A wonderful book

I have a small book in which I write down things that I have come across here and there. There aren't many quotes in it and I read lots of books that don't produce anything worth writing down. This particular book produced two. Both of them in their way very relevant to this blog - though perhaps not quite as relevant to the book. It was our book group book - the first of the year and we discussed it last night.

I will come to the quotes in a moment because they were both quite profound in their way - one more so than the other. But first the book itself, which I loved, although the ending was perhaps a bit over the top. In lots of ways it is also a very slight book - easy to read, very funny here and there. I guess it's a satire about modern food - the extreme of super technical food and the extreme of super natural food. Lots of characters who are virtually all appealing in their way. Yes it is fantastical - and one of our group hated it for this very reason. But it covers a whole lot of things as it tells the story of a lonely soul in San Francisco, sourdough, robots, startups and farmers' markets. And a whole lot of other things too. Anyway I loved it - but, as I say, at least one of our number hated it.

Now for the quotes:

"I have come to believe that food is history of the deepest kind. Everything we eat tells a tale of ingenuity and creation, domination and injustice - and does so more vividly than any other artefact, any other medium."

Robin Sloan - Sourdough

I don't know whether this struck a particular chord because of the stuff I read about the Mexican cartels and avocados (which I think I mentioned the other day) or whether I was just struck by it anyway. In my ramblings on this blog I have come across similar sentiments here and there but not expressed so well and so definitely I think. The avocado thing is just one more example of food as more than food.

Food is primal. After it's first cry the first thing a baby does is suckle from its mother - well if given the opportunity. That's what it wants to do anyway. And the food provides more than nutrition - it provides comfort too and the beginning of human interaction - dare I say, love. I have a quote on my home page which is sort of the same but different:

"We have to eat; we like to eat; eating makes us feel good; it is more important than sex. To ensure genetic survival the sex urge need only be satisfied a few times in a lifetime; the hunger urge must be satisfied every day." Robin Fox

Human history is full of all those things that Sloan mentions - ingenuity, creation, domination, injustice and food has played a major (though not the only) part in them. I frequently marvel at how people first found how to make various different kinds of food - who first thought to grind grain into flour, to beat up eggs and mix them with things ...? All of those 15th and 16th century explorers were looking for quicker ways to get to the land that gave them spices, although of course it led to death, destruction, colonisation and development too. Many wars are fought over territory - territory on which to produce more food as well as just plain dominate. They say that future wars will be over water. But I'm sure you can think of many, many other examples both from the past and as being played out in the world today - think deforestation, palm oil, urban farming and so on. I do think that the case is probably rather overstated, there are other factors at play in history too. Hitler was not all that interested in food after all. Nevertheless there is a grain (pardon the pun) of truth in there.

And the second quote?

"The internet: always proving that you're not quite as special as you suspected."

Just about every time I think I have an almost original thought when I am doing this blog, I find that, of course, it is not original. Not by any means. It's a bit of a truism I know, but anyway it grabbed my attention.

Read it.

PS: And I forgot Valentine's Day too. But that's flowers not food.