Friendship
Donella Meadows says that one of the densest, most potent places to intervene in a system is the “purpose.” Change the purpose, change the system. I’ve noticed that the “purpose” of a good meal seems to be individualized enjoyment. An arena to practice having “taste” or pride in these personal decisions. A drive to find joy in the flavor, or joy that your food is so “healthy” it will make you immortal. This individualized enjoyment is often verbalized in the form of gratitude (i.e. I’m grateful for the circumstance of My meal, My able body that prepared it, My rich body that bought it, My good taste).
Growing up, my mom would read me Rilke’s Book of Hours over and over. His words are lodged in my mind, and have permanently hypnotized me into believing in other possibilities:
Do not be troubled, God, though they say “mine”
of all things that permit it patiently.
they are like wind that lightly strokes the boughs
and says: MY tree.
They hardly see
how all things glow that their hands seize upon,
so that they cannot touch
even the utmost fringe and not be singed.
…
Eating is the most intimate business, perhaps more intimate than sex. What you consume passes through every single system of your life. Your meals are the stuff of your life. Touched by many hands before you digest. Sometimes, you can see a fingerprint smudged along the wax of a zucchini, or find a hair in your bag of spinach, or an ellipse, the accidental carving of a nail in a fruit. You want to ignore these things. Sterilize what is yours. Make the hands invisible. Deport them from your imagination. Cook for your kin.
I think it is lonesomeness that keeps food hostile, or prepackaged. Lonesomeness that breeds a certain type of ignorant, selfish gratitude. Lonesomeness that leaves you hungry, even when you are full.
Lonesomeness created commodity. Lonesomeness created fossil fuels.
And when I say “lonesomeness” I do mean white supremacy.
I grew up well fed but lonely. My stomach was always upset. We all had our seats at the table, under the electric chandelier. It was rare that anyone came over for dinner. We washed the mysterious dirt off the mushrooms that came into our home wrapped in cellophane, on a bed of styrofoam.
…
Paradigms are paradigms for a reason. We all know we are kept busy and distracted in this storm. How can we even eat here?
My cat Tom can only eat when I’m watching him. If it’s late and I feed him and then turn the lights off, he’ll walk up to my pillow, breathe in my face, and cry. He’ll only stop crying once I turn the lights back on, sit up, and watch him finish his meal.
When I watch him, when I sit beside his anxiety and within my own, I get to thinking that the purpose of a meal isn’t food, it’s friendship.
This strawberry season, I have received pints and pints of free strawberries. They taste fine when I eat them alone in the kitchen. But they taste like divinity when I eat them outside for dessert with the person who grew them, under the Strawberry Moon.
And then I go to work and I have to charge customers eight dollars for the strawberries. Eight dollars is more than half an hour of my time. And I imagine the customers will go home and rinse the strawberries off in a colander. Rinse off the story of how the farmer didn’t scan the row before she began picking. And all the berries she gathered in the morning were scrawny until she came to a luxuriously red patch. And then she was overwhelmed by the matter before her. The customer never knew that.
Maybe the cost is so prohibitively expensive that the strawberry owner will want to savor the strawberries. Before they know it, the strawberries will expire, grow moldy, and will have to be tossed.
How can you ignore the pink-dyed fingers of the berry pickers? Gesticulating wildly with the humor of exhaustion. Hear them when they tell you they are having a hell of a time accessing health insurance. Backs are burned by cancer, lungs are full of smoke from this planet that’s on fire. Dehydrated and fainting from the dried-up waterways. Don’t pause to be grateful for what you have. You have nothing until the water is drinkable for everyone. You have nothing until your friends are safe. Something is very wrong.
The more friends you have, the more intimate you will become with disaster. Someone is flooded on the mid Atlantic, while someone is burned in the desert, while someone is frozen in the south, while someone’s sky is constantly red, while the bridge washed out and someone can’t get home, while someone can never afford a home, while someone is too sick to eat, while you are right there, affected by all of this.
The grief is massive. It is almost unbearable to reach out when you know we are so massively fucked. When you know we won’t all survive. Anything other than connection is denial. It takes courage to hold each other close. Keeping your eyes closed while you say grace will not extinguish the fires.
“Connection is the first act of acknowledgment, accountability, and responsibility. It offers, whether fleeting or long lasting, a closeness to all others. It is jubilant. Ecstatic. Without fear.” - Kae Tempest