On my first road trip around America, in the historic 1960s, I was especially impressed by the diners, those shining chrome palaces of excess with their long, fat-saturated menus. Out west, many of them were topped by a big sign, saying simply EAT, a one-word message in the imperative mood that no hungry traveler could ignore or resist. It was a triumph of the advertiser’s art, and it so impressed me with its stark simplicity that I have never forgotten it.
We must eat, first to please our mothers and then for sheer survival. Eating was on my mind last week when I went into two new supermarkets that had recently opened in our area. I don’t usually do such reckless things because I am not a good supermarket customer. Normally, I treat the place like a village shop—in and out with the minimum of delay. But I was curious to know how an area so rich in food sources as ours could possibly support two more big markets.
They were so huge, so shiny and so well-designed, and such a confusing maze of edible products of a very kind, that in one case, I had difficulty finding my way out. My latent puritan, never far below the surface, said: This is too much. We must have food, but surely not so much of it in such overwhelming quantity. The human stomach is only the size of a cantaloupe, but the grocery carts are like small trucks. How much can anybody possibly eat?
Food is the landscape of the suburbs. Mile after tempting mile we drive past one food source after another – restaurants, fast food, bars, mini-markets, supermarkets. If we don’t want to drive, we can have meals delivered. The proverbial alien from outer space would conclude that we must be grazing animals, like cows. We do nothing all day except think about food, look for food, and eat.
Food is everywhere except where it’s needed most. On television, celebrity chefs and baking competitions alternate with images of starving people all over the world, many of them children. If we don’t want to think about the rest of the world, there is plenty of food insecurity right here in the United States, which is why we need SNAP tokens, food pantries and food kitchens.
Food affluence and food poverty are older than history; indeed, they are history. How could they not be? In the Paleolithic age, one family might subsist on a few nuts and roots, while the family in the next cave would have a whole roasted mammoth to themselves. It was one of the things they fought over, one of the things humans have always fought over. It seems that, for the moment, we have a whole mammoth to ourselves, and we shouldn’t be surprised if our less fortunate neighbors, who are not invited to the feast, are envious or angry.
Food, or the lack of it, is a symbol of political power, and people and nations that are short of food are always victims. Our bulging supermarkets are evidence of economic success, and perhaps excess. Remember the Roman Empire, where the exorbitant eating habits of the elites were notorious. We know what happened to them.
