Читать книгу All the Wild Hungers - Karen Babine - Страница 25

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I REMEMBER THE FOOD shelf in the back of the hundred-year-old parish hall at the church, my father answering knocks on our parsonage door and giving food to whoever needed it. Looking back, even gatherings like Wednesday evening soup suppers during Lent—each one prepared by a different group in the church—were a way to make sure the larger community didn’t go hungry in a rural world where church and school were the primary community gathering places. American relationships with food are often an expression of class and poverty and this is not new, from debates about free and reduced lunch for children to concerns about food deserts, both rural and urban. Politicians find it expedient to shame those who use SNAP to feed their children, stoking outrage over the idea that if one is poor, one does not deserve a birthday cake or fresh fruit. We are a food culture with a strong relationship between shame and food. This is the language we teach our children about who deserves food and who does not.

Perhaps we collectively tense around food because it has been vilified ever since we came out of the Depression, the Dust Bowl, the Second World War and had enough surplus that many of us did not worry about going hungry. The backlash against home cooking as a practice obviously coincided with convenience foods and women working outside the home, but it also seems to follow the rise of food as something to be feared and scorned. Don’t eat too much, you’ll get fat; eat something, you’re too skinny; fat is bad; salt is bad; sugar is bad. My parents grew up in the age of the Clean Plate Club, the admonition to “think of all the starving children in China,” which had become “all the starving children in Africa” by the time I was old enough. Food became a cultural tool of manipulation. Rather than teaching moderation, advertisements teach gluttony and austerity, practices that ring of immediacy, that advocate no planning for the future. Eat all the meat you want, just no carbs!