Civilized food

and the "lunch of suffering"

No suffering involved

Last week the news brought an interesting, albeit sad, counterpoint. At the same time, there were two apparently divergent themes on the same general topic of food. One was what seemed to be a series of reproductions (equal to a T) of some original article I didn’t bother tracking down about how some Chinese discovered what they call “white people’s food”, and decided it was “the lunch of suffering”. The other was about the increase in clients asking jewelers to make their rings and bracelets smaller because they lost weight using semaglutide (Ozempic) injections and got thinner fingers, now called “Ozempic fingers”.

Both, though, are aspects of a single societal crisis, all over great parts of the former First World, on the way people deal with food. Anglo-Saxons (and the media is Anglo-centered, so much of what we read about comes from them and talks about them exclusively) never ate well. Before the blessed arrival of Indian food in England, they would eat stuff like meat boiled in water with just a little salt added. “Luch of suffering”, indeed. It’s a very old cultural trait, by the way; while all other peoples, when offering their gods animal sacrifices, would basically make a huge fire and have a nice barbecue, burning down parts of the animal as a sacrifice to their gods, the natives of England would boil the meat. No barbecue for them or their gods.

When they crossed the Atlantic, having (unlike the Portuguese) made the mistake of bringing their women with them, they couldn’t get nice native ladies to feed them properly and kept to their old and sad ways of eating. The first colonists in what is now New England could have gorged on the best lobster in the world, but would rather eat canned sweet beans. Later, when they grabbed the lands that had been colonized by the Spanish, the half-wild rustic cattle introduced by the latter in order to have something to hunt became the main source of beef for the established cities in the East. The beasts’ meat was so tough it could only be eaten minced. And that’s why until these days the poor Anglos barbecue ground meat: hamburgers and sausages. Well, at least they don’t boil them; it’s a start.

When we add the Protestant ethic to the mix, and food is reduced to fuel to keep a worker going, things get even worse. The sandwich was invented by a guy who was so dissolute he didn’t want to stop gambling to eat. He would have his servants bring them some meat wrapped in bread so he could eat while playing cards. It’s bad, but doing it in order to be able to keep working is even worse. Unless one’s work is so delightful it would be horrible to interrupt it, eating by one’s work desk has a sniff of slavery to it.

Curiously, the introduction of American food in Brazil — something that started after WWII — created an interesting dialectal difference in a term imported raw from the English language. In Rio, “lanche” (pronounced almost the same as “lunch”) means something light one eats between lunchtime and dinner: a sandwich, a fruit, eggs, or something like that. A kind of picnic that can be had indoors. In São Paulo, on the other hand, the same word means “hamburger”.

Nevertheless, both agree that substituting a “lanche” for lunch would be at best childlike, if not uncivilized. A proper lunch is eaten sitting at a proper lunch table, on proper crockery, with a fork and a knife. I once took my grandfather to McDonald's, some fifty years ago. He was flabbergasted they had no plates and no fork for the fries. He refused to eat them with his hands. And he was right. By the way, establishments like McDonald’s are not called “restaurants” in Brazil; they are “lanchonetes”, or “lancherias”, depending on the state. But nobody would even conceive of calling them “restaurants”, even if it is a lot more expensive to eat there than in a restaurant that caters to office workers. These are usually big buffets in which customers pick what they want and pay by weight. And, of course, sit down and eat; they are restaurants where people go to have lunch, not “lanchonetes”.

The way human beings always try to sabotage the way our bodies are made is a ceaseless source of wonder for me. We have lots of different pulsions and desires that lead us toward reproduction, and we come up with contraceptives, IUDs, condoms, the works. We have a hardwired desire to eat greasy stuff because a fat animal is a healthy animal, therefore a good source of protein, and to eat sweet stuff because a sweet fruit is a ripe fruit, therefore a good source of vitamins. And then we come up with all kinds of pseudo-food that is basically made of fat, sugar, and nothing much else, with virtually no nutrients.

And there is where stuff like Ozempic arrives and thrives. When people eat as if food were just fuel, it quickly becomes not only fuel for the body but also for the mind. Food becomes a(nother) way of pretending one is not sad, of having a momentary pleasure that makes a senseless life seem bearable for a while. The deeper reasons behind the opioid crisis are the same, by the way, as something people often do not realize about opioids is that they are not painkillers in the strict sense. They have no effect on pain itself, and when we are under the influence of an opioid we are still able to know where the pain is, and often how strong it is. On the other hand, pain doesn’t bother us anymore. No pain: neither physical nor psychological. It’s there, but it is not as important, as urgent, as it was before the opioid started its magic. When it is over, though, we’re back to the original situation, and compared to those moments of bliss it seems even worse.

Inhaling fatty and sweet pseudo-food can serve the same function, but its effect is even more limited, as it works while we chew, and that is it. For many, the solution is to keep eating. At work or in front of the TV, it’s the same. The food is, if I can coin a term, “mono-sensical”: it involves only the sense of taste. There is nothing to see, nothing to smell, nothing to sense by touch, nothing but the fatty and sweet taste that gives us a small and passing sense of being alive. Something easy to do that dulls the inner pain.

