Slowly these will be defrosted, cooked, shared... loved. It is my hope that your freezer bear as much fruit. Peace to us all as we embark on this holiday season.
May your belly be full, your soul free of worries, and your mind overflowing with ideas!
A lot of people have been asking me where I'm from lately... and I have struggled every time with an answer.
I'm from nowhere.
The consummate gypsy, I never lay my head in any one place too long, which makes it hard to say where I'm from, but there is a bigger implication in that question. Where you are from also tacitly suggests what you are influenced by- what has defined you. Place defines us because it indicates what we've been exposed to, understand, love, accept, and abhor. When we know where a person comes from we can begin to make some kind of assessment of what they know and what they like - that's a normal, human behavior - a way to make sense of the unknown.
So, where am I from? I grew up outside of Chicago... but not in Chicago. I left and went to the following places for more or less time, for varying lengths of time, and often one or two times: Wisconsin, Germany, much of Europe (East and West), Russia, Kansas, South Africa, Massachusetts, Virginia & Washington D.C., Vermont... and Louisiana - New Orleans, to be exact. All of those places influenced me in distinct and profound ways. So which one am I from?
The place we "come from" is a self-defined space. Where we come from is a place inside of us, a place that we know in intimate ways... the streets we drive intuitively when we are too tired to think; the foods we cook when we are sick, lonely, or scared; the smells we know as indicators of seasons... these are the ways we know we belong to a place. When these places are removed, by force or choice, we learn them even more intimately. Is it true that we love a place more when it has been taken from us? I think it might be so.
As a true gypsy I know many places, many foods, many smells, many seasons... and I love so many of them, but none of them tell me where I am from. Perhaps I still wait for that space to open itself up to me, or maybe I am from all of them and they are all reconciled in my heart and soul. Until I am called home -to one place- I will continue to question my response every time you ask me where I am from.
So, I wonder... where are you from? Where is that secret spot that calls you home, and how do you know it when you see, smell, taste, or feel it?
In its most transactional sense food is energy, a resource required for life to exist. If we leave the discussion at this point however, we risk missing a more profound aspect of what food means in the larger cultural sense. Food is a signifier of cultural status, inclusion, and class, but it helps us to understand who we are through a deep systemic set of activities and spaces. Wendell Berry reminds us:
A culture is not a collection of relics or ornaments, but a practical necessity, and its corruption invokes calamity. A healthy culture is a communal order of memory, insight, value, work conviviality, reverence, aspiration. It reveals the human necessities and the human limits. It clarifies our inescapable bonds to the earth and to each other. It assures that the necessary restraints are observed, that the necessary work is done, and that it is done well (Berry, 1977, p.43).
In this definition culture is more than a way of making meaning, it provides a social function that clarifies and edifies both behaviors and objects. Culture in this sense is woven deeply into the matrix of the social system, and cannot be extracted from it without damaging it in a fundamental way. Food in this sense is more than a set of social signifiers; it is also a set of practices, spaces, and outcomes all of which speak to the larger structural value system of the social system.
[O]ne cannot fully understand cultural practices unless ‘culture,’ in the restricted, normative sense of ordinary usage is brought back into ‘culture’ in the anthropological sense, and the elaborate taste for the most refined objects is reconnected with the elementary taste for the flavors of food (Bourdieu, 1984, p. 1).
Bourdieu calls us to see past the normative aspect of culture and move into a more nuanced understanding of the permeation of culture in all that we do. In this sense food cannot be reduced to a set of ingredients or procedures, rather, it must be gauged in how it is set within the activities of social life. Not only are we concerned with what is eaten, when it is eaten, and with whom, but also we must extend our vision to see how the production and allocation of food is structured within the social system. This examination asks us to look at food as a complete system and it opens our eyes to where value is placed on the resource of food as well as the meaning of food. If we reduce our examination of food to the kitchen or the dining room we miss very important places within the social system that are imbued with value and distribution of resources. These choices within a society represent more than a static snapshot of value, rather they express the conversations of changing values.
