Knowledge is power, but food is delicious

Posted by admin on Feb 3, 2009 in Issues & Ideas | 0 comments

Initiating meaningful interactions with other people can be difficult.

A person enjoying Kenny G’s Christmas album might not want to listen to Duke Ellington. Your boyfriend may not be in the mood for a heart-to-heart while he’s watching the Canucks lose another game. Sometimes your best friends aren’t ready to drop everything for a spontaneous dance party.

Instigating profound interactions is an art requiring both tact and timing. Lacking your external perspective, most people are completely oblivious to the things or ideas they obviously need. It is a safe bet, however, that everyone you know will be hungry sometime in the near future.

Here at Trinity Western University, we do quite a bit of thinking. Our obsession with ideas can make us lose sight of the most natural and basic thing we can share: food. People who want to discuss the merits of Pierre Bayle are much harder to find than people who would love a piece of delicious Belgian chocolate.

Food is easier to share than ideas because it is more important. Plato had this notion that in order to be truly alive, a person must dwell in the world of ideas. This concept is particularly ominous in a world where our lives revolve around devices for storing and retrieving ideas.

Most students risk underestimating the impact that a good meal can have on their quality of life. Our information habits are creating a world wherein people believe eating a meal while cruising Facebook is a better use of time than eating a meal with their family.

As the semester rolls along, our eating experiences often become a casualty to productivity. The chaotic dinner that your dorm once shared becomes a hastily retrieved sandwich lodged awkwardly beside the keyboard; the meal you cooked and shared with your roommates has degenerated into a burrito now shared with the pages of your biology textbook.

Food intelligence, which is often neglected due to intellectual endeavours, increases our ability to enjoy profound, interactive meals. Do we know enough about our food to savour it?

Only one per cent of the population is engaged in food production and most of them avoid discussing their production techniques. Eating and sharing food you’ve grown or raised is deeply satisfying. While few students have the time to start their own farm, we can discover how our food is produced.

In addition to enjoying organic chocolate and knowing where your chicken fingers were raised, food intelligence includes an understanding of how communities are built when people share food together.
A man whose life and teachings are central to TWU chose to have his followers share bread in his memory – this was not an arbitrary choice.

Enjoy meals that friends, family, religious establishments or soup kitchens have prepared. In addition to savouring this food, try to engage with your dining companions. Avoid restaurants with televisions! Prepare something delicious, yet filling for other people.

Once those experiences have sunk into your consciousness, repeat and enjoy.