“And another thing,” it’s my sister Robin, again, Chairman of Column Quality Control, with more feedback. “That column about food additives. It wasn’t funny.”

No, it wasn’t.

“It’s like reading Erma Bombeck to start the day with a light heart, but getting references to governmental corruption and mangled bodies, instead. Here I am expecting to laugh, and at the end of the column I feel like...” This is a family medium. Use your imagination as to how she concluded her criticism.

The reality is that food is becoming less and less funny. Food preparation and consumption can still be hilarious. The food is not.

Contemplate the basics. You’re hungry. What do you need? Food? Wrong. Money, either your own or the financial largesse of a charitable entity. Since the earth and its indigenous productive capacity cannot fundamentally be owned, yet we insist on owning and trading it, anyway, this isn’t funny. Why is starvation epidemic in many areas? Lack of arable land? Lack of water? Nope. Not yet, anyway. Economics; the politics of distribution, based on currency. Not funny at all.

What about the advances civilization has made in increased food production per acre? We can produce, if not distribute, enough nutritious food for everyone. If that’s not funny, isn’t it at least wonderful? One of the ways we’ve accomplished this is with pesticides. In late March and early April of 1997 Associated Press circulated a story reporting on a study suggesting that the use of pesticides may be causing a dip in male birthrates and a corresponding rise in “other unexplained defects in male reproduction” in the industrialized world. Two prominent researchers were quoted, one suspicious, one cautious. Since then, several experts have rallied to debunk the research. The only way to make sense of this controversy is to recognize that ultimately we don’t know what we’re doing to ourselves by virtue of agriculture. We’d better learn. Fast. This doesn’t provoke laughter.

When I was in college a professor mentioned that during the height of Greek civilization it was possible for one person to know everything there was to know. Having been born into the information explosion, this intriguing tidbit has become a mantra for me when I think about life and its sustenant, food. We used to be able to know how dangerous life was. As we’ve grown in population and knowledge, we’ve become less perceptive of increased danger. It’s scary. Not funny.

Maybe, as my father and I satirically surmised, humanity will evolve a whole new physiognomy for which presently toxic substances will be nutrients. Could be. That’s a happy thought. Not funny, though, when you consider that your body won’t be one of the brave new breed.

Anthropologists have been discovering for some time that prehistoric human life may have been much less dangerous and stressful, much healthier and, at least as long as it is now. This is a shocker. It’s hard to relinquish the belief that civilization is an improvement. It’s even harder to accept that life’s current difficulties, which we enshrine as character builders and challenges that render life worth living, are not natural to us, having been imposed for only .4%, yes, that’s four tenths of one percent, of our existence as humanoids.

Unable to escape the system into which we’re baptized, many of us authoritatively argue these points. It is, however, the authority of fear. It’s not funny, and not easy, to realize you might be living a horrible mistake.

Closer to home, literally, think about your last trip to the grocery. How many times, as you picked up a package, did you try to ignore the thought, “I wonder what this really has in it, I wonder what I’m really feeding myself, my friends, my family?” How many of those pesky, uncontrollable brain graphics of a future someone-you-love suffering the ill effects of a lifetime of, say, hormone-loaded yogurt, did you allow your conscious mind to dump in it’s subconscious trash can? Did you chuckle while each image was disappearing?

Why do I insist on reminding everyone, myself included, how precarious life, through food, has become? I’m not hopeless. I believe that through our increasing inability to individually handle knowledge we will understand, at a religious level, that as a species we are one organism living within the larger organisms of the world and the universe. The accelerating rate of the information explosion might guarantee this in my lifetime. At critical mass, perhaps we will consciously exercise our natural productive and destructive capacities to create a no less mysterious and provocative but definitely gentler life.

Then we can laugh, joyously, about food, again.

Text, Recipes & Graphics ©1999 by Gail Rae Hudson

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