Tonight for dinner we’re having home made broccoli soup and bread baked by my son last Sunday and put in the freezer (we’ve already eaten half of it). I found this wonderful message about being grateful for our food on Ted Talks.
Ted.Com is a wonderful website where you can find speeches by experts on anything and everything. (Except Glenn Beck--he lectures 40 minutes a day, 5 days a week on everything from Crime Inc. to George Washington to Miranda rights, employs a number of researchers, has written best sellers and speaks at many special events, so he would be overlooked by the organizers of Ted as too commercial.) Nevertheless, you can find others who don't have audiences of 30,000,000.
This lecture by Louise Fresco (Dutch) is no different than what I knew back in the 1970s when I worked in the Agriculture Library. But the ordinary person is even further removed from knowledge of food today than they were then. It's hard to know who is more naive--the kids who thinks meat comes in Styrofoam, or the college professor who thinks oranges are "locally grown." She provides a fresh, non-confrontational explanation about the important of modern agriculture. She talks about why the much maligned white Wonder Bread is the solution to world hunger, not locally grown, sustainable farmers markets. The mythical image of life in the rural past that rich Westerners have (particularly western USAns aka Californians) is false and will condemn millions to hard poverty if they succeed in returning us (particularly women) to that era.
I would just make one correction--although yes, there are very few farmers today (in industrialized nations), there are still many millions employed in the food industy, from production of inputs, equipment, buildings, transportation, processing, packaging, marketing, merchandising, kitchen equipment and on to restaurants and fast food, all the way to bus boy and dishwasher at the Rusty Bucket where we go every Friday night. They are all part of our food chain. As Ms. Fresco takes her bread out of the oven she encourages her audience to think about their own food chain beginning with the farmer and the wheat.
Saturday, May 15, 2010
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2 comments:
Just finished watching your Ted.com story on bread and you know why most people preferred the loaf of homemade bread? Whether they realize it or not, the sight of the homemade bread conjures up emotional and psychological images and smells from a better time and place. Even if you had a Mom who never baked a loaf of bread in her life, this deep-earth thing happens. Homemade bread, and the smells, and the anticipation of the first hot slice with real butter and maybe homemade jam is just too much to endear!! The image is of love, and home, and heart, and Mom in an apron, and pies on the window ledge, and all is right with God. All this is so healing that it isn't even necessary for one bit of the bread to pass over the tongue. The healing begins. The actuality only adds to the psychological response mechanisms that flow straight to the heart and soul. Once again, thank you!
God Bless and Shalom!
Oklahoma Rose
My mom did make bread occasionally. When she was growing up homemade was the standard, and she said "store bought" was the special treat. It was like cake and their regular fare was coarse and crusty and took many hours of labor for her mom to produce. Any commercial bakery still has those wonderful smells--there used to be a bread factory in Columbus and you could smell it for miles.
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