Friday, July 16, 2010

The Staff of Life

We were looking at old snapshots, the kind where the color is already fading, and even a few that have come down to us in black and white. There were classic fishing trips at Midwestern reservoirs, with the men walking up from the dock after a brisk morning of casting lures into misty coves; there were backyard reunions with cousins flocking around picnic tables covered with potluck bounty. My wife pointed out how thin most of the relatives were. There were exceptions, of course, but most of my aunts and uncles, people who were born in the 1920s and 30s and 40s, looked average back then but they were, by today’s standards, not just fit but absolutely skinny. Most of us, myself included, don’t look that way now, and we don’t need a government-sponsored study to tell us what we can see with our own eyes: in the intervening years something dramatic happened to our diet and our way of life, and we don’t quite know what to do about it.

Sure, hard economic conditions helped keep folks slender in the old days. In I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith’s beautiful 1948 novel about love and family life in tough times, the young hero, seventeen-year-old Cassandra Mortmain, comes to expect that a skimpy Depression-era bread-and-butter snack will stand in place of a proper evening meal, and even the hearty butter she knew growing up has been economized away in favor of pale, unsightly and unsatisfying margarine. At least the bread is still good traditional British bread. “I thank heaven,” she says, “there is no cheaper form of bread than bread.”

And yet of course we now know that there is. For there is no cultural expression, no fundamental human need, that cannot be cheapened; there is nothing so central to our life that somebody won’t try to get rich by hawking an adulterated version.  No cheaper form of bread than bread? Sure, there is. You know what aisle it’s in over at your local grocery store. Maybe a pale, insubstantial loaf of it rests on the counter now, not far from your radio and your coffee pot. There’s one at our house.

For in the years since the publication of Dodie Smith’s novel, we have come to accept and perhaps even enjoy emptier and emptier foods. We should be able to create better lives as easily as we slide into these more impoverished ones, but we don’t. Why is that? How did we debase something so central as bread, the very staff of life?

The writer Karl Kraus talked about “baking bread from bread crumbs,” and by that he meant a society gathering up its scraps and crumbs and second-rate goods and cynically assembling them into barely acceptable facsimiles of the real thing and selling them off. Just think of any mediocre situation comedy on television, recycling the same little stories and jokes until the viewers are left snoring on their couches, and you know what it means to bake bread from bread crumbs. Doesn’t that sound tasty?

But let’s not berate ourselves for having become a passive society that feeds itself badly. Instead, let’s look around at our resources. Right now, today, Michiana’s farmer’s markets are filling up with real tomatoes and sweet corn. We’ve got community gardeners all around the neighborhood, socializing and getting good exercise and eating well, and folks who buy a weekly share of organic produce from nearby farms. There are people growing vegetables in little patches even in their front yards. All the color that drained out of those old snapshots, all the taste and good taste that drained out of our lives, is still there for the harvesting.

Broadcast by Ken Smith on July 16, 2010 • WVPE's Audio Archive
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