one who got
me into decadent things like dark chocolate, coffee, and puff pastry. I usually helped him when
he made bran muffins, pancakes, rich coffee cake, and deserts like shiny hot fudge sauce or
chocolate birthday cakes. He taught me to always cut the sugar. Sometimes his baked goods
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would turn out weird because either he would forget an ingredient, or I would eat a quarter of the
batter when he wasn’t looking.
But privileged as we were to eat homemade meals, my sister and I would beg for the food
other kids had at school. Candy that turned your tongue bright colors, neon drinks, Dunkaroos
and Lunchables were what we wanted. Sometimes my mom would indulge us—I know we got
Lunchables for a while. She got us mid-grade snacks like bagel bites, combos and toaster pastries
with mysterious syrupy filling and white icing. But she probably knew we would thank her one
day for feeding us more wholesomely than we wanted.
Around age 12, I went vegetarian. I couldn’t stand the thought of eating the flesh of
murdered animals. The heroes in most of the stories I read or watched were animals! In the dimly
lit booths of restaurants, wreathed in cigarette smoke from the smoking section, I taunted my
little sister as she ate her hamburgers, saying “Mooo! Mooo!” in a cute little voice. It used to
make her cry, but I thought myself justified—that everyone should be forced to face the truth. I
had decided that I wouldn’t eat meat again until I could be a part of its killing.
In my late teens, I started being responsible for my own meals. At that time, most of my
friends and I were vegans. That means that we ate no animal products, including meat, eggs and
dairy. This diet choice was a response to learning about the terrible conditions of factory
farming. It was quite a challenge to find prepared food that fit this diet. You could find me sitting
on the white linoleum floor in Kroger, looking through a package’s fine print for lactose, rennet,
or various other byproducts. Even “natural flavors” could mean something that was once animal.
Reading labels taught me about the dubious nature of industrialized food, while a restricted diet
and my small budget encouraged me to start cooking more.
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When I was 21, I got the chance I was waiting for to be a part of killing animals for food
and “break my veg.” I was part of a group that was adopting a “hundred mile diet” for four
weeks in Oregon as part of a sustainable living skills program. Anything that we couldn’t get
locally was out, including most spices, oil, sugar, tobacco, coffee… all the good stuff. We even
took a field trip to the coast to gather our salt, which involved hours of stirring big metal pans of
seawater and stoking the fires on the sand to evaporate it. We had to learn to bake our own
sourdough bread, which required days of planning ahead and techniques that needed lots of
practice. After all that work, when our clumsy loaves came out of the clay oven, they were
always as hard and heavy as bricks, but we ate them anyway.
But the biggest psychological shift for me was eating meat. I had feared this day. I was
tense as I watched the ducks struggling in the unrelenting grip of human arms in their last
minutes of being alive. I wouldn’t step forward and wield the hatchet this day, though a couple
of the other young, squeamish Americans would. But to begin, Macorel from Haiti showed us
how it was done at his home. He set the duck down with its feet on the earth, gently bent its head
back and held it pinned behind its wings and sliced its throat– blood started to pour as he
released the duck from his hands and it burst forth and ran wildly into the cornfield to die alone.
We Americans were all crying while Macorel watched us with confusion.
Next was the messy butchering and cleaning process with the smells and textures that
made it hard to think of eating, and then cooking while also chopping wood for the clay stoves.
Finally we sat down at the big table with a feast before us, featuring steaming duck stirfry with
greens fresh from the garden—only a precious small serving per person. Full of a mixture of
emotions, I blended the ducks’ bodies into my own.
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This blending is the essence of my understanding of food not as a static thing but a
process of transformation. Food is taking something living and incorporating it into something
else living, releasing energy from one place and capturing it in another. As much or little as we
think about it, we are all wrapped up in the food chain. Focusing on food has enabled me to learn
first-hand about my place in the web of life and to develop my sense of ethics. Being human in
addition to an animal, food is not only a necessity but also an art form. It gives us an opportunity
to celebrate events and unique cultures, to carry the past into the present by making traditional
recipes, and to bring people together. As the legendary food bible The Joy of Cooking puts it, “as
a source of satisfaction and renewal, few daily rituals have the extraordinary potential of the act
of preparing and sharing a meal” (Rombauer, Becker, and Becker 4). Above all, focusing on
food is a grounding experience for me. When life gets complicated, eating a delicious meal is
always a good place to start getting things back in order.
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Works Cited
Oliver, Jamie. “Food philosophy.” Jamie Oliver Official Website. n.p., n.d.Web. 12 November
2014.
Rombauer, Irma S., Marion Rombauer Becker, and Ethan Becker. The Joy of Cooking. 1931.
New York: Scribner, 2006. Print.