World Wise Beauty Trendscapes
I found the article below at a fun and smart site called “Foodie Underground”. Bravo to the writer Anna Brones for saying what we all need to hear sometimes. “Good food doesn’t have to be complicated, but it does have to be conscious”.
Technology can be “used” to make life easier allowing us more time to enjoy our real lives. Right? GPS navigation helps me get from point A to point B without spending hours getting lost. I can arrive on time and enjoy a wonderful meal and good conversation with real friends. Definitely a good “tool” to use. But when I saw the photo below I found it a little creepy. I showed the same photo to a few friends and they said ” it’s no different than reading a paper while eating your cereal”. I admitted it was a good point! It made me think the cultural question isn’t really about technology being good or bad but rather how do we want to use it and manage it in our lives? Are we “tuning in” by using technology or are we “tuning out”? Maybe the answer is having the wisdom to know the difference. What do you think ?
Truly Herself
Lauroly
IS TECHNOLOGY KILLING OUR RELATIONSHIP TO REAL FOOD?
COLUMNIn our modern, technology filled world, we’re busy, and so we cut corners, but food shouldn’t be one of them.
Checking your iPhone during dinner is rude (well, unless you’re food porning it up… and even then, there are limits). But what’s worse? Making your iPhone your dinner partner.
That’s right food lovers, you can now buy a bowl for ramen that magically connects your iPhone so that you can surf and text and check your updates while you’re slurping down a bowl of hot noodle broth. Great! Why enjoy your meal when you could be reading your email?
In the midst of articles about farmers markets, CSAs and urban gardens, it’s discoveries like this that give me cause for concern, particularly about our future as a society. Not because hip food cities may soon be filled with ramen/iPhone bars (isn’t there an app that turns your phone into a set of chopsticks??), but because it’s an indicator of a larger cultural dilemma.
We live in a fast-paced world, where work is longer and meals are shorter. We trade the conference room for the dinner table, and soon eating is just another task in the day; something to be checked off of a to-do list.
We’re busy and so we cut corners, but food shouldn’t be one of them. Seeking out devices to replace the fact that we aren’t sitting around a table with family or friends is not only depressing, it’s a sign of the times: we live in a world where eating is an afterthought–something that we know we must do, just like we must wash the dishes and we must go to work.
But if we take the pleasure and ceremony out of eating, what are we left with? A world where good food isn’t honored and fast food is the norm. There’s a causal relationship between our high octane modern world and our path towards a public health epidemic: we don’t take time to eat, much less honor the process, gather with friends, celebrate the food in front of us and the company around us. Put an emphasis back on living life, and maybe food politics falls in place right behind.
We complain that dinner takes time and energy to prepare; but aren’t we lucky enough to be taking a moment to work with our hands and produce something that sustains us? Somewhere our relationship to food went askew – instead of flavor and sustenance we chose efficiency and in turn have created a system where taste is in fact the last criteria that is used in most food that is grown. Genetically modified tomatoes that grow into squares so that they pack better? Why not?
Food is one of the few moments in the day where we can disconnect. Remove ourselves from our digital lives and appreciate something physical and tangible. An all-senses affair. If we want to change the world of food, maybe we need to start thinking about our own interactions with it first. Are we present? Are making something or merely hitting the “warm up” button? Do we make time for food or is it an afterthought?
A good friend emailed me in reference to last week’s column where I said that cooking is our thirty minutes a day to disconnect from everything else and merely commit to the creation of a single thing:
“My face fell at the idea of spending a mere 30 minutes cooking each day. Try as I might I spend far more than 30 minutes preparing food each day. I’d better start working towards more efficiency in the kitchen. All those hours add up in a hurry. And what did you do with your life, Mrs. Bryan?”
I responded simply by saying “If all you did in your life, Mrs. Bryan, was spend time in the kitchen making amazing things and being aware of your surroundings, I would say that that is a life well lived.”
Good food doesn’t have to be complicated, but it does have to be conscious. If not, we risk a world in which real food disappears, and that is a world that is certainly not conducive to living well.
This is the latest installment of Anna Brones’ weekly column at EcoSalon: Foodie Underground, an exploration of what’s new and different in the underground movement, and how we make the topic of good food more accessible to everyone. More musings on the topic can be found at www.foodieunderground.com.
Photo Credit: MisoSoupDesign