Just recently I watched a video clip of a famous Italian butcher eviscerating a pig on stage at one of the culinary world’s most prestigious events.
There was nothing new or revolutionary about the way he did it. I have seen and done it myself many times before… But never to a standing ovation.
I was truly perplexed by the crowd’s reaction.
Why would you want applaud something as simple as removing the intestines of an animal? What is so special about that?
Consider this: here is a global event that brings together the world’s leading chefs and cooks, food producers and foragers, scientists, food lovers, eaters and diners and they applaud the simple act of disembowelment.
For a little while, I thought the food world had gone truly mad. Then the penny dropped: this simple act that we here in Namibia had personally seen and experienced so many times before, has never been seen or experienced by most of those in the audience of that illustrious event. No doubt the organisers of the event wanted to bring their audience closer to their food, and judging by the audience’s reaction to that little bit of theatre, they were very successful.
If you want to eat meat, you need to understand something, every living being has to die, then has to part with its guts, after which it is portioned for your consumption. Simple, really, if you grew up close to your food source and the process of converting life into food. Not so simple if you grew up purchasing your meat from a supermarket packed in Styrofoam and wrapped in plastic.
As I pondered this issue, it became clear that we live and eat in a very polarised world. What are common and everyday practices to one segment is no longer for the other. As omnivorous humans, we all knew how to hunt, kill and slaughter. We were equal in that. But with the evolution of the modern world food system, we lost that equality.
Some parts of the world were incorporated quicker and further than others. Which means they lost their basic food skills, i.e. the skills to produce, process and preserve food. Instead, a trip to a supermarket is all that is required.
In the modern world, the rich buy what is required for their daily survival with hard cash, whereas the poor mainly grow or raise it.
Sadly, the already substantial odds against growing what is needed for survival are rapidly increasing. Human activity is destroying the very things we rely on for growing food. Yet the global poor have to soldier on despite the odds, whilst the global rich already waste more than what is needed to feed the global poor.
One feature of the rich world today is that chefs have become celebrities and celebrities have become chefs. Everyone who’s anyone writes books and makes TV series teaching the common man and woman how to cook, and book stores are packed with books that tell you how to cook a meal with only three ingredients and in only 15 minutes. This is the world where everything is dumbed down and the purpose is financial gain.
On the positive side, a small segment in the rich world has turned a corner. They seem to be heading, food wise at least, back in the direction we’re coming from. They express the need to get closer to their food, want to become more personally involved in the gathering, production and processing thereof, and generally, consider themselves open-minded enough to explore new – previously deemed unacceptable – food sources.
Hence the standing ovation for a simple procedure performed by a master butcher at an illustrious global event.
In these circles, producers, foragers, growers and gardeners are valued for what they know and do. Chefs employ modern science and ancient wisdom in equal proportions in their food craft.
They have become philosophers pondering the questions of sustainability and meaning. They explore and plate the relations between humans and food in a manner that has not been seen before in modern times.
Restaurants, even in deep urban settings, grow their own produce, or at least part of it. Insects have made their way onto high-end restaurant menus. Everyone owns a dehydrator and employs benign bacteria. Fermentation is very sexy, and so is preservation. These chefs see their restaurants as a means to spread a message: one in which the past is part of the future and tradition is valued for its knowledge and substance.
If the rich world has turned back to the past to look for true meaning, why are we heading in the very direction they are running from? Is it because they have solved, for most part anyway, their problem of hunger, and we have not?
When our new president over the weekend said that all Namibians should have decent food to eat, I could not help but wonder what he meant. What is decent, and where would it come from?
Are we going to export less meat and fish and sell these to local citizens at affordable prices?
Are we going to cut levies and costs on imported fruit and vegetables to make them more affordable?
Are we going to stop protecting inefficient local producers and allow cheaper imports?
Are we looking to employ policies that promote small-scale urban agriculture?
Are we going to invest in scientific ventures that would make subsistence and commercial agriculture more efficient?
Are we going to review the relationship between land, farmers and food?
Are we going to grow more and waste less?
If the modern food system was as good as they say, why are significant proportions of people, who have intimate knowledge about it, turning their back on it? Do they know something we don’t?
I reckon there are tough times ahead and we have a serious amount of thinking to do.
