Yesterday as I was waiting for Fringe to come on, I saw, with the sound off, the tail end of Kitchen Nightmares. This is pretty much all I've ever seen of Kitchen Nightmares, so I don't really know what the show is about, but I think it's more about the personality of Gordon Ramsay than actual cooking. Yes? Anyway, it got me thinking about the huge amounts of food-related programming that is on now. I used to enjoy watching The Frugal Gourmet on PBS as a kid because Jeff Smith was so darn avuncular and his kitchen looked prettier than ours. But I never dreamed there would one day be so many celebrity chefs, cooking competitions, whole channels dedicated to food.
I never dreamed it, but C. S. Lewis did.
"Now suppose you come to a country where you could fill a theatre by simply bringing a covered plate on to the stage and then slowly lifting the cover so as to let every one see, just before the lights went out, that it contained a mutton chop or a bit of bacon, would you not think that in that country something had gone wrong with the appetite for food? ... One critic said that if he found a country in which such striptease acts with food were popular, he would conclude that the people of that country were starving.... Starving men may think much about food, but so do gluttons; the gorged, as well as the famished, like titillations." -- C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
He uses this imaginary fixation on food as an extreme example to make a point about the state of sexuality, as if to say, "If we were as obsessed with food as we are with sex, look at the kind of nonsense we'd be getting up to!" And now it seems that we kind of are as obsessed with food as we are with sex, and we have complicated relationships with both. Pleasure and shame and biological drive and societal pressures get all mixed up with each other, and we hide certain choices and flaunt others, and all the while, we're not getting any healthier. I hesitate to say that if we all just obeyed the commands of God that our lives would be automatically better--because that's getting into some tricky prosperity gospel territory, about which I will no doubt blog at a later date--but I do think that there might be something askew in a society that has a dozen television shows about cake.
On the other hand, I've never known anybody who gave up sex for Lent, so I guess food still has a ways to go before we consider it REALLY important.
Are you kidding? People say they're going to give up sex for Lent all the time.
ReplyDeleteAlthough now that I think about it, all of those people were single at the time. Hmm.