Not done with eating of course. No, not that.
And just before I start in on this latest rather long, mixed, occasionally ranting offering, first some ‘news’ that will come as no suprise to anyone: the multi-national food companies, supermarkets and global producers conspire to steal even more of what — little — money you and I have remaining…
“Do no harm”, eh?
Burn them down, burn them all down. Today. “It’s the only way to be sure.” 1
It’s all about borders; remove all borders.
I realise that sometimes — not always mind, but, I will admit, possibly sometimes — there are some posts on this blog have been less than obviously about food and eating and pigs; but I’m of the opinion that food and politics and community and love and kindness are inextricably linked, no difference between ‘good’ in one apparently unlinked silo and ‘good’ in another. What I’m striving to write down, trying to describe in here — in trying to define my terms — is how all the various pieces, the things I choose to talk about aren’t actually discrete pieces but simply different views of the same thing, filtered through artificial borders, artificial differences; that they all fit together as one, because they are one, one thing, just different spy-holes onto the same reality.
In the exact same way that the older religions of the world describe a parable of the “blind men and an elephant”, used to teach that any claims by someone to knowing (or speaking of) any kind of absolute truth are based on their own limited, subjective experience; you’re guilty of ignoring other people’s limited, subjective experiences which may be equally true.
Here’s an elephant being assessed by some blind people.
So, whilst I lay no claim to my absolute truth being correct, equally, I do submit that, together, as a group, as a community, we are one.
United we can make a stand; divided — sure as shit — we fall.
And the attempts to separate us by race, by creed, by colour, gender, class or any other artificial difference, is merely an attempt to deny the truth of everyones’ fundamental humanity, that we are all heir to that same humanity, irrespective of any of the borders, any of the crass, ‘paperwork’ and rules and regulations and barriers and processes that they use to try to raise one group higher than another or to deny one in favour of another.
I recall a piece by Lester Bangs; geological eons ago. About white supremacists. That it’s just as relevant today, 40+ years later is, frankly, an horrendous comment on how little we have changed or learnt. Aren’t we (us humans) supposed to get better? Isn’t that what 3,000+ years of “civilisation” is supposed to have done for us?
Or is it all just a waste of our time?
We choose to watch Al Jazeera more often that, say, the BBC. Whilst it will have a bias — of course — it’s far less in thrall to the West & to the giant media organisations with their pabulum diets interleaved with (sometimes subtly, sometimes not) “messages from our sponsors”.
Just very occasionally, they manage to get the right tone.
Interestingly, I’d first spelt the word as “pablum”, which was how I’d first (mis-)heard it years ago as referring to something that is “simplistic, bland, mushy, unappetising, or infantile.” Pablum I see had also long been used in botany and medicine to refer to nutrition or substances where the nutritive elements are passively absorbed and was therefore picked as the brand-name of a processed baby food produced in the 1930s.
Val wrote an essay entitled “Art Bollocks” some years ago as part of one of her many academic projects. She wasn’t the first to coin the term but she introduced me to it as her description of an industry where you can’t become a fully paid up practitioner or even discuss what “Fine Art” means or stands for, without learning the vocabulary and you can’t just learn it you have to be taught it. At great expense. I perfectly understand the need for my heart surgeon to have been trained and tested and tested again and again, for my blow-fish chef to have been trained and tested and tested repeatedly. For the person running the nuclear plant (Homer Simpson aside), those same strictures apply.
For The Fine Art crowd? It’s simply self-serving, self-justifying. Reading from, listening to, their “language” is an experience akin to swimming through a bath of cold sick. One not to be repeated anytime soon. Obscurantism at its very worst. There’s no need for it.
One can of course generate ones’ own mission statement. I’m a little concerned that some of my own pieces read slightly similarly…
To wrap this one up until Part 2 drops, I thought you might raise a wry smile at this story via Food & Wine, involving as it does, another pernicious — comparatively — new development, the “influencer”.
“The woman—who has only been identified by her surname, Wang—was having a meal with friends at a hotpot restaurant in Kunming, a city in southwest China. When everyone’s selections arrived at the table, she posted a photo of the spread on the Chinese social media platform WeChat. What she didn’t notice was that she’d included the QR code on her table, which the restaurant’s customers use to place their orders.”
“Even though the photo was only shared with her WeChat friends list and not the entire social network, someone—or a lot of someones—used that QR code to add a ridiculous amount of food to her order. Wang was absolutely shocked to learn that “her” meal soon included 1,850 orders of duck blood, 2,580 orders of squid, and an absolutely bonkers 9,990 orders of shrimp paste.”
Remember, if you’re an influencer (or even not) “Be careful [what you share] out there”.
And looking forward to reading this one which I’ve had recently recommended. Food and borders.
