The Lost Sublimity of Food (2)

Occasionally, we might happen to pluck a pear in the garden of a friend we are visiting, or be the dinner guests of people who keep an allotment and suddenly, momentarily, we are returned to our other untame, primal selves, in relishing the full, vibrant flavours of fresh, natural food. Or perhaps we might find ourselves wandering, by accident, through some rural place, lost, in the heat of summer and we see a beautiful, golden field of wheat and we cannot resist walking into it and lying on the earth surrounded by the reeds. We smell their sweetness and look to the flute blue sky, watch swallows swoop and feel the pulse of the earth running through us. We breathe deep and drink in the magnificence about us. Our appetite for all that is not synthetic, comes alive and our love of creation and all it gives us, is re-awakened. And we think we understand the bond our ancestors had with this land and the pure, raw, instinctual joy, with which they feasted and celebrated nature’s goodness----we understand them, because their pagan souls are the same as our pagan souls. We are of the same essence.

On the way back from the wheat-field, we pick wild berries from the hedgerow and find we have a hunger for a home-baked cake of soda bread, or some garden-fresh summer salad, or wild salmon with young potatoes and watercress from the stream below. On a day as sublime as this one, it is not a sliced pan we yearn for. This is not the state of being in which we think to order a pizza. We feel too much alive for that type of food, today. Today, our tastebuds want the real thing. Now we see our earth as a garden of paradise and we think about why Eve and Adam had to bite that apple. How could they resist the exquisite fruit from the wild tree, sweet-smelling, sun-ripened, red-green-skinned, fresh-plucked, noisy, crunchy, juicy to the bite, at once sweet and tart, making mouths water, tastebuds tingle and senses come alive.

The bland, tasteless, waxed, chemical-sprayed imitations in our supermarkets, ‘fresh’ from factory-orchards and a year of cold storage, make it hard to appreciate how an apple could be so sublime and so seductive. But on rare days like this day in the wheat-field, when we remember not to forget our true nature, we can understand Eve’s genius and Adam’s predicament and we sense the sublimity of our pagan past----it is the ghost that haunts our artificial present.



Blessings on your table!

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