Throughout all of our plentiful contemplative practices, the one I found to be most impactful was focused on industrialized food where we used raisins. Being the first contemplative activity we had done, when it was introduced I will admit I was very skeptical of the ability for this small raisin to mean much of anything to me especially so early into the class. However, after experiencing the practice I realized the worth of this exercise. Spending a few moments with this small raisin allowed me to better connect to the course material in a physical way. It is one thing to hear about the process of industrialized food and how much the process takes, but to watch a video of it and then hold the final result in my hand was other worldly. I often find myself not paying attention to what I eat and thinking that the industrialization of food is apart from anything I will ever come in contact with. Yet holding the product in my hand changed that mindset. Through this exercise I been able to gain more insight into the world itself. I realized how much our industrialization has hurt other countries. How we have raised the bar so high that farmers are unable to compete and instead live in poverty. All because of what? So that we can have a raisin? Millions of people can question where their next meal with come from or if they will have the money to send their children to school but we will at least have our raisins to top our foods with. I had distanced myself from thinking about food and actually pondering how it got to my table and all of the people we have stepped on to get there. But through this practice I now know the larger consequences of doing so and can go forward anew.
Hi Bailey!
I really appreciated your post. I especially enjoyed that you emphasized the physicality of the contemplative practices. Particularly in western academic institutions, we as students are encouraged to pursue an intellectual ideal of “objectivity.” Often this means that we are pressured to separate our emotional being from our intellectual being in accordance to Cartesian dualism. Unfortunately, this manifests an incomplete understanding of systemic issues, such as industrialized food, as we are disincentivized to engage with course material in a holistic, honest way. Realizing the physicality of our experiences within these structures, and in particular, food, reinvests us in challenging them. Our bodies are the nexus of cheap food, relative poverty, industrialization, capitalism, colonialism, environmental degradation, etc, and so we carry an embodied knowledge with us as a “felt experience” that is often particularly subversive to institutions that benefit at the cost of everyone else. You also evoke the ambiguity of these structures when you admit you hadn’t previously given much thought to industrialized food as a system. For me, when I come to the realization that a reality has been hidden from me, or has been made abstract to me, I find it useful to question why? Who does this abstraction benefit? To what end is our own lack of awareness as communities also an integral component of the industrial food system? These questions challenge us to confront that which has been made invisible, and therefore challenge that which we’ve been taught is impossible. Finally, you mention the role of entitlement in eating in affluent countries. Is it a right to have a raisin? It might be significant to reappraise this question framing consumerism and consumers as separate categories. Consumerism is an ideology of entitlement and individualism. Under this epistemology, raisins are a right. Consumers are really communities through which consumerism and capitalism are being exercised. If consumerism is analogous to entitlement, then consumers are in many ways disenfranchised. Here we might be able to find answers as to why ambiguity and abstraction is so important to industrialized food: isn’t it easier to operate through people if they are unaware?