Appearance and reality, ideal and ideology – ad nauseum please!
note: this is already on my KI blog, but since it is effectively hidden in the deluge of end-of-year articles corresponding to the release of all the assignments of Term 3 at the same time, here it is -- because I want it to be read by someone.
I was watching my mother trim the fat off a pink, stripped chicken when I suddenly thought: ‘so this is what we look like on the inside.’
It was a very disturbing thought. When you are a carnivorous little hypocrite like me it is best not to think too much about the stuff that tastes so good in your mouth. For all we know we could be eating the offspring of poor families deep-frozen from Victorian times.
That, if I may mention, is a disturbing thought too. Most disturbing, however, is the niggling notion clinging fiercely to the back of my brain that I wouldn’t mind trying the meat-as-it-is either – i.e. raw.
I bring up no defence against myself except for that it looked like a special kind of jelly. The canon of Pavlovian conditioning tells me that this might account for the strange impulses I get from staring at that slimy pink lump – but no. The jelly I like is radically different both in appearance and smell from a slab of limp substance on a chopping board. Moreover I have never tasted raw meat before, and have no inclination to act on the inclination to try. I have been fortunate enough to have eaten only vegetables, fruit and processed preservatives uncooked; the only exception would be three very thin slices of salmon, which bears only a superficial resemblance to the almost-defrosted chicken in the kitchen sink. Bye bye Pavlov.
The primal subconscious so dearly beloved by Freud and his bevy of little protegés is no excuse either. For one, if it were subconscious, why am I conscious of it? I’m only supposed to be conscious about other people’s subconsciousness(es). For another: the attraction has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with sex. All right, I know I grossly overgeneralise, but I’m not sure I am the only one of the world with these strange little urges to go picking at the dismembered corpses of dead fowl. In any case, if these ‘strange little urges’ were the unhappy remnants of the tastes and preferences of a triumphantly savage evolutionary throwback, I’m in hardly any position to help it – but what I can do is not follow up on the notion to pick up the oozing stuff and run away with it. Which is precisely what I did. Which brings us way back to the clash of civilisations – the clash between impulse and ideology.
A classic and ever-relevant example of this would be of how ‘Meat’ always sounds so much more appealing compared to ‘Muscles’ or ‘What might once have been the legs of an eating, breathing, defaecating being’. Once in my impressionable childhood I asked about what part of the animal we were eating at the moment and was reluctantly told ‘muscles’ – and when I tried to probe further I was firmly told to stop asking so many irritating questions. The scientific truth and its implications seem to be something everyone is quite happy to remain oblivious about. I slash my way through the foliage to reach it at my own peril.
This route of conversation is particularly pertinent because, being Chinese all the way down to my little toenails, I grew up eating Chinese – rice, cailan, hair fungus, crocodile soup. The Chinese are famous for being able to make a good dish out of everything and anything that may or may not move. This means a lot of difficult questions at dinnertime – and if you think the questions are bad, the answers are worse: it doesn’t help that my mother is a nurse who always knows exactly what we are eating. Liver, brain, lungs, kidneys, trotters, stomach – colon – sea cucumbers – all the things that normally go into sausages in the hardly less decadent worlds of traditional European cuisine, they come out unmauled and recognisable through the heavy sauces in weddings all over the country. Even better, these dishes tend to be exotic and very poetically-named: one is expected to be so grateful for the opportunity of actually getting to lay tongue and chopstick to these delicacies that any childish enquiries to the original functions of the unmentionables in the gravy was liable to get a smack in reply. A smack once too often tends to breed a certain complacency in the food put in front of you until you grow up a little bit only to find that, all your life, you have been seriously enjoying congealed pig’s blood as some sort of tofu substitute. The feeling is quite indescribably strange.
Education in food, as one might say, comes first and foremost from the clumsy but amazingly accurate English translations of dishes on the neon menus at the humble hawker centres. Verily does one find truth in the strangest places.
It is not just words and ideology that make eatables… edible. It is packaging as well. A fortune goes into the food preservative and colouring industry just so that our apple juice does not turn out in their transparant jugs to be some kind of grey colour (like baby apple puree), and that jellies squirt properly out of their appealing plastic cuplets in liquid neon shades that children love, and that ice cream retains their jewel-like creaminess and orange boiled sweets melt a wholesome orange. The moment aesthetics was applied to food was the moment were were asking for trouble with the truth. Even the little labels listing the ingredients on one side of the box has little impact on what we think we are eating. The tangible properties of a food we didn’t kill, gut and fillet ourselves are the first we go by and usually the only ones we consider when making a choice for tomorrow’s lunch: no one is going to care about the percentage content of sodium bicarbonate unless it is widely known (to supestitious precision) to be prodigously unhealthy. Food labels are there only for worried mothers and health freaks; ordinary people, much less snack-scarfing adolescents, are unlikely to bother. How much do they know of what they are eating? Are your potato chips really made of potato?
