'Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who you are.'

So said the epicure Brillat-Savarin, and while an ontological argument based on that aphorism would be hard to sustain in many quarters (or so I pray, at any rate: the idea of my body decomposing into lardons of cured pork and boxes of Good-n-Plenty while the walls of my veins leaked Barolo and Amarone into the velvet walls of my coffin strikes far more terror in me than the normal image which -disturbingly, perhaps - doesn't disturb me in the least), and the more transcendent aspects of his musings on gastronomy and gourmandise are equally unsuited to the realities of our present world, the above quote, read entirely wrongly, of course, and viewed through an ethical rather than aesthetic lens, is what I want to get to here today.

(Update 06.12.08: That was really all one sentence. Someone, save me from myself.)

People like to think of globalism as a brand-new phenomenon. And I will admit that with the population of the world so much greater than ever before, every nation or region has a greater impact on others: I have more people producing more waste over here in country X, so there is a greater chance of some of it reaching you in country Y, for example. But the Chinese have been a global power for millennia, over land and by sea. The silver in Chinese coffers plundered by the British opium trade and subsequent wars and concessions was largely from South American mines, while the tea that the British came to love was, as we all know, an ancient part of Chinese gastronomic culture. Marco Polo brought pasta to Italy, and the cotton plantations of the southern United States arose to fill the growing gap between India's long history of production and current need, while the US is now poised in coming years to become the leader in 'hauling coals to Newcastle' quite literally -- not to mention the huge markets of China, India, Russia, as well as many smaller countries in the developing world.

So.

It may have been the case before, but now that the stakes are manifestly higher we admit it more readily: we are all in this together. Even George W. Bush has come to acknowledge that, at least as far as the ozone layer is concerned, human beings can have some kind of corporate and individual impact on the world as a whole. And I believe that food, our use of it, our approach to it, our taking it for granted or choosing to be deliberate in our choices, can be a significant aspect of living up to our values.

Every left-leaning, bunny-hugging simpleton will recite the evils of McDonalds anytime there is a perceptible lapse in conversation. And, in the Northwest at least, anyone desirous of impressing upon his audience the virtuousness of his life and lower intestine will not fail to (re-) state (the obvious:) his unswerving allegiance to the aisles of Whole Foods for all his home cooking and (natural) grooming products needs.

But in the same way that my sending a check every once in a while to Mercy Corps or the Red Cross does not confer something akin to proactive moral immunity, a lifetime's absolution, or mean I thus have carte blanche to perform human sacrifices or set the neighbor's house on fire because I did good elsewhere, trusting a preacher, or a friend, or - for heaven's sake! - a retailer, as gatekeeper for all our individual, specific ethical choices sells our own conscience and powers of rational contemplation short. There simply is no one guidebook containing every possible moral conundrum an individual can face in the moment. And I think that before we can get to 'we are what we eat' in its moral sense, we have first to accept that we are what we do, overall. We are the choices we make, the mistakes we regret, the issues we feel compelled to stand for, and the hand we do or do not offer a suffering soul.

How this all ties in to food, not to mention my enduring and recurrently proven faith in the human voice coming through miles of wires and anonymity and preconceptions, and not forgetting, as well, my own well-deserved humility and willingness to put crow in cream sauce on my own dinner menu when appropriate, will have to wait until next time, as this preamble to what I intended to say is already too long without even having a body yet!

Ess, Bench, Sei a Mensch!

And while we are on the subject of stupidity, I would like to expatiate a bit on one of my long-held peeves: use of the content-free, yet so perniciously, routinely, and vacuously turned-to word 'classy.'

Now, I hear you rustling in your chair, getting ready to object, 'It can't be content-free, since I know what it means!' And I see your point (somewhat): there is a meaning, to some extent. My problem is that that meaning is now predicated on air, which is a bad thing to predicate most things on, unless those things are respiration, or flying.

I say now because things have changed a great deal in the past few centuries. These days it's harder to find a daimyo, serf, lady-in-waiting, knight errant or invigorating pas d'armes than it is a suburban mother of three driving a sensible mid-size sedan. First it was that whole business with Gutenberg, then Diderot, Condorcet, Rousseau, Kant. The Church, King, and God got disentangled, and Man with his Declaration of Rights stepped into the vacuum. Then came Marx, Lincoln, child labor laws, compulsory education, corporations, self-made men, literate freedmen and chimney sweeps.

