Beware the Tin Fiddle

So far our Symposium is crawling along, with plenty of empty days; for this I refuse to apologize, however, for reasons which I will make clear in a little bit. I have enjoyed re-reading and thinking and typing about Supper of the Lamb, and have even more so enjoyed reading Andrew's take on things (and salivating over poutine). One unsubtle encouragement: please comment on our posts! We both really enjoy getting feedback. As those notable culture critics the Backstreet Boys once said:

All you people can't you see, can't you see/What your love does to our reality?/Every time we're down, you can make it right/And that makes you larger than life

Yes, we are as insecure as the Backstreet Boys, so please help us along. And now on to the post!

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Robert Capon wears many hats in the course of writing Supper of the Lamb. At times he is simply cooking enthusiast, at other times his training as theologian creeps in. Perhaps my favorite guise, and his most thought provoking one, is as iconoclast. Capon simply does not have patience for the idols of American quick cuisine, and he makes no bones about his displeasure. His general term of distaste for the infinite variety of gadgets and quick fixes which permeate the American kitchen is "tin fiddle". He asks the reader to imagine a conspiracy between all the violin makers in the world to foist upon the public violins made of tin: through advertising and dominance of the market, they will eventually succeed in pushing their monstrosities upon most people. Professionals no doubt will continue to saw away on wooden instruments, but the common man will be left with little choice. In the same way, Capon suggests, the American public has been duped by any number of substitutes for good old fashioned hard work and hard eating. Convenience and nutrition have become the rallying cries for home cooks, but they come at a high cost. He therefore calls us away from "plain cooking and fancy eating" and back to "fancy cooking and plain eating".

Capon wrote this book in the 1960's, and his words have been prophetic: if anything, the situation is much more dire now than it was at the time. Instead of focusing on doing things correctly, we have asked again and again the dreaded question "How much time will it take?" We now have not only frozen vegetables but entire Fancy Feasts (TM) at our fingertips, just waiting to be defrosted. Furthermore we have almost quantified food out of existence. Everything we buy comes neatly packaged with nutrition information, and that is expected to be the last word. Don't eat butter -- eat this butter substitute with less fat! If Capon's is a voice crying in the wilderness, those of us who wish to repeat his sounding joy are more like lone survivors of a horrific nuclear holocaust.

I propose that all of this comes down to a basic confusion of means and ends. In our relentless drive to make life faster and cheaper, we have categorized things such as food as means to an end, rather as an end in itself. Food is no longer something to be enjoyed, to revel in over long supper with old friends; it is "fuel for the body", something to keep us going and satisfy our occasional cravings. Therefore we give it little to no thought: our only concern is how best to get our hands on it in a way which causes us as little inconvenience as possible. We do this in most areas of life. Our music has been dumbed down to the point where we can only digest three minute, ready for radio sound bites. Our education system (I speak from experience) values teaching children WHAT to think rather than HOW to think. In both of these cases our folly is self evident but often overlooked. As I type I am listening to Brahms; the intricate design of his symphonies moves me in ways that pop music could never do. One of the most disheartening things about teaching is seeing how unaccustomed my students are to loving what they learn. Knowledge is something to be heard, processed, stored away and finally spit back up onto a test page; no wonder we remain squarely in the realm of facts and never progress to real wisdom.

But I digress; these posts are ostensibly about food, and it is precisely in the realm of the gastronomical where we see some of the most blatant butchering (har har) of clear thought. We fail as a culture in two distinct areas: both how we eat and how we avoid eating. Let us start with the first.

The way Americans view food preparation really speaks to the gods we worship. We seek after faster and faster ways to get things done. Canned sauces, pre-made piecrust, ready to bake cookies: all give the same basic message -- Who has time to cook? The root cause spins down too far to follow in this post; let us simply say that we essentially work too much and use our leisure time in an appalling manner. We kill ourselves at our jobs so that we can earn more money so we can buy bigger houses and bigger cars and bigger tv's so we can feel good about the fact that we work so hard and ignore our families and... you get the point (my head is spinning already). We hope to find satisfaction in our hard work; we never do, but that only drives our determination all the more. As a result we are always seeking but never finding. One major problem with this lifestyle (there are many) is that it is essentially unnatural: we ignore the simple things which matter (God, family, food, etc) and seek to be filled up by junk food of both the literal and spiritual kind.

So 90% of what we eat comes precooked and prepackaged. Need a sumptuous Italian dinner? Simply boil some precooked noodles, slap on a little Ragu, and there you go (or better yet, microwave a pre-cooked lasagna for 5 minutes). But probe a little deeper, and the story starts to unravel. How much enjoyment do you actually get from such a meal? You are missing the first joy, which is the process of cooking. There is nothing quite like chopping up your own tomatoes and onions and garlic and letting them stew for several hours till they reach just the right flavor, or the wonder of stirring a roux and watching it work its thickening magic. There are ten thousand such intricate mysteries waiting to be explored and meditated upon by the cook who is willing to take the time. Second, and perhaps more important, you miss the joy of taste. Too often we settle for adequate taste instead of exquisite flavor. Our food inhabits the tepid middle ground, always bland and safe. Where are the depths of richness which true food of the earth achieves? Most of what we eat has the faintly lingering scent of the laboratory about it. Do not even start me on fast food; my wife has exhorted me to keep these posts relatively brief, and a full discourse on that subject would push me perilously close to Karamazovian length.

Our desire to take the easy way out extends beyond our intake of food to another subject: the ways in which we hope to rid ourselves of what we eat. Leslie and I went to Barnes & Noble the other day and saw an entire display devoted to a myriad of dieting books, each one promising to help the reader shed pounds "the fast and easy way". Of course one big problem with diets is that, taken as a whole, they simply do not work. They promise us ease in an area where ease is not possible. But they drive us to an even worse error: they push us to see food (and life) as something over which we can exert utter mastery; they encourage us to see food as something to be controlled rather than something to be celebrated.

Please do not misunderstand: I do not advocate eating whatever you want whenever you want. Certainly moderation is to be encouraged, and we live in a time when food has in fact gained mastery over us -- this must be combated. But the way to do it is certainly not by claiming that we can have our cake and eat it too, which is precisely what dieting promises. Capon's solution is rather to fast: to engage in concerted times of doing without. Not only does this help us avoid excess, it reminds us that true eating is a sometimes thing. There is a time to feast, and a time to fast, but we seem content to take the middle road on everything. I think ultimately this is a spiritual problem: we are Epicureans, hoping to avoid pain at all costs. We would rather have long extended periods of completely boring food than simple (but good) eating followed by times of glorious excess. Fasting, Capon reminds us, is good for the soul as well. Dieting tempts us to believe that we can gain glory without pain, but fasting tells us to enter into that pain, to bear with it. Is this not the way of the cross? In some small way we imitate Christ by fasting, by choosing to embrace the pain that comes long with denying our own desires. In this creaking, groaning world we cannot hope to see glory without pain; even God submitted His own Son to suffering in order to lift the world to glory. How can we expect to do our part in raising all things up if we do not imitate our Savior in bending down? Maybe fasting seems like a small part to play, but I firmly believe that the small things are essential in the kingdom.