The Deeper Beauty Of My Lunch

 

The beauty of my lunch goes deep. Deep enough that I wanted to take a picture of it, to memorialize its ephemeral beauty. So that I may study and savor its richness long after it is gone.

I have had two compliments on it today, by coworkers expressing a desire for such a salad. I’m sure it looks quite unlike anything they are going to see all day. Excepting the wrapper of the Skittles package, it is way more colorful than anything to be found in the vending machine, which my coworkers jokingly refer to as the Wheel Of Death.

If I were to bring this salad to the art department of my local college I wouldn’t be surprised if some painter did not draw inspiration from it and ask if he might capture it on canvas for posterity’s sake . Perhaps I shall blow up the image, put it in a frame, and hang it upon my wall. I know just the spot.

They say that beauty is only skin deep but this goes deeper. It is a wonder for the eyes, but it is also an experience for the taste buds. Each bite a different texture of crunch. Each taste a subtle shift of flavor that blends with the rest. And when I have finished, I shall arise from the table not full, not sluggish, but energized and ready to return to work. The enjoyment of eating it is but a precursor to the joy of having it inside of me. It does not sit like a rock in my stomach but is already making its way through me, causing my body — not merely my tastebuds — to be awake and alert.

But it goes deeper. For it is a variety of natural foods, each packed with one or more of the vitamins and minerals which are essential for this soft machine which I inhabit. I have not filled myself with harmful food, like I once did in my childhood. I did not choose option C3 from the Wheel Of Death. All that I have ingested is of nature. All that which is consumed by me is what my body has evolved to find nourishment in. There is no falsity in it, no artificial coloring required. This, my friends, is lunch as it was intended by God, the Tao, the Mother Goddess, whatever spiritual reference resonates with you.

But it goes deeper. The food I eat was grown as a labor of love. Each vegetable was raised by those who choose to farm, who have a great love for it. It was not grown on some massive farm, not picked by exploited immigrants who do not have the same quality of life I do or the same career choices. It was grown by people very much like myself.

But it goes deeper. At the farmers market, these wonderful growers of food offer their wares for sale and I am able to meet and express my appreciation for their efforts. We talk, and in communicating we create the bonds with which our local community is knit. There is no automated checkout at the farmers market.

But it goes deeper. This salad’s importance has an impact upon the planet. Or rather, it doesn’t. Because there is nothing in it that has been shipped further than 30 miles. Most of it has not had to travel more than five. Some of it required no additional travel at all. While the grocery stores in town are filled with foods that have traveled across the country and from other continents, this food I eat has only a tiny footprint upon our tired and weary Mother. In eating this salad I am asking of Her as little as possible, and her gratitude for this is the gift of the freshest and most flavorful vegetables one can find. Bill Gates wishes he could eat produce as fresh as this.

But it goes deeper. This produce was not raised in a cage. The tomato never had its offspring torn from it at the moment of its birth. There was no animal suffering involved in the meal. No milk taken from a suckling’s lips to be given instead to an adult human. This salad did not require the repetitive motions of manual laborers performing on living creatures some of the most inhumane actions imaginable with a sharpened blade. Neither man nor beast was traumatized in the picking of these radishes.

But it goes deeper. This food was grown in accord with nature. It did not require unnatural chemicals or fertilizers. It is sustainable. Its creation does not unduly tax the ecosystem. It does not create massive manure ponds. The streams that acquire the runoff from the area where these vegetables were farmed do not carry algae to nearby rivers and lakes, killing off the fish and other creatures.

But it goes deeper. This salad may feed me, but it does little to feed the corporations that control so much of our food supply. That control so much of our economy. That influence our government, buy our elected officials, create commercials that induce our children to eat unnatural and unhealthy diets. That feed our children such unhealthy foods that they are unable to perform at school. That feed them such unnatural foods that our children require medications simply to function as normal children should.

That’s pretty deep. Way deeper than a Happy Meal. Way deeper than a Kit Kat commercial. Even deeper than the bottomless salad bowl at Olive Garden. Plus — and this is the best part — it makes my coworkers envious. Taste The Revolution.

The Road I Travel

A Drive To Work

(If you are a writer, you write about anything you experience.)

I now drive 40 minutes to get to work every day. As an environmentally inclined person, I feel bad about that, but I do need to make the house payments. And despite the fact it takes a bite out of my day, I enjoy the ride. It’s through rural areas, and a good stretch of it is along Lake Michigan.

What I notice most is the number of dead animals lying on the road: deer, racoons, skunks, opossums. Once, society took the time to remove the bodies from the road, but now we leave them there. We no longer have the resources available to do such things, no longer have the political will to do much of anything. Everything that is done is done through the market now, and the market doesn’t care about animals, dead or alive.

