FOOD AND ART
FOOD and ART
The greatest paintings ever painted have as their subject - wait for it - FOOD.
These are the cave paintings of animals, dating back to at least 40 thousand years ago on various continents.
But this 'Food-Art' is profoundly metaphysical/philosophical/religious/spiritual - whatever word you want to use for it. The people who painted these paintings regarded their subject as the most important and 'sacred' thing in the world.
I like to give numerical grades to societies. One of the measures of a Good Society is how many of their fellow society members would any individual willingly risk their health and life for. The higher the number, potentially the Better the Society.
Another measure would be - how many of their great works of art have food as the sacred hero?
Our society has no great art now, but for the last three thousand years or so our predecessors made very few if any great works of art with food as the hero (Unless you count depictions of Ceres, the Goddess of Grain, or Diana, Goddess of the Hunt, or Pan and Sylvanus, Gods of Wilderness and Nature....), and after Christianity, none.
Our society is therefore a Bad Society in the extreme. How many people would you die for? How many of our great paintings celebrate the sacredness, mystery and power of food?
We trivialise, denigrate, disrespect, ignore how sacred the act of killing, cooking and eating of food is.
Even the 'scientistic' analysis of the evolutionary and social importance of 'commensality' (a pretentious pseudo-scientific word meaning 'eating together) desacralises, demotes, ignores the profound truth of food.
Only once have I seen a contemporary person, about my age, delve into the seriousness of food. This was in a documentary about how badly British farmers were treated not only by the economy and government, but also by our 'culture' which demonises them as mindless sadistic, perverted, superstitious homicidal maniacs (Straw Dogs, Wicker Man, Deliverance, The Texas Chain-Saw Massacre...) or .just laughs at them as local yokels (The Beverly Hill Billies, Emmerdale Farm, The Archers) and countless stand up acts that portray rural people as idiotic, inbred, incestous fools.
These totally false images of the rural life disgust me, make me ashamed of our culture and our society.
At the end of the documentary, this farmer, about 40 years old at that time, with a very dignified but deeply troubled demeanour said straight to camera that 'city people' did not understand what farmers experienced daily - the necessary death of fellow animals and plants. In order for all of us to live (and most of us live in cities far from daily farm-work), the farmer must raise with great care the animals and plants under their care, and then send them off to be killed. Or watch them die of accidents and disease. He said very seriously that city people did not understand death. And he seemed to me to imply that they therefore did not understand life, and that the disrespect that farmers were treated with, both economically and culturally, was a tragedy for our society.
In Japan, I am told, the second highest rank in society is the small-scale farmer or peasant.