You hit the grocery aisle, and you don’t see food. You see ideas. Judgments upon judgments. Far from finding what you need — food — you meet disembodied voices painting pictures of YOU when you pick up a product. You’ll shine. You’ll glow. You be guilt-free (and grain-free, imagine that). You feel like a dry creek bed when the monsoon season hits; but it’s your stomach that’s dry and empty, not your soul (hopefully) and somehow everywhere you look, it isn’t celery, beef, or crackers staring back but ideas about your shape, your organs, your emotional wellbeing, all plastered on boxes that should really just contain…well, something to eat.
Is it what goes into a man that makes him clean, unclean, lean, mean, green? A machine?
When I was first diagnosed with celiac disease, the food looked simpler, even in a small grocery story. It was labeled gluten-free, and the boxes said things like “rice”, “beans”, “crunchy corn cereal”, “cheese”. But before that, I’d been chewed up and spit out by super markets and marketing language and pseudo-nutrition advice.
And as I sat down to lunch today, I looked at my plate, and for a moment my vision seemed to blur and I had two objects floating in my head (well before they hit my stomach): carbohydrate, collagen-boosting, good fats, gluten-free, grain-free, easy-to-make… and a nut butter sandwich. The latter was quite real. The former, I’m not sure. I think it was pieces of someone’s ideas about something that’s real mixed up with an imaginary view a human being, or a piece of food, as a cog in a machine or an object to be disassembled and sold piecemeal.
But I feel much more at peace when my meal is in bite-sized pieces, and not advertising bytes.
I think my stomach almost always knows, regardless. But it sure as thunder in a monsoon gets upset and overwhelmed when something — either my thoughts or the assault from stacks of something in grocery aisles — tries to cram on top of lunch someone else’s judgments about lunch, mistaking nourishment for power, and food for computer code, mistaking a human being for an object to be used, abused, sold to, and confused.
Having celiac has made me more vigilant about food labels. But being a philosopher and a human being has made me more vigilant about labels, full-stop. A label is someone’s idea of what you are. A name is the reality. A carrot is food. A vitamin-enhanced, gluten-free, grain-free, hydroponically-grown cylinder is someone’s packaging (and crippling) label of a carrot. If it is a carrot, I know what a carrot is, and I know I like how it crunches and its brilliant array of rainbow color possibilities. If it isn’t, or if it comes in runaway-train-sized medley jargon, and has to sell me a dozen things I lack before it gives them back, bow-attached…
Well, I’m either going to die from not eating after info-overload or explode if I eat the ideas, moral judgments — and especially, lies about my metaphysical identity.
This has been a segment in Tumbling Gluten Free, reflections on the world and food through the lens of celiac disease. Originally published for Celiacs in Wales.
C.J. Williams 