We Are What We Eat (and What We Wear)
A proposal for reconnection to origins
By Mariel Wiley
Photograph by Mariel Wiley, modeled by Zoe Norman
Every morning -- but especially Saturdays -- the city of Paris awakens in a flurry of noise and color. I had barely emerged from the entrance of the Bastille metro station when the first heady notes of the open air market coil into my nose. I made my way into the crowded bazaar of farmers’ stalls, humming in contentedness as my nose and eyes were wonderfully nourished.
Here there are fat brown eggs still dusted with feathers. The smell of the sea still lifts upwards from the brine that fresh fish and oysters rest in, and meat still shines sanguine with blood. The tomatoes and apples form entirely new rainbows, and potatoes and radishes and crooked carrots are still bundled in warm coats of the soil from which they were pulled.
It makes me think... in order to survive, we are meant to consume the earth. But how can we do so rightly when we wash and bleach and suffocate in plastic every reminder of the terra from whence our food came? I can’t help but compare this sensual experience of the open air market in which one participates with the origin of our food to the more familiar sterile, anxious environment that is western (mainly American) grocery stores.
We must witness the birth of our sustenance from seed to soil to flower. Or else we risk severance from the planet that created us as well.
Some might think me insane. Especially with the dangers that come alongside raw foods laying under the beating sun in markets… the widespread illnesses that result... But before you recoil in disgust, allow me to explain with a memory.
I am six years old. My little brother and I are at our friend’s house, and we are spent from hours of make-believe and splashing in the garden hose. My friend leads us to a dark bed of soil in which his mother lovingly plants vegetables. A green thumb is not enough to make food grow in Florida’s unforgiving heat. Her entire soul must be green, I think, to make the legumes she tends flourish like these have. The three of us extend little hands into the ground, rooting like truffle pigs. We pull slender carrots from the earth, their tops as green as springtime and the root as vibrantly orange as fresh henna on skin. We do not wash the dirt from them before eating them. Carrots that taste so much lovelier than candy that even picky children will devour them.
So you see, it was not so much the fact of the carrots being specifically organic, or even homegrown, but for the fact that it were my own two hands plunged into the earth that brought sustenance from the ground to my mouth. Therefore this divine connection, this cyclical transfer of energy, remains an uncorrupted rhythm.
But when I walk into my local supermarket back home in the states, my experience obtaining carrots is quite different. I find them supine in the produce section, blanched and dry from days spent under fluorescent lights suffocating in a plastic bag. There is not a speck of soil left on them. This fact alone is a travesty in the western habit of coddling our already over-antibiotic’ked immune systems that requires a separate article of its own…
But I digress. I have no connection to where these carrots were pulled from the ground. I’ll never even know whose hands brought them to the air, nor whose watchful eyes and tending tools these carrots grew under. My only participation in the chain of production before I become the concluding consumer is to drop a few coins into a self-checkout machine. I have expended virtually no effort in obtaining these carrots. It is my belief that food should not be passively acquired or consumed. It negates its value… obtaining something that you have labored for infuses it with a gratitude and value that cannot be replicated any other way.
Believe me, I am not trying to upend America’s current system of large-scale farming. I know that there is a huge part of this nation’s population that simply has no other way to obtain food: they don’t have the spare time or resources to grow or tend their own. I am simply asking you to think about how much sweeter the apples from the tree in your grandmother’s backyard taste, how much more exciting the blueberries from the bush on the trailhead are. How much more pride and accomplishment there is in the milk of a coconut you scaled the palm for.
And so it goes with the clothes we wear. I cannot help but feel a morbid likeness between the exorbitantly organized aisles of a supermarket and the color-coded racks of any given clothing store. In both places we are told what to buy -- what to consume -- with a constant barrage of subliminal messages. Healthy! 100% natural! This season’s latest trends! We enter these spaces assuming we are making choices, but in truth these choices are being made for us.
This is not a bad or evil thing. It is simply a thing. But it is a thing I feel that we should all be aware of, if we are to be subjected to it. We need this awareness so that we might retain some agency -- some free will, if you please -- in what we consume.
And I, armed with this freedom to choose, find joy in the fact that I can elect to consume things whose origin I am privy to, things that I grow and make and harvest with my own two hands.