I admit my initial skepticism when it came to the acorn bread. I mean, really. What we eat has a direct effect on how we look. If we go around eating acorns, we’ll start to look and behave like squirrels, right?
All right, no, I don’t think we’ll grow long, bushy tails if we eat too much acorn bread. But I do believe what we choose to eat makes us look and behave a certain way.
I have always thought of acorns, however, as having their right place in the world: either on the tree, on the ground, or inside of a squirrel. They are not, I believed, suitable for human consumption. I must have thought this because harvesting acorns is practically unheard of. Our society operates in a particular way. We eat what we cultivate. We plant things, they grow, we eat them. We do plants and animals a favor when we touch them, nurture them, and make them grow. We give them purpose. Then they feed us, and let us go along with our purpose, which is… to give them purpose? This is what happens when I try to make sense of food chains. I end up explaining the circle of eating and purpose.
Again: acorns on trees. They are wild. We are not wild. We do not eat wild things. We are Civilization, and we keep ourselves on a nice paved road, stopping off only to go to visit nice rows of corn and asparagus we have trained to grow.
Eating acorns, in our society, would be like… like putting your pet dog in your mother’s high heels. Or releasing a baby into the woods. You just don’t do that kind of crazy thing. That juxtaposition does not happen!
Regardless, when the acorn bread made its appearance in our classroom, I was excited. Not ever fully trained by our society, I have come to love eating new things.
This past summer, I was given thirty dollars to try and eat a whole bowl of jello salad (made with love, walnuts, cranberry sauce, pineapple, red jello mix, sour cream, cream cheese, and celery).
When I had a boyfriend last year, I talked him into eating baby food with me.
Another time, that same boyfriend and I were in my room, and I found an ant on him. Instead of brushing it off so that it could be somewhere else, and instead of smooshing it and making a mess, I ate it.
Once, Matt Dunlap and I made brownies. Special brownies. And by special, I mean they had silk worm pupa in them. This turns out to be a disgusting combination, if you can believe that.
The outcome is that New and Unusual food does not scare me. I had anticipated nervousness when the day of acorn-bread eating came. But, sadly, it turned out to be an anti-climactic experience that merely reminded me of the time I confused the measurements for a chocolate cake. Dense, but neither sweet nor bitter, I found myself wishing I had a good dollop of freshly whipped cream on top.
1 comment:
Well this is thinking out on a limb here- but think about this-
If our ancestors decided that acorns supply us with proper nourishment, in order to do so, i would think that it would require a vest amount of acorns in order to supplement a small group of people, so think on a macro scale how many acorns it would require to feed a civilization, society or nation properly.
By doing so, we would be cutting down vastly on resources, we would have a loss of lumber, only restricting buildings, tools, weapons, etc, etc, etc- let alone our oxygen. its not that we dont eat acorns because we find it odd to eat, or that we might fear what peers would think, or that they are meant for squirrels (all social norms and believes) its just that we have a better use for them.
on a last note- you mention that humans are not wild. i would like for you to further elaborate on how we are so much different than the dog we care for or from the cow that we eat. we are a part of the ANIMAL CLASSIFICATION, doesnt that stand for anything?
-Jason Rowley
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