Food

(our most intimate link to life)

A few weeks ago I found myself in a hospital with severe intestinal problems. I was unable to eat or drink anything. Ice chips became a treasure beyond price. And all I could think about was food. Under the influence of boredom, fear and quite a bit of morphine, these thoughts went off into some very abstract directions, and I thought I would share them with you.

It occurred to me that there is nothing that links us more intimately with the biosphere than food. Everything we eat or drink at one time came from something alive. Every waste product we emit feeds more living things. Food is the umbilical cord that connects us to the Earth, and to the whole complex, amazing network of living things. In the best case, our bodies are returned to the Earth and our components are remade into new organisms. And in one of the most affecting cases, consider mammals: the mother feeds her children from her own body before their digestive systems get into gear; they are altricial. The nutritional link between mother and child is visible and undeniable.

I want to make a distinction here between food and nutrition. Nutrition is a very abstract and analytic concept. You can keep a colony of bacteria alive in a carefully constructed nutrient medium, containing nothing but the exact molecules the organism needs to survive. In particular, to survive without changing much – you typically don’t want your colony to struggle and evolve (though, given time, it will evolve anyway). This is very different from what that same bacteria consume in the wild: it eats a variety of things, produces a variety of waste-products and metabolites; it interacts dynamically with the other organisms around it. If the environment changes, it will adapt or mutate to achieve its needs. Our carefully constructed nutrient medium places the bacteria in a static isolation but on Earth nothing exists in stasis or isolation. The very idea of isolation is probably a fairly modern human abstraction.

Let me take a few steps backward. I’ve recently become really enamored of Hart Crane’s phrase “conscript dust”.¹ The sun is the ultimate source of all energy in the biosphere. The Earth has limited resources: limited space, limited matter. The biosphere, the whole network of interacting organisms, conscripts these resources, and, powered by sunlight, turns them into new organisms. When change and entropy and planned obsolescence get the upper hand, the dust is demobilized and returned to a simpler state. Then it is “eaten” and becomes part of a living thing again. It’s really an amazingly beautiful, detailed and awe-inspiring process. And it’s a process in which we are inseparably entwined.

So every time we put food in our mouths we are energizing and reaffirming our connection to the Earth. This brings up a number of considerations. Like the effort put into supplying only the necessary nutrients to our captive bacteria, how much effort is put into coloring, preserving, enhancing and packaging food? I am not advocating a “natural” diet – I have no idea what that means. And I don’t really think that GMO derived foods are significantly unhealthy for humans (except for those with inserted pesticide genes). But they really suck for the environment. And in general, massive farming processes are an insult² to the local environment. But insects and pathogens are ultimately more adaptable than technology. In my opinion, commercial farming practices are unsustainable and ugly. Commercialism, and in general, those practices aimed at maximizing profits, are inherently dangerous. But the culprit that disturbs me the most is plastic packaging.

Two or three billion years ago (if you’ll cast your minds back) there was little or no oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere. There were plenty of organisms, but they breathed sulphur and a number of other oxidizing agents to power their metabolisms. And they excreted oxygen: a poison. Around two and a half billion years ago, they began to poison the atmosphere with their waste products. Sometimes this is called The Great Oxygen Catastrophe. Many species died out. But eventually the biosphere adapted to the new atmosphere, and learned to use that dangerous oxygen. Later, only 350 million years ago, some new land organisms learned how to make cellulose, which is a very long chain molecule that allowed newly emerging land plants to have stiff bodies that could stretch upward toward the sun for their photosynthetic lifestyle. Unfortunately, cellulose and its relatives don’t leave many access points for enzymes to break them down. So they lay on the ground and the corpses of these un-rottable organisms covered the Earth. Cellulose wasn’t yet food for anything. This was the Carboniferous Period – and all our coal and oil are the discarded reminders of that time. Eventually, though, some clever fungi and bacteria and protozoans learned how to these digest long-chain polysaccharides, and we were saved from a Cellulose Catastrophe. But now, I’m afraid we’re in the midst of a Plastic Catastrophe. The molecules in plastic are also, like cellulose, largely unassailable. And they’re often cross-linked (instead of linear) which makes it even harder for enzymes to find a tooth-hold on them. There are, indeed, a few organisms that can attack certain plastics, and researchers are still looking for more. But until the whole biosphere finds ways of breaking them down, they will accrete and accrete, and disturb the processes of life. When I was hospitalized, I was appalled at the amount of plastic waste. Plastic is inedible. It is not food. It has isolated itself from the cycles of life. And it is a burden on the limited capacities of the Earth.

