back to part one
With a belly full of starchy edible tuber byproducts and what was advertised as cheese I pondered the state of school food and it was while standing there watching some very overweight young "athletes" play basketball and looking around at what one health educator called "tonnage" in the general crowd that I began to develop the thesis that this school and others have a collective eating disorder. Several thoughts came to mind from my past experiences and education.
I don't hear about many people in school teaching Plato's parable of the cave anymore. We are too busy trying to make everybody into scientists and engineers. There's no money in philosophy. The cave was the Greek precursor to the Matrix. Living in a world of illusion, the dwellers of the cave assumed that the shadows they saw were reality. Being a part time philosopher I could but not help but speculate that we have to come to live in a food "cave." We assume that what we are being offered and served is food. For must people, especially, the current generation, it's all they know. Their "truth" lies in their experience.
Plato and Glaucon speculate that if the dwellers of the cave saw reality, truth and sunlight, it would cause them pain. Perhaps it is better to stay in the cave and be comfortable in our illusions.Indeed it has been my experience leaving the cave of the industrial food system that my insights and enlightenment are not always welcome. There is a complex psychology behind all this. The first reaction is that I am trying to take something away whereas my perception is that I am trying to liberate them.
The second thought I had was recalling the words of a Lakota Elder whom I used to spend a great deal of time with. The Lakota had a word for the people who hoarded the fat of the buffalo after a hunt: Wasicu (Waa see Choo) literally means takers of the fat. On the great plains of North America, buffalo fat was a highly prized commodity. Winters were long and bitter cold. The people needed that precious fat to survive. But as in any group of human beings, there were greedy people who tried to take more than their share.
When Caucasian people arrived and began what is now a familiar and ugly story of conquest, the Lakota people who observed the habits and behaviors of primarily English speaking people began to call them wasicu as well. Eventually, the term referred almost exclusively to English speaking people. As I looked around at the crowd and what the illusions they were consuming and their love of fat I ran all these thoughts around my mind. The ancient Lakota and the Greeks would have much to say about our current state of affairs.
The third thought I entertained was what an alien or advanced species from another planet would conclude after observing the dietary practices of the world's richest country. I speculated they would conclude we were primitive, insane, suicidal or all three. With all the wonderful and delicious bounty the best we would come up with was a mix of chemicals that we chose to call food. At that basketball game, the concessions stand offered nothing that would actually pass for food under close scrutiny. If not suicidal as a country we are at the minimum self destructive.
I have been joking, only half in jest, that I am a cultural anthropologist in my own country. As I try to come first to an understanding of the nature of the food beast I am encountering I look through the eyes of a visitor or guest. What motivates people to eat food which kills them? Why do they resist becoming healthy and vibrant? Is it like in Plato's cave that the first exposure to sunlight (truth) would cause pain? Are they like the greedy wasicu of Lakota culture who operate primarily out of fear that they won't have enough fat to endure the winter? Or is it just simply that we have all become content to become the feedlot ourselves?
With a belly full of starchy edible tuber byproducts and what was advertised as cheese I pondered the state of school food and it was while standing there watching some very overweight young "athletes" play basketball and looking around at what one health educator called "tonnage" in the general crowd that I began to develop the thesis that this school and others have a collective eating disorder. Several thoughts came to mind from my past experiences and education.
I don't hear about many people in school teaching Plato's parable of the cave anymore. We are too busy trying to make everybody into scientists and engineers. There's no money in philosophy. The cave was the Greek precursor to the Matrix. Living in a world of illusion, the dwellers of the cave assumed that the shadows they saw were reality. Being a part time philosopher I could but not help but speculate that we have to come to live in a food "cave." We assume that what we are being offered and served is food. For must people, especially, the current generation, it's all they know. Their "truth" lies in their experience.
Plato and Glaucon speculate that if the dwellers of the cave saw reality, truth and sunlight, it would cause them pain. Perhaps it is better to stay in the cave and be comfortable in our illusions.Indeed it has been my experience leaving the cave of the industrial food system that my insights and enlightenment are not always welcome. There is a complex psychology behind all this. The first reaction is that I am trying to take something away whereas my perception is that I am trying to liberate them.
The second thought I had was recalling the words of a Lakota Elder whom I used to spend a great deal of time with. The Lakota had a word for the people who hoarded the fat of the buffalo after a hunt: Wasicu (Waa see Choo) literally means takers of the fat. On the great plains of North America, buffalo fat was a highly prized commodity. Winters were long and bitter cold. The people needed that precious fat to survive. But as in any group of human beings, there were greedy people who tried to take more than their share.
When Caucasian people arrived and began what is now a familiar and ugly story of conquest, the Lakota people who observed the habits and behaviors of primarily English speaking people began to call them wasicu as well. Eventually, the term referred almost exclusively to English speaking people. As I looked around at the crowd and what the illusions they were consuming and their love of fat I ran all these thoughts around my mind. The ancient Lakota and the Greeks would have much to say about our current state of affairs.
The third thought I entertained was what an alien or advanced species from another planet would conclude after observing the dietary practices of the world's richest country. I speculated they would conclude we were primitive, insane, suicidal or all three. With all the wonderful and delicious bounty the best we would come up with was a mix of chemicals that we chose to call food. At that basketball game, the concessions stand offered nothing that would actually pass for food under close scrutiny. If not suicidal as a country we are at the minimum self destructive.
I have been joking, only half in jest, that I am a cultural anthropologist in my own country. As I try to come first to an understanding of the nature of the food beast I am encountering I look through the eyes of a visitor or guest. What motivates people to eat food which kills them? Why do they resist becoming healthy and vibrant? Is it like in Plato's cave that the first exposure to sunlight (truth) would cause pain? Are they like the greedy wasicu of Lakota culture who operate primarily out of fear that they won't have enough fat to endure the winter? Or is it just simply that we have all become content to become the feedlot ourselves?
to be continued
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