Preface to the Food Portfolio

Abstract

Preface to the Food Portfolio Matthew Shenoda (bio) The very concept of food, the physical presence of it, the way it triggers all of the senses is a central part of life, human and otherwise. Whether abundant or scarce it occupies a part of our daily lives. The pleasure of it, the struggle for it, the fast from it, the feast in it, the joy of it, the worry for it, the nourishment from it, the gift of it, and sadly, in these times, the poison of it. It is, simply put, the inescapable commonality for all living things. As for me, I must admit, I love food, but not always in the way one might think. It is not just the pleasure of consumption that I enjoy, but the engagement in a physical manifestation of creation, a thing relished and appreciated, a thing of great wonder, a thing brought forth by labor but not made by the hands of humans. Each time I cut open a peach to feed one of my children, I delight at the textured and storied lines in the pit; I pause at the thought of the intricate process of seed to earth to table, something so simple, so close to what we might call perfection, that we seem to have all but forgotten its seamlessness as we consume. In this way, I am serious about food, the simplicity of it, in particular. The immense gratitude of how we nourish our very existence. The way a meal, fresh and well prepared, can slow us down and remind us of our communal humanity. I lament the commodification of food, the way agribusiness and the chemical industries have tainted one of the most central elements of our survival and existence, the way it has destroyed not only our human trajectory but the ecology we occupy. Perhaps my perspective on food is, at least in part, a matter of time and place. Growing up in California, my childhood was filled with fruit and olive trees in the yard, citrus trees in the midst of the city, avocado trees growing wild near the beach where you could pick one fresh just after a swim. And on the streets of my parent's native Egypt, no matter how congested and chaotic a city like Cairo became, I could always crunch into [End Page 7] a clean cucumber picked recently in the fertile delta and contemplate the contradiction of such fresh food amidst such a polluted city. Those days seem all but gone now with the proliferation of imported fertilizers, government subsidies, food aid and tariffs, the privatization of wild fruit trees, and a pace of life that relegates conscious engagement in the foods we eat to the margins of the human experience. So marginal it seems is this idea of food consciousness that my produce shopping has become a running joke among some of my closest friends. You see, we eat kale in our home, lots of it. We cook various dishes with it: kale with lentils, kale with chickpeas, kale with pasta, kale in soups, kale salads; my children chew on the leaves as a snack and the stalks to soothe their teething. But the thing is this, almost every time I go to the market and purchase kale, the checkout clerks invariably make a comment: "That's a lot of kale!" "What are you going to do with all that kale?" "You gonna juice that kale?" And every time I answer similarly, "We are going to cook it and eat it." And, every time, I am met with a blank stare and an occasional, "Oh, that's real healthy." Is this how disconnected we've become, that the purchase of fresh produce for human consumption causes such astonishment? Have we become so distant from the acts of cooking and eating a balanced diet that even the folks in the produce market seem surprised? Never mind, I know the answer to this, and I know too what the larger corporate interests prefer—those same interests that have been deeply tied to the devaluing of human life from the moment of their founding. I know that the resurgent consciousness around...