To say it is all about packaging is to call a tiger a small pair of earmuffs. And it is supermarkets that is the biggest and baddest player in this civilised game of deception. In small-scale grocery stores there is bad fluorescent lighting and rather ugly iron shelves; in wet markets everything is hot, raw, noisy and bloody where the fish on the ice are still alive and the butcher cheerfully carves the meat to your liking. In supermarkets everything is different. Food is packed in neat and coordinated rows according to selection and category. Food is wrapped in plastic and put under treatment of the most flattering UV light. Food is stuck with yellow promotion markers, advertised, arranged in appealing formations to entice the hand that pays the cash. Allow me to revert to the example of raw meat: let us not talk about chicken this time. Let us talk about pork or steak. (No, not pig and cow, pork and steak! You see?) In the wet market these products are hung in all their raw, whole and gory glory, without benefit of special lighting or air-conditioning to hamper bringing the distinctivly stinging scent of blood to your nose. In a supermarket the pork or steak are lovingly bundled in transparant plastic held taut against the neatly portioned cuts and the styrofoam, with little stickers telling anyone who would read about how happy the aforementioned pig or cow was before it died. I spent most of my childhood in the supermarket poking with fascination at the taut transparant plastic, feeling it yield beneath my fingers, and then poking the clean, strange, sterilised stuff beneath it, and then reading the label proclaiming in mechanised type that I was holding in my hands a great lovely specimen of HIND LOIN.
A supermarket already is a vast conspiracy by itself. Worse than a supermarket is your mind.
Construction of knowledge in food is something not to think about too much or too deeply if one intends to continue to eat, because you can’t eat without killing something. One day if someone suddenly makes the discovery that green things really do have thoughts and feelings, carrot juice would become murder – for real.
If God made this world in peace and harmony, it was a bloody farce. If people made ‘civilisation’ a civilised word as they do all the time I think I shall in the future not attempt to desist from simply laughing in their faces.
I was watching my mother trim the fat off a pink, stripped chicken when I suddenly thought: ‘so this is what we look like on the inside.’
It was a very disturbing thought. When you are a carnivorous little hypocrite like me it is best not to think too much about the stuff that tastes so good in your mouth. For all we know we could be eating the offspring of poor families deep-frozen from Victorian times.
That, if I may mention, is a disturbing thought too. Most disturbing, however, is the niggling notion clinging fiercely to the back of my brain that I wouldn’t mind trying the meat-as-it-is either – i.e. raw.
I bring up no defence against myself except for that it looked like a special kind of jelly. The canon of Pavlovian conditioning tells me that this might account for the strange impulses I get from staring at that slimy pink lump – but no. The jelly I like is radically different both in appearance and smell from a slab of limp substance on a chopping board. Moreover I have never tasted raw meat before, and have no inclination to act on the inclination to try. I have been fortunate enough to have eaten only vegetables, fruit and processed preservatives uncooked; the only exception would be three very thin slices of salmon, which bears only a superficial resemblance to the almost-defrosted chicken in the kitchen sink. Bye bye Pavlov.
The primal subconscious so dearly beloved by Freud and his bevy of little protegés is no excuse either. For one, if it were subconscious, why am I conscious of it? I’m only supposed to be conscious about other people’s subconsciousness(es). For another: the attraction has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with sex. All right, I know I grossly overgeneralise, but I’m not sure I am the only one of the world with these strange little urges to go picking at the dismembered corpses of dead fowl. In any case, if these ‘strange little urges’ were the unhappy remnants of the tastes and preferences of a triumphantly savage evolutionary throwback, I’m in hardly any position to help it – but what I can do is not follow up on the notion to pick up the oozing stuff and run away with it. Which is precisely what I did. Which brings us way back to the clash of civilisations – the clash between impulse and ideology.
A classic and ever-relevant example of this would be of how ‘Meat’ always sounds so much more appealing compared to ‘Muscles’ or ‘What might once have been the legs of an eating, breathing, defaecating being’. Once in my impressionable childhood I asked about what part of the animal we were eating at the moment and was reluctantly told ‘muscles’ – and when I tried to probe further I was firmly told to stop asking so many irritating questions. The scientific truth and its implications seem to be something everyone is quite happy to remain oblivious about. I slash my way through the foliage to reach it at my own peril.