In order to appreciate the essential ubiquity of food it’s helpful to (temporarily) stop thinking of ourselves as individuals, as isolated beings. I have in mind an image of a world warmed by a constant and gentle sun. This world has tides and seasons and a somewhat moody and mercurial atmosphere – so the planet, as a whole, never settles down into steady, cyclic, dynamic equilibrium³. Instead, there are lots of whirlwinds; the sun heats some regions more than others, the wind drives dust from warmer regions to cooler ones, the whirlwinds bounce off irregularities in the landscape and interact with each other; sometimes passing through each other, exchanging matter, sometimes one will subsume another, sometimes breaking into many smaller dust devils, sometimes canceling each other. Anyone who has watched snowdrifts on a windy day has seen this.

What I want to say, to conclude this conceit, is that we – we humans, we animals, trees and bacteria – are like those whirlwinds. Humans conceive of themselves as individuals. But from another point of view, we are temporary, metastable nodes in a huge sun-driven process, somewhat like the quantum particles that manifest themselves momentarily when a wave function collapses⁴. And the transfer of particles, motion, and heat from one whirlwind to another – that is food.

In another article here, I wrote about what we have in common with all animals. Food, or rather, the process of eating eating, was among the most essential defining characteristics. And as conscious animals, we are endowed with sensations that drive us to satisfy our needs. We get hungry. We feel replete. We feel stuffed. We feel nauseous. Our bodies send neural signals to our somewhat thick-witted minds to tell us what we need to maintain ourselves. And the neural signals become thoughts and emotions. And the thoughts and emotions become habits and folklore and rules. But being human, being the somewhat whimsical experiments in evolution, we can also make an art-form of food and eating. This is more than the folklore about “balanced meals” or the quasi-science of nutrition. It is a multi-sensory experience that goes far beyond biological requirements, and satisfies far more of our total being than fuel and spare parts. I’m not sure any other animals do this: prepare meals with variety and care and aesthetic appeal. It may be one of the few things we can call our own, along with language and story-telling⁵. Also, some animals, like two-year-olds, cats, dolphins, and octopuses seem to play with their food. I’m not sure if that’s related, however. I think the desire to manipulate and explore can sometimes supersede hunger. Anyway, playing is a whole ‘nother thing that I need to write about at a later time.

There is a dark flip-side to food aesthetics, too. We tend to eat what we’re used to⁶. I think this is the heart of “comfort foods”. Unfortunately, comfort and convenience collude to make uncountable profits for MacDonalds, Chick-Fil-A, Little Caesar’s and all the chains that serve us food we were habituated to as children (or college students). From almost any viewpoint, the stuff they serve is gummy, over-processed, and tastes bland compared to a carefully constructed meal. And even if some of those opinions aren’t shared by others (who, after all, can empirically define “healthy” or “tasty”?), the fact that the mass production of these foods has largely detached them from the biosphere, is undeniable. Moreover, the overproduction of chicken and beef, is again a wound to the ecosphere⁷. Once again, fast foods are not foods in the sense that I’m trying to develop here. They generate a large amount of unrecoverable waste.

So, I suppose if this meandering article has a theme, it’s that food and eating are the nerves and veins that connect us to the Earth. Some people – futurists, space-travel advocates, dystopian catastrophists – imagine self-contained ecosystems detached from the Earth: domes on Mars, “generation ships”, underground metropolises. I think they’re being short-sighted and more than a little hubristic. We are animals. We are not stewards or masters; we are part and parcel of the Earth. And the most intimate links to that kinship come from food.

1. Hart Crane. For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen. But he meant something rather different in his poem.

2. I’m using “insult” here quasi-technically, to mean a damaging blow. Think of a cardio-vascular “insult”.

3. See At Home in the Universe, by Stuart Kauffman, or any of his other popular books. In particular, it’s valuable to think about his ideas about life evolving “at the edge of chaos”.

4. I have no authority to say this. My understanding of quantum effects is nil. But I think the imagery works.

5. I used to include warfare and murder in this short list of uniquely human traits. But it turns out that our chimpanzee cousins share them with us.

6. The bluejays who come through my window for handouts will eat peanuts with shells, but not shelled ones. Go figure.

7. As well as being egregiously cruel.