Bankruptcy (#2)
An excerpt from Daily Bread, a story of Spiritual Bankruptcy through the eyes of the food system
If you are just joining, note that this is an excerpt of a book-in-progress, titled Daily Bread, about the spiritual bankruptcy in America as seen through the lens of the food system. All passages are available for free in sequential order, though it is perfectly acceptable to read one without the other, should you wish.
It is possible that our morality will hasten our meeting with mortality. But morality would inherently suggest something is so because it is for the betterment of society. But has morality shifted? Today it seems the moral choice is not the one that ensures the continuation of humankind, but only freedom, even if freedom leads to the destruction of humankind. And it does: our wants have caused incalculable harm to our needs. We are selfish, narcissistic (yes, you too), and consistently rely on the corporations we pretend to loathe to feed us, clothe us, provide us all our wants and desires, then, if that weren’t enough, to also guide us safely though the impending storm without having to pause our perfectly little free lives. While “they” solve global warming, we’ll get fatter and die earlier than our fathers, who died earlier and fatter than their faithers, for the first time in recorded history. The ones that will survive what will become a global apocalypse will be the third world, who had nothing because we took everything from them, but will soon have everything because of it, and care nothing for it. Perhaps it is the third world that builds the Ark and floats peacefully above our avoidable but certain collapse.
There are universal laws to freedom that many of us, to our great detriment, have chosen not to follow. Freedom is asserted to be an inalienable right. Here in the United States all people can be free, but not all have chosen to be. The shackles of man do not see color or sex or class—they see weakness. As result, a good many of us wear the shackles of our own creation. We are slave to our temporal desires. In quiet and private moments, one understands this all too well. It is the nucleus of our misery. We’ve mistaken our ability to consume for freedom itself, having exchanged one shackle (money) for another (the thing we’ve purchased). Freedom is born from lightness, not the things we carry. It is earned through fulfilling our needs and having the strength to deny our desires. Everyone has different needs—only you can judge the weight of the things you carry.
It is important, however, to understand that these notions of freedom have nothing to do with the righteous and necessary strides that have been taken in the pursuit of Civil Rights. The right to be free is different than the consequences of the choices we’ve made with our freedom. What we’ve chosen to do with our freedom has threatened our communities, thus our values and traditions, and our communities have always kept us alive, through precisely these fundamental values and traditions. We may have become free from evil, but we’ve consequently become free from good. We’ve exchanged the need of community for the desire to indulge the individual self.
Simple examples of this notion can be easily seen as related to mealtimes. Where we once came together as a family or community to procure our food, prepare our food, and eat our food, we now regularly do the opposite: from her mobile phone the mother places several orders to fast-food establishments at the behest of the individuals related to her only through blood and dwelling; the father is sent to retrieve them like a good Labrador; when the father arrives home, each related individual comes out of their hovels—their video game lair, their cellular phone scrolling chair, their television room—to collect their individual pile of genetically modified, chemically laden, and vegetable oil fried food-related product and return to swallow it while still engaged in their trivialities. Where have their minds gone? There is no talk of one’s day, nor of tomorrow or the weekend plans to visit friends or family; there is no talk of weather, nor the return of Spring or plans for the garden; there is no discussion of school, no reciting of poetry nor discourse related to the great works and art of mankind. Where is one to gain their values, their inspirations, their dreams? They procure them individually from whichever technological void they’ve found themselves in, barely breaking long enough to grab a French fry to put into the feeding hole formerly known as their mouths, those things no longer used for communication—their realities are entirely perverse, having gained them from unreality. Everything in their lives is clickbait, and they’ve taken it like a catfish: bottom feeders. Freedom without free will. Opportunity squandered. Outcome unachieved. They will suffer the idea of their dreams alone, because they created them alone. They will suffer their failure alone. The best, it seems, a modern family can do, is force the children to consume their various fetched meals at the table with mama, who had the good sense to choose a salad—though a salad is easier, healthier, and more economically prepared at home—and force her children momentarily away from the technological blackholes that will determine their lonely futures.
Of course, not every family engages in the above behaviors regularly, though I’m certain the definition of regularly varies considerably between families. No need to pull statistics from the world wide web to prove whatever point you prefer—you, dear reader, know as well as I how often your family accepts meals from outside the home—and that includes meals procured from the grocery store that you do not need to make: cereal, prepared foods, frozen foods, etcetera. Then there are those in-between foods like bread and deli meat that you’ve so intelligently sandwiched together. Our conscious will always beat technology as the truest judge. The question, really, is why one’s family chooses this mode of eating. The widely used excuse cites a busy lifestyle, as if we were engaged from sunrise to sunset with the growing of food, raising livestock, mending fences, chopping the wood to heat our houses and fire our food, saying morning, afternoon, and bedtime prayers, and spending Sundays at our places of worship… But, in fact, we all know our busy lifestyles are hardly to blame for every meal we procure from outside the home. It is both convenience and the desire for a tasty pile. Tasty, in this example, would be the acute combination of fat, chemically derived sugars, and salt, that any number of corporations can provide more of to us with each ultra-processed mouthful than we care to provide ourselves through real food. And, of course, the activities one has chosen to fill one’s life with to the brim, supposedly preventing one’s ability to nurture, could also be reflected on using the above notion of freedom. Perhaps our busy lifestyles should be amended to reaccommodate our families, our health, and our fulfillment and joy.