Yes We Can (and Pickle and Jam!)

Food. It does more than nourish us. It defines us. Brillat-Savarin famously quipped, "Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who you are." The reductive extension of this is our own idiom, you are what you eat.

If this is true, do we know who we are? Since World War II, when women flooded the workplace, technology has conspired to take food production out of the kitchen. Convenience foods became the norm, and the culinary arts of our parents and grandparents became unfashionable, to the point where many of us grew up not knowing how food got in jars -- or, for that matter what went in there with it. Cheeses and sausages were, for all we knew, magically birthed in their cellophane wrappings. Shelf stability reigned over such pesky concerns as freshness or flavor.

Increasingly synthetic foods have been marketed to us under the guise of healthfulness. While few among us would consider ourselves scientists, nearly all of us feel compelled to buy food based on how much or little it has of things we only think we understand. Is it low in fat, cholesterol or carbs? Is it packed with vitamins or, better yet, antioxidants! Then it must be good!

And yet, with an unignorable coincidence, as food has gone from being wholesome and close to the source, so has the American condition degraded. Somehow, in spite of our diet and fat-free foods, obesity is eternally on the rise. All the antioxidants in the world don't seem to be helping the inexorable onslaught of cancer or heart disease.

Perhaps worse yet, this movement toward making food a commodity has robbed us of something important: Community. For millennia, food was at the very core of human interaction. It brought families together across generations, extending beyond the grave as recipes were passed from parent to child again and again. Friends gathered to prepare and consume it. Individuals put their indelible stamp on recipes, making their own lasting creative expressions.

The ruse that convenience food would free up more time in our modern lives to spend with loved ones has had an almost exactly opposite effect. People eat entire meals in their cars, scarf down snacks from vending machines, mindlessly nibble on snack foods at their desks.

Not all of us. Increasingly people are trying their hand at the old foodways. We are making jam, curing meats, raising chickens. This is not anathema to modernity; it is an imperative part of it. We are preserving: Food, culture, community, ourselves. We are celebrating our punk domesticity.