Traveling
The paradox of reading is that the path towards ourselves passes through books, but that this must remain a passage. It is a traversal of books that a good reader engages in – a reader who knows that every book is the bearer of a part of himself and can give him access to it, if only he has the wisdom not to end his journey there. Bayard, How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read (178)
When I was thirteen, I became a vegetarian. The decision was rooted in my inability to reconcile that one could have deep emotional feelings with one animal and yet kill and eat another. To a thirteen-year-old, there could be no greater hypocrisy. (How funny that we despise hypocrisy when young, yet grow to expect and at times enjoy it later.)
I remained a vegetarian for many years, largely out of habit. When you give something up at such a young age, it becomes accepted, normal. I forgot what it was like to ever be a carnivore, and still have only hazy memories of eating meat when I was younger.
Sometime in my twenties, I started to read seriously about food. I was struck by Richard Manning’s Against the Grain, a revisionist history of agriculture that challenges much of the accepted wisdom about why humans relinquished the life of hunters and gatherers. But rather than force me to reconsider what I believed about agriculture, it revealed to me that I believed nothing: this was a corner of my life that was, at the time, unexamined.
Towards the end of the book, Manning swiftly dismisses vegetarianism as a utopian ideal born of the city. One could argue this point (indeed, many have), but I recall being surprised at my reaction: I was insulted, but did not want to argue him. I wanted to agree.
I continued to read and to think about food, learning to interpret the effects of a decades-old food bill on what we eat each day, and gradually softening the boundaries of my vegetarianism to admit fish. I joined a CSA, perhaps the ideal way to eat locally and one that (Manning be damned) is really only available to city folk. Then one day, without ceremony, I had a steak.
When I came around to reading Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, I had already reached a place where Pollan had little to teach me. I was deeply suspicious of the organic economy; I was committed to sustainable agriculture in my daily life; I bought ramps and celeriac and grass-finished beef from the farmer’s market, and sought out pastured milk and cheese as much for the flavor as the ideology. And yet, Pollan’s storytelling about Polyface Farm, and his experience in the abattoir, gave form to those beliefs in a way that no personal experience could. With his text, I could take the measure of myself, could see my own beliefs in the light of another.
And yet, as with Heisenberg, each measurement brings with it an unshakeable uncertainty. We are more than the sum of the books we read, and yet books are the means by which we form the equation. It is necessary then, as Bayard argues, not to read in stasis, but to travel through books – to use them as guideposts but never to set up camp.
This weekend, all of the reading and writing and talking about food that I’ve done for the past ten years was realized in a single tiny plate of celery, gelato, and apple – one course of the Farmer’s Feast at Blue Hill at Stone Barns. It was perhaps three bites, but it arrived with the force of thousands of words. And while it brought to the fore just how much these books had affected me, it also revealed how much further I’ve traveled. And yet – how much further I have still to go.