Perhaps it was only ever a matter of cosmetics anyway. Perhaps we were just lying to ourselves about how a technologically advanced society treats the natural world. We didn’t want to know what our need for speed was doing to the rest of God’s creatures, or the planet, so we hid the evidence. And now that we have come so far, we no longer care. We’ve grown used to it, like the factory farm I drive by that smells of animal waste, where semi-trucks daily haul out milk in shiny metallic tanks to be packaged in little cardboard containers imprinted with pictures of cows in a pasture.

A veneer of trees obscures much of the crops that grow behind them. Once I imagined vast forests lay beyond, now I know they are mere barrier walls for crops of corn to feed the cows to feed the people.

I reach the lake and soon I am driving past the closed nuclear power plant. Within its depths somewhere, God knows what is stored in God knows what kind of containers. There is no plan to deal with the radioactive waste, and so they sit and will gradually become forgotten about. It is part of our mental makeup to forget about things, no matter how important and dire they may be, if we don’t have a good way of dealing with them.

Not far past the mostly-abandoned nuclear station, I see several signs on people’s property warning about the health risks of wind turbines. I am incapable of understanding the degree of disconnect required to not notice the irony.

Working nights, I drive home in darkness. It seems I have encountered thunderstorms almost nightly this summer. I can never remember a summer so full of thunder. One becomes aware of such things when one has a skittish dog and a long drive at night.

I’ve become aware of the weather of late. It almost seems that nature itself has become unnatural. In late August, I noticed the moon was just a tiny sliver, but that sliver was more red than I ever remember seeing it. A harvest moon, I know, but still it seemed an omen to me. Perhaps it is just me. I know it is foolish to look for signs in the sky. And yet, the desire to do so is deeply imbedded in our species. Perhaps, like animals who can sense impending natural disasters, human beings too are capable sensing danger without being able to understand why.

Nightly I drive home and encounter the wildlife that must contend with traffic while crossing the road. I see a chipmunk speed across, a frog taking large jumps to cross as quickly as possible. I see a deer peering at me from a ditch, a couple of raccoons who, once committed, seem unable to turn back even with my car speeding right into their path. I brake and the disaster is narrowly averted.

My eyes are wide open, my mind alert. I do not want to hit anything, not even a frog. And yet there is something within me urging me to go faster. I need to get home, back to my life I’ve had to abandon in order to do my job to earn money to afford my car payments, car insurance, and gasoline. There is a subliminal urge too great for my conscious mind to control, and my foot applies a little more pressure to the gas pedal. Time is precious. I’ve calculated that driving even 5 miles an hour less should be sufficient to prevent an accident should something jump out in front of me, but somehow every time I look at the speedometer, I’m going faster again. Have to race my coworkers, have to beat them home, win the race.

What is wrong with me? Why do I love nature and yet not only drive so far to work, but drive so quickly from it? It is technology, it enables me to do what objectively I would never wish to do. It is like being home with a box of Twinkies: I would never imagine gorging myself sick on unnatural food, would certainly not go out of my way to do so. Ah, but if it is already there… If bad behavior is effortless and satisfying in the short term, it makes it far more difficult to do the right thing. If all it takes is pushing my foot a little harder on a gas petal, why not go faster? If gas is so damn cheap that I suffer little by polluting the atmosphere and endangering God’s little creations, it does make it more difficult to do the right thing. I do want to do the right thing.

The answer is to fashion a world in which it is easier to make good decisions. We’ve done a poor job of that. We’ve made a world where advertisement is constantly telling you to buy what you do not need, consume what is not good for you, trust in the system advertisers perpetuate. We are told that progress is our only good, and that progress means continually pushing further down on the accelerator.

We are, each one of us, driving down the road at too great a speed, heedless of the damage we cause to the natural world we ultimately rely upon for our survival. We must be reminded again and again that not only are we in control of the gas pedal, but we also have a brake.

Unnatural

I like to think I was wise by the age of five. Perhaps not, but I had already perceived something about the world that even today helps form my personal philosophy of life. I was born in 1966, so by the time I was five the United States was near the peak of its interest in the ecology movement. There was a sense that the way we were living was taking us in a dangerous direction and that we’d better do something about it if we didn’t want to be living in a world transformed by industrial waste. There was a sense, unlike in the 50’s, that technology was not an unqualified good, that science could just as well lead us to our doom as it could to our salvation. And somehow, even at that young age, I could detect the difference between natural and unnatural, and it felt to me the difference between God’s will and sacrilege. It was not an ideology but a feeling, as though the difference between what was healthy and what was not was obvious. What I could not understand was why the world was so willing to embrace that which was so wrong.

