Tater tot casserole and other down-home meals are back on the American menu! That conclusion comes thanks to recent data from Campbell’s soup company, indicating that more people are cooking at home than they have in the last five years.
The CNBC article making the announcement immediately connected this trend to a flailing economy, suggesting that “more meals at home could mean people are eating out less, showing Americans tightening their belts.”
That may well be the case … but there’s always a silver lining in negative news if only we look for it. In this instance, the silver lining is that more eating at home and kitchen meal prep has the potential to set off an interesting chain reaction eventually leading to greater peace and tranquility for average Americans.
How can this happen? Agrarian author and cultural critic Wendell Berry explains in his book, “Bringing It to the Table.”
In our urbanized culture, Berry says, many consumers have little concept of where their food comes from or what went into making and processing it – and many of us are perfectly fine with that. But what many of us fail to realize is that such a situation is simply another knock against our personal freedom.
“We still (sometimes) remember that we cannot be free if our minds and voices are controlled by someone else,” Berry writes. “But we have neglected to understand that we cannot be free if our food and its sources are controlled by someone else. The condition of the passive consumer of food is not a democratic condition. One reason to eat responsibly is to live free.” [Emphasis added.]
Berry goes on to say that preparing one’s own food is one of several ways to pursue this freedom:
This means reviving in your own mind and life the arts of kitchen and household. This should enable you to eat more cheaply, and it will give you a measure of ‘quality control’: you will have some reliable knowledge of what has been added to the food you eat.
This simple change of thinking can lead to growing interest in other aspects of the food industry, which Berry believes also advance freedom, including self-production, whether through gardening or raising other food products, such as poultry and beef.
Such was the case with former Time editor and author Whittaker Chambers. Chambers became famous in the mid-20th century when he came forward as an ex-Communist spy in order to expose the infiltration of that ideology into high levels of American government. Having left Communism, Chambers and his wife sought to raise their children in the values which made America great. To accomplish this, the two left city living and bought a farm, training themselves and their children to live off the land.
“In an age of crisis, the farm has been our way of trying to give our children what peace and security is left in the world,” Chambers writes in his autobiography, “Witness.” That peace and security doesn’t come from lack of hardship; rather, it comes because of it, Chambers implies, through the hard work, the witnessing of life and death and struggle on the farm, and the firsthand connection that it brings with God and His creation.
That struggle, that survival mode, that connection with God and His world is something many of us have lost in our society of ready-made food and the other elements of our prepackaged lives. And unless we work to regain some of that connection, many of us will continue in our restless, discontented lives.
Granted, not many of us are going to go out and buy a farm and get close to the earth like Chambers did. But that doesn’t mean we can’t take baby steps to find some of that same peace and tranquility – baby steps like making our own meals, eating at home, growing a few vegetables in little garden plots or even window boxes. Each of these actions require us to slow down, process, and think about where we came from and what – or rather, Who – is behind our survival and flourishing in this world. And that recognition, after all, is where true freedom begins.
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The republication of this article is made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal.
Image Credit: StockCake
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