I’m writing a paper for class and I came across this passage that speaks so much life to my frustrations with today’s food system. It comes from the conclusion of Anna Meigs’s essay entitled “Food as a Cultural Construction” which is published in Food and culture: a reader by Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik.
“Food, according to our dictionaries, is something material, a thing made up of different kinds of similarly impersonal and material things. Most persons in the industrialized West do not grow food or see of know those who do. We encounter food in tins, in boxes, under plastic. We know food as inert matter dissociated from its human produces and natural context. In fact, children in societies such as ours must be taught that the impersonal lifeless packages we call ‘food’ were originally living animals or plants.”
Isn’t it scary how much this passage, published in 1997, voices the tragedies represented on Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution?
We have to change.
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