Colonial British were often ridiculed because they would wear a dinner jacket to dine, even in the midst of the African jungle or in the poorest Indian countryside, but they were right (even if their food was horrible). Food is not fuel, and cannot be fuel, for the very simple reason that human beings are not engines. When a ritual is involved, as in any proper civilized meal, food cannot become fuel, be it fuel for the body or for numbing soul-aches.

Nine years ago I suffered a horrible accident, that made me spend three and a half years lying on various beds, in and out of hospitals. When I eventually came back home with my son, just the two of us, I made it a point of cooking a proper dinner for us every day. Every day he would help me chop onions, cut the vegetables, and so on, and we would have a wonderful dinner together. As he had been living away while going to college, he had gotten used to quick-and-dirty cooking: throwing together some spaghetti with dry basil and olive oil, plus some grated Parmigiano cheese, this kind of thing. But I brought him back to the righteous path of real cooking, and it gladdened my heart when he told me that, during the pandemic, he managed to finish some gourmet cooking distance courses to learn how to prepare the more complicated French sauces and such.

Even if cooking in a regular kitchen while sitting in a wheelchair is not easy, I did that then and I keep doing it. Eating properly is not just a matter of eating “healthy” food, but of eating in a healthy way: fresh food, yes, but also food that is well prepared, tasty food, eaten in good company (or, if alone, in the company of a good book that allows one to look at the food, smell it, hear the plinking of the silverware against the crockery, feel the weight of the fork, the resistance of the meat to the knife, and so on, unlike a TV that demands one’s full-time attention and gives back nothing). In a ritual, in other terms, a ritual that contemplates not only the taste but much more.

And that is where the “lunch of suffering” makes its sad entrance. The Chinese shock at “white people’s food” started, or so it seems, in Europe, when a Chinese ex-pat saw on a train a woman eating raw lettuce and ham slices instead of a proper meal. He took a picture and uploaded it to some Chinese social network, and other Chinese ex-pats started taking pictures of the sorry “healthy” stuff their coworkers brought to work.

I understand some people have no money to go to a proper restaurant every weekday. I have taken food boxes to work. But I always had proper food in my food boxes, like any Brazilian. Once I forgot the box at home, and I got really sad when I realized I would have to go to a restaurant, as I knew no restaurant nearby would have food nearly as tasty as the one I had intended to bring.

But the stuff that shocked the Chinese (with their proud tradition of good food, fried gecko jokes aside) was what many people in the former First Word see as the opposite of the fatty and sweet stuff. The “healthy choice”: penitential raw vegetables, tasteless crackers with ugly-looking cheese and sad-looking ham, this kind of thing. Tasteless food, as if the problem with the fatty and sweet stuff was that it would be too tasty.

No. Although most of that stuff is indeed disgustingly sweet, salty, or both at once, it is not the fact that it has (some) taste that makes them such a lousy way to poison oneself. The main problem, that is, treating food as fuel, continues unabated when people substitute lettuce and carrots for proper food. By the way, rabbits eat raw carrots and lettuce; the right way to do it is to feed a rabbit the raw vegetables and then eat the rabbit, properly prepared. The carrots work well in the sauce for the rabbit, too.

It does not matter that much whether the food one eats is theoretically healthy, as in the “lunches of suffering” that so disgusted the Chinese netizens, or is just sheer pseudo-food. The problem is that food cannot be fuel. Food cannot be an opioid, used to disguise some other pain. Food is a blessing, and as with almost all blessings, it demands ritual. It demands attention. It demands more than a list of nutrients. It must be beautiful. It must smell good. It must be tasty, in rich and surprising ways.

The theoretically health-conscious rabbit-food eaters are just as misguided, just as far away from having a healthy relationship with food, as the TV-dinner guzzlers. The stuff they eat cannot possibly make them grateful, unless as a source of misguided pride, like a young lady who wears a veil to Mass and takes tons of selfies so that everybody can see how saintly she is. Penances are not things to be proud of, for it would be self-defeating to be proud of something that is supposed to help us overcome pride.

It is perfectly possible to lose weight — if that is the goal — or to eat healthily without eating tasteless rabbit food. Or, shall I say, to lose weight without either eating rabbit food or injecting some newfangled new chemical witch’s brew. What is not possible is to respect food when one eats as if the food was fuel, be it body fuel (as in rabbit food) or painkilling fuel (as in food that is guzzled down to deaden some soul-ache). And if one does not respect the very food one eats, if something that should be an important part of each day becomes much less than what it is supposed to be, one will hardly be able to respect oneself.

I always say that God didn’t make us humans able to eat once a month, as camels, because if we did we would probably hide from the others the very fact that we eat. We do it, in a way, about plenty of bodily functions; even if a healthy person needs to go to the toilet at least once a day, what one does there is not something one refers to in polite company, and we make sure the door is locked before starting. If we did not need to eat at least a couple of times a day we’d probably do even worse, as the smelly product of our entrails is something we get rid of, while what we eat is, in a way, what we are made of. It deserves respect. It deserves ritual. It deserves to be treated as the important part of our lives it is.