For the different forms of consumption in hierarchical societies are not simply transformations of a timeless cultural pattern that continues unaffected by a changing social system. They are in conflict with one another not only at the formal level but in action too. They may generate conflict and conflict may generate change (Goody, 1982, p. 35).
Changes in the food system represent larger shifts within society. As Brillat-Savarin has famously stated: show me what men eat and I will tell you who they are – we can understand something of social meaning, value, class, and change when we look at how food is produced, distributed, fabricated, consumed and disposed of as a complete system. If we are to move past understanding culture in Bourdieu’s “restrictive, normative sense” we will need to understand food practices not as bifurcated events, but as a systemic representation of the social structure which they serve to sustain. It is the goal of this paper to begin this refocusing of how we study the culture of food. I intend to outline the five phases of the food system in order to create the framework through which we can begin to see the deep connection between food and people. In my experience the most effective way to accomplish this is through the power of narrative. It is my hope that by telling a brief story about the food of a region (in this case the Acadiana region of Louisiana) I will be able to show how all parts of the food system weave together to form the container of cultural meaning and value. Ultimately, this is a story about sustained survival, and it holds within it the potential key to how we perceive a sustainable food system. Instead of creating new technologies that dismantle our cultural systems there is the potential to return to the traditions and heritage we have won over many centuries of learning how to live in our world, and on our world. It is to the bayou we must now depart.
Since I was a little girl I've had a recurring dream that comes when things are tough in my life. Water comes up- usually in a deluge, although sometimes I wander into it, and most often, it's in the form of a wave with dreadful winds accompanying it. I've learned that sometimes in life the tide comes in and we are left treading water, waiting for things to get a bit more shallow.
Lately it seems I know a lot of people who are treading water and the tide does not seem to be turning. Divorces, lost jobs, lost mortgages, injuries, deaths... change- painful, un-wished-for change. Anyone who knows me knows that I like change. I change careers, places, jobs, and possessions rather often. The only thing constant about me is my willingness for change. However, even I have my limits, and some changes are more remitting than others.
I have a friend who recently wrote a scholarly paper on resilience. Now, I am not familiar with the methodology or the data set, but what his paper says has what those in the academy call "face validity"... it seems to make sense on an intuitive level. He claims that there are five elements of resilience:
The desire to improve the persistent needs of groups and individuals
The satisfaction of seeing change and improvement, one person at a time
Support networks of family and colleagues
Spiritual beliefs
Spiritual practices
I guess I agree with those, and certainly I've called on all of them in the past six months as I've watched loved ones go through all of the worst things people can in this life. But there is something else... some other element to resilience.
Last week Richard Campanella was speaking at Loyola in New Orleans and he quoted two definitions of resilience from the Oxford English Dictionary:
The ability to return to a prior form.
The ability to recover readily from adversity.
Of course, he was talking about New Orleans, and there is an obvious resilience in that story. He also indicated that the second definition was probably more appropriate in that case. But what is it that allows us to recover? How do we 'come back' when all odds are against us?
I know for myself it is like a switch gets hit. After all of the tears, the mis-spoken words of anger and rage, when I surrender and say: "I give"... something just cools down and the soft whisper comes from deep in my soul: "let's try this again, shall we?"
Which leads me to think that resilience is a natural part of the process of change and life. Like the roses in the image at the beginning of this post, things go away... die, either metaphorically or really. And as those petals and leaves fall to the ground they carry with them the memories of joy we generate through the five themes my friend outlined above... which is why change hurts so much. We embed ourselves in others when we love them, and when those things decompose and die it hurts because part of us goes with them.
Let's not forget though that those petals and leaves, those things that die, compost into the fertile stuff of the next season. Good compost comes from dead shit. It really is that simple, and that true. So, when you love, know that it is not forever, and for heaven's sake... don't stop loving. As soon as you stop loving people, and things, and jobs, and places you lose the fodder that will compost into your future garden.
And as for that water... remember, you need that for things to grow as well. It may be deep when it comes, but it leaves alluvial stuff behind that your garden needs to grow.
The following is an inventory of my freezer... take it for what it is, and make of it what you will.
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