This route of conversation is particularly pertinent because, being Chinese all the way down to my little toenails, I grew up eating Chinese – rice, cailan, hair fungus, crocodile soup. The Chinese are famous for being able to make a good dish out of everything and anything that may or may not move. This means a lot of difficult questions at dinnertime – and if you think the questions are bad, the answers are worse: it doesn’t help that my mother is a nurse who always knows exactly what we are eating. Liver, brain, lungs, kidneys, trotters, stomach – colon – sea cucumbers – all the things that normally go into sausages in the hardly less decadent worlds of traditional European cuisine, they come out unmauled and recognisable through the heavy sauces in weddings all over the country. Even better, these dishes tend to be exotic and very poetically-named: one is expected to be so grateful for the opportunity of actually getting to lay tongue and chopstick to these delicacies that any childish enquiries to the original functions of the unmentionables in the gravy was liable to get a smack in reply. A smack once too often tends to breed a certain complacency in the food put in front of you until you grow up a little bit only to find that, all your life, you have been seriously enjoying congealed pig’s blood as some sort of tofu substitute. The feeling is quite indescribably strange.
Education in food, as one might say, comes first and foremost from the clumsy but amazingly accurate English translations of dishes on the neon menus at the humble hawker centres. Verily does one find truth in the strangest places.
It is not just words and ideology that make eatables… edible. It is packaging as well. A fortune goes into the food preservative and colouring industry just so that our apple juice does not turn out in their transparant jugs to be some kind of grey colour (like baby apple puree), and that jellies squirt properly out of their appealing plastic cuplets in liquid neon shades that children love, and that ice cream retains their jewel-like creaminess and orange boiled sweets melt a wholesome orange. The moment aesthetics was applied to food was the moment were were asking for trouble with the truth. Even the little labels listing the ingredients on one side of the box has little impact on what we think we are eating. The tangible properties of a food we didn’t kill, gut and fillet ourselves are the first we go by and usually the only ones we consider when making a choice for tomorrow’s lunch: no one is going to care about the percentage content of sodium bicarbonate unless it is widely known (to supestitious precision) to be prodigously unhealthy. Food labels are there only for worried mothers and health freaks; ordinary people, much less snack-scarfing adolescents, are unlikely to bother. How much do they know of what they are eating? Are your potato chips really made of potato?
To say it is all about packaging is to call a tiger a small pair of earmuffs. And it is supermarkets that is the biggest and baddest player in this civilised game of deception. In small-scale grocery stores there is bad fluorescent lighting and rather ugly iron shelves; in wet markets everything is hot, raw, noisy and bloody where the fish on the ice are still alive and the butcher cheerfully carves the meat to your liking. In supermarkets everything is different. Food is packed in neat and coordinated rows according to selection and category. Food is wrapped in plastic and put under treatment of the most flattering UV light. Food is stuck with yellow promotion markers, advertised, arranged in appealing formations to entice the hand that pays the cash. Allow me to revert to the example of raw meat: let us not talk about chicken this time. Let us talk about pork or steak. (No, not pig and cow, pork and steak! You see?) In the wet market these products are hung in all their raw, whole and gory glory, without benefit of special lighting or air-conditioning to hamper bringing the distinctivly stinging scent of blood to your nose. In a supermarket the pork or steak are lovingly bundled in transparant plastic held taut against the neatly portioned cuts and the styrofoam, with little stickers telling anyone who would read about how happy the aforementioned pig or cow was before it died. I spent most of my childhood in the supermarket poking with fascination at the taut transparant plastic, feeling it yield beneath my fingers, and then poking the clean, strange, sterilised stuff beneath it, and then reading the label proclaiming in mechanised type that I was holding in my hands a great lovely specimen of HIND LOIN.
A supermarket already is a vast conspiracy by itself. Worse than a supermarket is your mind.
Construction of knowledge in food is something not to think about too much or too deeply if one intends to continue to eat, because you can’t eat without killing something. One day if someone suddenly makes the discovery that green things really do have thoughts and feelings, carrot juice would become murder – for real.
If God made this world in peace and harmony, it was a bloody farce. If people made ‘civilisation’ a civilised word as they do all the time I think I shall in the future not attempt to desist from simply laughing in their faces.
posted by the zen thing at 6:49 pm
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