FOOD, ART AND RITUAL

The relationship between food, art and religion through the ages is obvious. Gods of harvest, gods of wine, prohibited foods, classified foods, certain foods on certain days, even a Messiah embodied in bread and wine. Icons, architecture, mandalas, textiles, calligraphy, music ... all associated with religion throughout the ages. I have recently been thinking of the relationship of art, food and ritual in a non-religious context. My own daily ritual of food has evolved in response to various medical conditions, medication side effects, allergies, genetic digestive issues and other metabolic problems. So, combining artful preparation of food and ritual has become a daily process for me. 

I recently viewed a video of Jordan B. Peterson and Ronald DeSouza debating "The Sacred" (above). I highly recommend it, if you are interested in skepticism, religion, philosophy and history. This video, in conjunction with a couple of others, got me thinking about food, art and ritual in a new way.

I will first disclose that I am at the obsessive-compulsive end of the neurosis spectrum. Ritual is a matter of course for me. I make my bed every morning after showering. Then I do my yoga. All this before breakfast. I clean my house from top to bottom every Wednesday afternoon. I pay all my bills as soon as I am invoiced. And so on.

My relationship to food has been a consciously evolving process since my adolescence. My mother had gone to a professional cooking school in her early marriage. She simultaneously worked checking bombshells at a government arsenal. It was the time of WWII. During some of this time, she was pregnant with my older brother. My father was at war in Europe for those few years. 

Our daily meals in my childhood were widely varied. My mother, a first generation American from an Eastern Baltic background, was schooled from childhood in that ethnic cuisine. Her mother lived with us as well. She was a farm-raised cook. For example, she insisted on seeing any poultry she cooked while it was still alive. We were served everything from stuffed cabbage to Chinese-American chop suey to huge roasts to eggplant parmesan. My grandmother baked her own bread. My mother baked like a Swiss pastry chef. And they both managed all this while working at various jobs outside the home.

I probably need not say that I had a weight problem by the time I was in college. The constant flow of irresistible desserts had badly effected my teeth as well. Our fill-and-pull dentist had made a small fortune off my family. At 18,  I began to have regular adult sexual experiences with older homosexual men. Most of them were affluent residents of Boston's better neighborhoods. They were not shy about lending advise on my physique: "Loose some of that weight, doll, and you'll be a star."

So I listened. In relatively short order, I lost forty pounds. I discovered my mentors were right. My general popularity sky-rocketed with my college peers as well as my sexual consorts. My self-esteem also increased after an initial bout of drinking too much cheap bourbon. This transformation developed into a conflict at home, where I was still living with my parents, an unmarried aunt and grandmother. My mother and grandmother relied on their success at feeding happy diners for their self-esteem. Turning away from too many desserts and pork roasts made me pretty unpopular. My newfound vanity about my appearance was also at odds with the preferred male persona of their culture, where pulling a plow tops nice hair. But I persisted.

In my first serious relationship with a composer and performer, I found myself putting my mother's tutelage to good use. My partner was the most magnetic and gregarious of men, but he could have easily lived without a kitchen. Our small apartment became a de facto artists' guild hall. I was teaching secondary school. I would shop after school and immediately contrive a soup kitchen menu for the evening or late night, after the theaters closed. Soups, stews, casseroles, huge pans of lasagna. Cookies by the dozens. Gallon jugs of lemonade and ice tea. It was not unusual for James to arrive without advance warning with the whole cast and crew of a theater company. They would eat every morsel and often fall sleep all over the living room.

These folk were largely semi-vegetarian hippies. That was a stretch for me. Slowly I read and learned about balanced diets and vegetarian cuisine. I began to bake bread. I experimented with fresh pasta. This was an oddity in mainstream America of the early 1970's. It was the Wonder Bread Era, during which MacDonald's was an exotic new concept. 

My next domestic partner had never tasted pizza before we met. He had been raised Christian Scientist in a wealthy WASP household with Mayflower provenance. A distant relation to both Washington and Lincoln. While this required some major revising of my menus, I realized that my previous living situation had encouraged me to learn a great deal. My partner of that time used to say to friends, "If you ever want to gain twenty pounds, live with Paul for a year." The reality was that I simply introduced him to new foods which he liked, so I cooked them. 

Over the following decades, I quit smoking after fifteen years of two-to-three packs a day and eventually ate a largely vegetarian diet. Then the AIDS crisis hit. Since then, I have remained mostly vegetarian (meaning not eating flesh of killed animals) most of the time. Exceptions have occurred when I have been recovering from major illness, of which I have had my share for the last twenty-five years. 

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My mother's food was art. My grandmother's was ritual. I have aspired to art with food preparation and have also been bound by necessity to ritual in my later life. 

My mother's food was artful because she used it as an expression of affection, an emotion which was difficult for her to express in any other way. She felt compelled to cook wonderful and bountiful dishes, despite frequent exhaustion and tight time lines. Rather than indulging herself in some selfish sublimation of that need to express loving, she pushed through exhaustion and a tendency to resent. It was her most admirable accomplishment, in my opinion.

My grandmother's food was ritual. She was an illiterate peasant at heart. Staunchly Russian Orthodox. Her food reflected the same patterns of behavior she had learned on her father's meager farm in Belarus, where she was one of thirteen children. Bake this bread at this time of year. Use white eggs at Easter. Have the priest in to bless food ... and then slip him his cash fee. Cook veal in Spring. Cook pork in Winter. Cook chicken in hotter weather because it cooks faster. Watching my diminutive grandmother wrestle and knead egg-bread dough (which was half her size) in a cloud of flour was a holiday amusement. She grumbled in Russian all the while. 

Our household's current diet is a daily and rather unvaried ritual. We dine midday on a large  Mediterranean salad with various cheeses and good bread. We each prepare half the lunches each week. I have tried to make this ritual artful on my days. I will carve and cut the vegetables different ways. I will slightly vary ingredients. I devise different dressings. It is a joyful process. I used to bake fresh bread for our lunches until we moved into a neighborhood with good bakeries. Supporting them is one of my contributions to maintaining a livable village. 

Turning rituals of obligation into artful exercises is rare in most religions. When practiced, it differentiates the rituals from their associated dogma. Dogma centers on control of minds and behavior. Ritual is often an attempt at a shared method of individually improving mind, body and spirit. This is why revolutionary spiritual masters have traditionally veered from dogma to sharing ritual as method to gain enlightenment, empowerment and/or liberation. The truly revolutionary path to enlightenment, in my opinion, is learning how to liberate yourself from selfishness and resentment in order to give to others through artful habit, or ritual, without expectation.