Last week, I selected the themes of nature and civilization, so this week I began to think about how to fill, modify the original position, and continue my research on food and body.
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Previous study ( part that relates to “Nature and Civilization”)
Modern society has always regarded morality and controlling one’s own desire as a way to divide the primitive animal instinct. Humans who come out of the jungle believe that eliminating their naturalness is an important phase to ensure a civilized society. The concept of nature was created, resulting in an inherent binary opposition between nature and civilization. Basic physical need like ‘Appetites’ is seen as a primitive pursuit that lower than spiritual need. People begin to treat animal nature from concealment to governance and finally become pure abandonment. The animal body we can’t get rid of becomes a remnant of civilization.
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This week
In an essay criticizing meal replacement drinks, I found evidence of we are abandoning our physical needs, a phenomenon the author calls “forgetting of the body.” (Diehl, 2018)
Soylent’s marketing pitch is that three meals a day with just one drink will cover all of the day’s nutritional needs. The founder of the product tried to drink only this product for 30 days. Then he emphasized it helps him devote more energy to math, art, music, these spiritual and tasteful pursuits. And give examples of how eating real food is a waste of time and money.
My mental performance is also higher. My inbox and to-do list quickly emptied. I ‘get’ new concepts in my reading faster than before and can read my textbooks twice as long without mental fatigue. I read a book on Number Theory in one sitting, a Differential Geometry book in a weekend, filling up a notebook in the process. Mathematical notation that used to look obtuse is now beautiful. My working memory is noticeably better. I can grasp larger software projects and longer and more complex scientific papers more effectively. My awareness is higher. I find music more enjoyable. I notice beauty and art around me that I never did before. The people around me seem sluggish. There are fewer ‘ums’ and pauses in my spoken sentences.
How I Stopped Eating Food
by rob
This terrifying idea leads me to a conjecture. When everyone eats the same compressed food, it may only lead to a future of being a working component like ants.
Also, I saw a report that interviewed people who eat the same food every day. Most people who eat the same food repeatedly expressed that they are busy with work and want to save time and energy for more important things (news).
According to these, I simply drew a cuisine evolution chart. Look at this trend more visually.
Maybe they all think that eating is a low-level need that can be sacrificed to some extent. They don’t want to give in to their physical instincts. They just want to satisfy their physical needs so they can move on to more important things. These ideas are derived from the alienation of nature, the loss of the awe of nature. Basic needs are met so easily that food becomes a less important pursuit.
I ended up drawing some abstract characters whose bodies no longer needed maintenance and were born 100 percent for a civilization with high needs.
I was inspired by Holly Hendry, who made many sculptures about the inner workings of the body. She believes that light and soft cartoon elements can polish the heavy theme. It will bring tension that makes the audience realize these forbidden words and “chucking them up in the air”.
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Is eating really so that unimportant？ What role does food play in nature and civilization?
The book, Medieval flavor food (2012) says that human beings are still fundamentally influenced by the rhythms of nature. Although humans have learned to use natural elements such as “grain” to make “artificial” bread that does not exist in nature, food production is still based on the existence of raw materials. Even though humans interfere the nature through labor, technology, and knowledge, the harvest is still up to nature. As the Bible says, “What will God give us?” For cooking, Montanari wrote: “bread changes the digestive behavior of wheat (which becomes bread), but also adapts to the realities of nature (wheat contains gluten).”
It follows that cooking food shows the balance between civilization and nature itself, and cooking is the process of artificially adding order to natural materials.
I took a closer look at how we collect raw materials from nature, process them, and make them into bread. You can see that the simple formula actually goes through countless treatments of raw materials, which shows the realization of civilization.
Next
1. Appetite is the basic need for human self-identification, social repression of the body, ethical eating, low taste and high taste (the delicacy of French food, the vulgarity of fast food?). “, and so on to witness the clash between nature and civilization.
2. Bread, one of the most representative processed foods, has been used and improved since the Stone Age and is the most widely eaten staple food in the world. Countless cultural references are made to it, bread became synonymous with money or the religious concept. Discover the true relationship between nature and civilization by studying the cooking of “bread”.