I remember seeing an advertisement on the back of a magazine that scared me even though I didn’t know what it meant. It was a picture of a man hooked up to a variety of machines. I asked my older brother what it was, and he told me it was about euthanasia. He said the person was being kept alive by all the machines attached to him and that some people thought that people like that should be allowed to die. I remember my brother asking if it were my dad if I would want him to be kept alive in that way. It was a horrible thought, my dad being in such a state. It was more horrible still, imagining that it was my decision to keep him alive or allow him to die. But I remembered I came to the decision quickly: if my dad were ever in such a position, I would allow him to die naturally than force him to live a mockery of an existence. Many years later, my dad approached me about his living will and asked me if I felt comfortable signing the form. After many years with that image in my mind, I knew that I could do what would be asked of me. I loved my father, but not to the degree of keeping him alive at any cost. To allow him to die was the right thing to do, I believe that now as I did at the age of five, when I was really too young to be contemplating the idea at all.

Perhaps the idea was already in my head because I watched more than my share of horror movies. Horror movies were always good at pointing out the dangers of going contrary to the laws of nature and God. My favorite was Frankenstein, and I knew that there were boundaries not meant to be crossed. Men attempting to create life, to play God, inevitably ended up creating monsters. While I sympathized with the monster, even the creator, I knew there was an inherent wrongness in such attempts. I loved the idea of scientific progress and dreamed of being an astronaut and exploring other worlds, but you just weren’t supposed to go tampering with human beings.

The idea of tampering with man’s nature has been the subject of many a Kinks song, and the first one that came to my awareness was Apeman. Admittedly, I was only four when my brother came home with the 45, so the reason I liked it was that it mentioned both Tarzan and King Kong. But at some level I connected with it. Somehow I knew we were children of nature and that it was not a good idea to start thinking otherwise. I’ve seen so many people adapt to whatever environment they were in, so willing to abandon the essential truth of what they are. Many years later I heard another Kinks song, Artificial Man, and it really brought home to me ideas that had been implanted in my head so many years ago by Ape Man as well as other influences:

Tell the world we finally did it.
Modified the population,
Put your senses and your mind
Under constant observation
Even when you're dreaming.
Replaced your nose, heart and lungs,
So shake me with your artificial hand.
We went and built a master race
To live within our artificial world.

 

But as bad as it was to modify humans, somehow it seemed the greater sacrilege to change nature itself. If man wished to alter himself—even if it was wrong—he was the victim of his own actions. But it seemed to me then as it does today that mankind is always trying to create some cheap copy of the real thing in order to sell it to the masses. We pollute lakes by building massive parking lots for water parks. I was still young, no more than eight or nine, when I had a dream I was at my favorite beach, a gorgeous stretch of lakeshore along Lake Huron, in the town of my mother’s birth. We were beginning to wade out into the deeper waters, the waves gradually getting us used to the cold water to come. When suddenly it occurred to me as I looked out towards where the great lake reached the sky along the horizon that they had done something to this spot that was so sacred a place to me. The water stretched out beyond me for perhaps another 40 feet, but at the end of it was merely a scene painted on a brick wall to simulate the sky and water that should have been there. They had converted this place of natural beauty into an indoor water park so that they would not have to take care of the lake that was beyond it. They had turned it into something fake and unnatural because that is what they tend to do. They could charge people for access while at the same time hide from the public the damage that they were doing to the larger world. I’m sure I could find song lyrics from the era to describe how that dream made me feel, also. Something like: “tear down paradise, put up a parking lot”.

I grew up in a time where it seemed the problems that mankind was causing through technology were beginning to be addressed. It seemed that people were beginning to look beyond the small worlds they lived in and see the repercussions to the larger environment that their actions caused. Man had lost his connection to nature, and the results could be catastrophic.

But unfortunately, it seemed that not much followed upon the initial awakening that occurred in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. Some laws were passed, and some things changed, but then society seemed to turn its attention to other interests. People’s awareness shrunk away from the broader implications of their actions, focused more on the near at hand and the immediate present. We are increasingly becoming lost in little worlds of our own, unaware of our relatedness to the entire earth we inhabit. But we can only stay safe within our little bubbles for so long before the consequences of our actions come smashing through. We look away from the big picture, but it is only a matter of time before our own backyards are affected by ripples that our lifestyles produce. It’s sad to think that adults can hide from truths that are so obvious that even a child can see them. I guess it takes a child’s eyes to see the obvious, and an adult’s mind to be able to train oneself to not see what is so very natural.

Happy Earth Day, everybody.