To Eat

Today I woke up far too late in the day and decided to go sit outside. The Blue Ridge in the Summer is full of this sort of day - long, humming with a thick humidity, and just bearable under the shade of a large tree. So I took my place under the beautiful Oak behind my house. Sitting there, contemplating plans for what to make for a late Sunday dinner, I began to notice a bird hopping rather closely. This little specimen, brown and common, moving it's head jerkingly from side to side seemed to have been searching for a place in the shade like me. However, what it had in mind was not sedentary comfort but something more essential. The bird flew this way and that, just above my tree, attempting to corner some type of flying black bug into it's mouth. When it finally succeeded, looking as pleased as any creature can, it simply flew on, leaving me with just my tree.

So I realized, this is the way it has always been.

I started reading Michael Pollan's book In Defense of Food the other day and have since had many a revelation. One such was about the history of food. Why do we eat what we eat? Well, of course, just as the bird, to survive. But once humans got involved, it got a little more tricky. We eat to live, yet we eat to show our bones, ironically. The food we make, or at least should make, represents the taste buds of our families, our history, the landscape and, these days, our ability to climb over the lonely mausoleums of fast food drive-thrus and frozen, fat-free, lemon-scented pasta dishes. To approximate Pollan, we have lost the real, engaging reasons to eat among all the muck. Myself included. After the bird, and the brooding, I thought I would put down the frozen pizza, walk away from the oreos, and make something with the fresh-picked, local blueberries that my friend had brought over three days before from her friend's farm. Buckwheat pancakes with a fresh blueberry compote it is. So, tonight, not so late in the day, there will be pancakes coupled with a sweet satisfaction.

It takes only a moment with a little bird and the old predator-versus-prey power play in my back yard to remember myself in this seemingly chaotic and confusing thing that human beings have to do everyday - to eat. But, now, to eat with a belief in eating, and, thus, with a belief in a history as thick as this Blue Ridge humidity.