(And et cetera.)
Add in the First World War, department stores, film, dance halls, television, and ascendant America, and what remains in the 'developed world' is demotic American culture writ large. Class distinction is a monetary distinction only, no longer rightly carrying with it connotations of difference in education, refinement, or taste in amusements. Popular culture, now the prevailing cultural expression, filters 'up' from the masses or out from the advertising industry and routinely influences 'high' art. Meanwhile, in countries where there still exist aristocracies, their scions grow up listening to the same rap and rock as do most other teenagers worldwide.

In the U.S., having taken the Enlightenment seriously, or at least the parts of it we felt applied to men of European ancestry, we wanted no truck with hereditary title, and sought instead to create a sort of meritocracy and a culture of opportunity. A poor man could through industry become rich, and some did. And then they realized that they weren't acting as they imagined rich people to. They hadn't the training. They hadn't acquired any acquired tastes. They didn't know a cantata from a canticle, couldn't tell Burne-Jones from Botticelli. So rich boys were sent away to learn Latin and Greek and history and politics as their European (economic) counterparts did, while rich girls learned ladylike arts and comportment at finishing school, the better to resemble people with money who had a family history of being people with money.

But it is all quite different now. We still have a robust tradition of philanthropy amongst the very wealthy in this country, and of that we should be proud. But with regard to 'class' being a reliable predictor of erudition, conduct, diction, taste, or 'classiness,' I need only point to George W. Bush and Paris Hilton as two notable examples among many with regard to which that is patently not true. Examples pertaining to either of these two admittedly egregious cases are too numerous to mention, obviously, but I think Bush's question to Brazilian President Fernando Cardoso in 2001, 'Do you have blacks, too?' (drawn from a conversation they were having about difficult race relations in the two countries, according to Cardoso), is just as good as any I might pick, as it is nicely multilayered in its resignation to (optimistic reading), or embrace of (more realistic version), ignorance, insularity, ineptitude, and indelicacy.

And perhaps that is where the problem lies. On the one hand, there is nothing to aspire to. On the other, the major cognitive divide in society is between youth and age. Both categories are fluid and subjective, but since 'youth' is widely believed to be a 'state of mind' rather than chronological fact, it can be learned, attained, much in the manner of adulthood in days past. The youthful demotic is now normative. Being young is what the old aspire to.

Fame is what matters, and it is viewed as simply Popularity on a much larger scale. Bush is the Homecoming King because he is in the White House; Ms. Hilton the Queen because her images, flattering or otherwise, are everywhere. He enacts variously the role of the sitcom buffoon, the warrior-hero, the rodeo cowboy, and the child king eternally under the tutelage of this or that éminence grise.

He is under no obligation to behave with the 'dignity befitting his position,' as his position is Star. He is the Captain of the Football Team; what he does or says is cool, or, more alarmingly, correct, by virtue of his having done or said it. His imprimatur is sufficient. The same with Ms. Hilton or other celebrities, or by virtue of the fact that a particular item is sold at a particular store. There is no global warming because George Bush says it is a fiction; I must buy these shoes (or a cheap knockoff of the style) because Saks says they are desirable. I must listen to Phish, or go to Burning Man, because (at 40, or 50, or 60) the kids I think look 'coolest' (or is it more comprehensible, and more as I envision my youthful self?) do...

In any of these three cases, I think the root problem is the same: immaturity, a symptom of which is the inability to think for oneself. This willful ceding of all higher-level though to the monarch and to Madison Avenue, which would have scandalized the thinkers of the last few centuries had they been forced to witness it, is routine for us now. Second nature. Nearly ineluctable. This tendency is evidenced in our pandemic of not voting as well as in our voting, as noted previously, for people we fancy we would 'like' were we to encounter them in a social situation. It is also apparent in our decisions about where we live, why, and what criteria we routinely turn to when meeting others.

But more on that then. Time for bed and books and sweet dreams,

so whatever it was I was going to say about Lautréamont with regard to all this, and whatever Grand Pronouncements I was hoping to get to about stupidity, cupidity, faux anything, the unconquerable vacuity of the newly rich and poorly educated, and the few (very few) defensible occasions on which one might wear a tweed jacket (I know, I knooooow, and it hurts me far worse than it does you, but some people simply don't listen to their clothing consciences!) will simply have to wait.