Feeding our faces with greed
Mary Margaret Nussbau
We learned more from a three minute record, baby
At many monasteries the monks take their meals in silence. They are served from a common bowl and they eat every last morsel. Such eating is a form of meditation and a form of praise. The idea in practice is mindfulness and it shapes their very days.
At meals in the dining hall, we throw away entire muffins, untouched bowls of cereal, tall glasses of orange juice and slices of pepperoni pizza — finishing your plate is the exception not the rule. We think we own our food and we think that there is an endless supply of it. We have been trained, above all, to be good consumers, confusing who we are with what we own. But "the day is coming," Paul Cezanne writes, "when a carrot freshly observed will spark a revolution."
What would happen if we paid the awe-filled heed of a bald-headed monk when sitting down to sup? To begin, we would save food. This week the students working for hunger and homelessness awareness tell of our waste. They tell us that every day Notre Dame throws away the equivalent of 10 to 12 dumpsters of food from the refuse of the tray lines. During an average night's eating, students throw away about 1,300 cups of rice. We are but a part of the whole. Americans are wasteful. We drive SUVs with World Wildlife Federation bumper stickers. We leave the lights on and the water running. We are a part of that wealthy 15 percent of the world that uses 75 percent of the world's bounty. And we use with fervor and conviction.
At the Hammes Notre Dame Bookstore we shop to a soundtrack of muted hymns, confusing the pilgrim and the shopper. In LaFortune, we learn from our fast-food culture that good meals are like Whoppers — fast, processed, individual and wrapped in trash. We learn that there is always something further, something finer, something faster, something new. It is not enough to be present to a meal, or to a place — the goal is to go and to get. The slow-jawed monks remind themselves with each deliberate bite and journey into taste and texture that everything they have is a gift and a beauty and rare indeed.
Eating, that most quotidian act, is a good beginning for mindfulness. A few years ago some friends of mine staged a protest at Saint Olaf College. They stood in the dining hall by the trash and ate the unfinished food off of their classmates' plates. They ate sandwich crusts and apple halves. They finished bowls of chili and ice cream cones. The protest, one student relates, was humbling and powerful. The students eating were forced to put their ideals into the most earthly action. The students throwing away their food were forced to see their friends eat their trash. It was terribly awkward. No one could look the other way. We can.
The technology which affords us such sweet comforts as kiwis in the middle of November is also comforting. It is comforting not to plant or pick or plow the land to grow an ear of corn. It is comforting not to know the callous-handed men and women who do. It is comforting to eat what you want, when you want, with whom you want — no awkward lulls in conversation, no time lost stirring a pot of stew or scrubbing a pan clean when you could be "doing" something. It is comforting to never know the sensation of hunger. It is comforting to place your dining hall tray on the line, turn heel and walk away. What happens to that uneaten eggroll? Is it composted? Are there Dickensian beggars in the basement who will — please sir — finish it? What happens to the pizza slice I took, and, then, recalculating the caloric extravagance, left on my plate untouched? Do the size of my thighs justify such waste? Should I have simply reconsidered (a difficult thing to do with aisles and islands, bins and buckets of so many kingly choices) and left the pizza slice on the pan? Of course I should have.
The food that is left in the dining halls at the end of the day is taken to local community pantries and soup kitchens. The food that we take onto our plates and do not eat is thrown away. It is thrown away like so many Grab `N Go bags, like so many polystyrene ND cups with "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" imprinted on them. It is thrown away without thought. But the economy of things demands more of us.
We do not have to see the families who swallow our waste, but we ought to remember them. The huddled masses are worlds (two, by most people's count) away. They rummage for fruit rinds in the trash bins of Tijuana and Dehli, not North Dining Hall. Oh, but we are close. In our lifetime 95 percent of the world's population growth will be in developing countries. What will we do if they all follow our lead and gobble up every tree, chunk of coal and chocolate chip muffin in their way? It's hard to believe while wearing Nike light-as-a-feather Air shoes, but the numbers remain: An average American child walks on the earth 23 times heavier than an African child, uses that many more resources.
But finishing the muffin you take is not only a matter of economic consciousness. The saint's admonition — that the shoes in your closet that you do not wear be taken to the poor — is only true to a point. You don't have to be an ascetic or a monk or a bore, be mindful as an artist (of this muffin you are eating, this day you are living, this cigar you are smoking, this Charlie Parker playing). Cezanne painted still lifes and imagined carrots sparking revolutions. He watched the world in wonder.
We are not ready to stop, to keep watch. We move at a dizzying pace through a world that is, as Hopkins writes, "seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil." Perhaps we are being poor lovers, then. Satisfying our hunger with greedy anonymity — not being present to the sun, the light, the growth, the death, the travel and the toil that is heaped on our blue and gold rimmed plates. It is no small coincidence that eating and the erotic are so often linked in literature. Would you marry a man who only ate turkey on white, who couldn't handle spice? Would you want to kiss a woman who gobbled her meal up mindlessly, unable to linger or savor? Where is the love in this daily ritual that connects us to the land, in our breakfast, lunch and dinner?
We are fleshly, bodily beings, shaped by our actions. So we must act rightly and well in the most ordinary bits of the most ordinary days if we are to become grand lovers or poets or saints in the end.
We will finish our muffin, then, in honor of its beauty, in honor of the hands that made it and in honor of the fact that most of the world doesn't have the luxury to be picky eaters let alone throw their food away. We will practice mindfulness. We will say with Wendell Berry, the poet and farmer, "I have taken in the light that quickened eye and leaf, in the brief blaze of motion and of thought, may I be worthy of my meat."
Mary Margaret Nussbaum is a senior PLS major.
The views expressed in this column are those of the author and not necessarily those of The Observer.
All Viewpoint Stories for Thursday, November 16, 2000
