The Agony and The Ecstasy of the Table

I thought I would take a few minutes to see if you would like to travel with me back in time to revisit exactly what the intentional table is and how it's considered here in our little conversation and in real life.

If you asked me to cook for you, I would be delighted. That's all there is to it. I wouldn't question what our budget was, what the logistics were, or really what it was that you wanted to eat when you're with whom. All those things are in a particular way beside the point. What this means is that you're asking me to create with intention, something for you that actually serves me equally. I can't prepare something intentionally meant for your health, benefit, welfare, and because I love you without being fully participatory in the creation of it, and the delight of seeing you Woolf-it down, of course!

Here is what I would say to you then, as now, at the Intentional Table. By the way, if you don’t have a poem, some prose, a recipe idea, or at least a damn snappy question or modestly radical proclamation to make, you should get that manifesto ready there, Trotsky, because it will be required for services. Love takes 2, yo.

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Eat Food

Sounds easy doesn't it these days this is quite a lot easier said than done especially when 17,000 new products show up in the supermarket each year all vying for your food dollar (or I should say your food hundo…) but most of these items don't deserve to be called food. I prefer to call them “edible food like substances,” or “crap.” I always wince a little when I say ‘crap’ you know, just for effect.

They are highly processed concoctions designed by food scientists consisting mostly of ingredients derived from corn and soy, that no normal person keeps in the pantry, and they contain chemical additives with which the human body has not been long acquainted. Today, much of a challenge of eating well comes down to choosing real food and avoiding these industrial novelties.

So, what is food, then?

Don’t eat anything your grandmother would not recognize as food. Imagine your great grandmother or grandmother at your side, as you roll down the isles of a supermarket. You're standing together in front of the dairy case she picks up a package of Go-Gurt portable yogurt tubes and hasn't a clue what this plastic cylinder of colored and flavored gel could possibly be. Is it food or is it toothpaste? Hair gel maybe? It could be anything but it’s not food.

There are now thousands of food products in the supermarket that our ancestors simply wouldn't recognize as food. They would walk right past it, or think that they somehow ended up in the auto care section of the store. The reasons to avoid eating such complicated food products are many and go beyond the various chemical additives and corn and soy derivatives they contain, or the plastics in which they are typically packaged some of which are probably toxic.

Check this article out, it is recent and will demonstrate exactly what I am speaking to. Plastic must be delicious, because we all eat so much of it!

Water! Water? Well, Kinda…

Today foods are processed in ways specifically designed to get us to buy and eat more by pushing our evolutionary buttons that are our inborn preferences for sweetness, fat, and salt. These tastes are in fact, difficult to find in nature but cheap and easy for the food scientist to deploy with the result that food processing conditions us to consume much more of these rarities that is good for us. The great grandma rule will help keep most of these items out of your cart. Put the Flaming Nacho Cheese Doritos back where they go, next to the pet litter.

By the way, if your great grandmother was a terrible cook or eater, or you can substitute someone else’s grandmother freely, I would try a Sicilian or a French one which seem to work particularly well. My mother could not cook, not even a little. I wish I had a mediterranean matriarch.

I am not sure about you, but if 4 out of 5 doctors recommend something, I usually run for it. We have been sold a bag of goods (literally) for so long that we can no longer distinguish between items that appear as food.

Next week, we will have more ideas about the basic rules of food, the ‘you should consider this’ rules.

Now, did you have something to read to us? Pass the Go-Gurts, will ya? (*wince*)

Thanks for reading!

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