Part 27 (2/2)

Seduced by our life of plenty and by the dyna and diseased populations, or we could try to understand our part in the equation Living in an integrated world and partaking in the praglobal econo the very disconcerting reality ofto the civilization of illiteracy that also leads to the enormous disparities in today's world Many forces are at work, and the danger of falling prey to the slogans of failed ideology, while trying to understand er in today's world, cannot be overestimated Starvation in Africa, South America, in some East European countries, and in parts of Asia needs to be questioned in light of the abundance of food in japan, West Europe, and North Aes in human self-constitution under expectations of efficiency critical to the current scale of hued and broadened its base of resources, the entire world would be subject to what Ethiopians, Sudanese, So

Extre fertility of the land due usually to bad farress in agricultural technology, biogenetics, and chees have come about in what is considered the h which hue affected ways of working, family relations, use of local resources, social and political life, and even population growth It resulted in a new set of dependencies a communities that had afforded autarchic modes of existence for thousands of years The environment, too, has been affected probably as ress as by the new fare of new fertilizers, insecticides, and genetic engineering of new plants and animals

Motivated by literacy-based ideals, some countries took it upon themselves to see that people in less developed lands be redeeh benefits they did not expect and for which they were not prepared At the global levels of humankind, when the necessity of literacy declines, dependencies characteristic of literacy-based interactions collide with forces of integration and coer is acknowledged and tended to by enoranizations, and institutions more concerned with themselves than with the task at hand They matics of the civilization of literacy The activities they carry out are inherently inefficient Where the new dynamentation, the main characteristics of these experiences are those of literacy: establisheneity, tireless effort to disseminate modes of existence and work of a sequential, analytic, rationalistic, and deterministic nature

Consequently, where nourishment from the excess attained elsewhere is dispensed, a way of life alien to those in need is projected upon them

Aid, even to the extent that it is necessary, re-shapes biology, the environ people, and each individual Diseases never before experienced, behavioral and enerated, even in the name of the best intentions In soious intolerance, and moral turpitude add to natural conditions not propitious to life These man-made conditions cannot and should not veil the fact that hu, replaced by ready- stimulated

Empowerment means to facilitate developments that maintain distinctions and result from differences, instead of uniforer and disease actually jump from the illiteracy of the past-a result of no school systee corresponds to the need to acknowledge differences and derive froeneity new sources of creativity Each ton of wheat or corn airlifted to save mothers and children is part of the anizations wanted to save the soul of the so-called savage The answer to hunger and disease cannot be only charity, but the effort to expand networks of reciprocally significant work The only e differences instead of trying to erase them Access to resources for more effective activities is fundamentally different from access to surplus or to bureaucratic mechanisms for redistribution

Where literacy never becaanization should take it upon itself to i Our literacy-based medicine, nourishment, social life, and especially values are not the panacea for the world, no matter how proud we are of sos have sufficientaith theht learn about that part of nourishher levels of efficiency And we ht find new resources in other environments and in the peculiar self-constitution of peoples we consider deprived-resources that we could integrate into our pragmatics

No truffles (yet) in the coop

Our civilization of illiterate nourishne from self-reliance to affluence corresponds, first and forematic context within which the human condition is defined

We project a physical reality-our body-that has changed over time due to modifications in our environment, and the transition from practical experiences of survival to the experience of abundance The room for invention and spontaneity expands the uarantee efficiency or liht be several dozens of sauces one can select from, and no fewer cereals for breakfast, many types of bread, meat, fish, and very eration to say that all taste alike But it would not necessarily be false to ascertain that behind diversity there are a li formulas, some better adapted to succeed in the ed than others

Yes, people are nostalgic More precisely, people are subjected to the nostalgia- triggering stimuli of mass media: the attraction of the homemade, homestyle, Mom's secret recipe

This is not because the majority of us knohat these icons of the past are, but rather because we associate theer possible: reassurance, calm, tradition, protection, permanence, care We also hear the voices of those who de of yesteryear: wo in their kitchens They did so, the arguoes, to satisfy males, only too happy to be taken care of Both voices, those idealizing and those de the past, should be heard: We enslaved part of nature and took it upon ourselves to annihilate anienetic structure In order to satisfy our appetites, we sacrificed the environed our genetic constitution The truth, if there is any above and beyond the cultural and econo, is that transitions from one scale of humankind to another subjected practical experiences of self-constitution to funda to understand some of the patterns of life and work, as well as patterns of access to food or of preparing it, requires that we understand when and why such changes take place

Language stored not only recipes, but also expectations that became part of our nourish, the art of discovering new recipes and enjoying e eat and drink, is e can convey

Truffles, the food of kings and nobles, and more recently of those who can afford thee Whether seen as the spit of witches, a ing food, truffles gain in status because our experience, reflected in the language pertinent to cooking, led us to regard them from a perspective different from those who first discovered, by accident, their nutritive value It is in the tradition of orality that fathers whispered to their sons the secret of places where truffles could be found Practical experiences involving writing, and later literacy, raised the degree of expectancy associated with their consu of truffles fros that used to find theours) to the reals prevail over anything else Through language processes paralleled by the sen-of a discri why truffles are good

Language and food interact This interaction involves other sign systees, sounds, h the influence of language and these other sign systems, the preparation of food and the appropriate drinks becoenetics, biology, and medicine make us aware of what it takes to avoidone's life Literacy was reinforced in the convention of how people eat, what, when, and how satisfaction or disappointment was expressed In our new nutritional behavior and in our new values, literacy plays atable) The artificial truffle is free of thetruffles, of secret for many, cheap, illusory, and broadly available, as democratic as artificial caviar or, as Rousseau would have put it, government by representation

Identical in so many ways, the cafeterias that extend an industrial model in a post-industrial context feed millions of people based on a formula of standardization Hierarchies are wiped away This is no place for truffles One gets his tray and follows those who arrived before There is no predetermined sequence All that remains is the act of selection and the execution of the transaction-an exercise in asse your own pizza on a coe of available nourish environ erated containers of sandwiches, cake, fruit-the language of expectations will not be much richer The increased efficiency made possible this way accounts for the wide acceptance of thisourselves

We are e eat

If ere to analyze the language associated hat, hohen, where, and e eat, ould easily notice that this language is tightly connected to the language of our identification We are what, hohen, and where we eat

This identification changed when agriculture started and faain when the prag, and so on until the identity of the literate person and the post-literate eed from practical experiences characteristic of a new scale of hue of our social life, an identification number of a sort, an address, and other information in a database (income, investment, wealth, debt history) that translates into whatmodels define as our individual expectations Information brokers trade us whenever someone is interested in e can do for hi can be used to precisely map each person to the shelf surface available in stores, to the menus of restaurants we visit on various occasions, and to the Internet sites of our journeys in cyberspace Our indexical signs serve as indicators for various for calories (how many do we really need?), fats (saturated or not), proteins, sugars, even the aesthetics of food presentation, in order to exactly match individual needs and desires Scary or not, one can even iical systearam atched for the last 30 seconds, or the e are involved in To make this happen is a task not soour custoh Pointscape, saving ourus ti and drinking are freed from the deterministic chain of survival and reproduction They arepractical experience Each ti or sandwich, each time we enjoy ice cream, drink wine or beer or soda, take vitamins or add fiber to our diet, we participate in two processes: the first, of revising expectations, turning what used to be a necessity into luxury; the second, of continuous expansion of the global h e eat and drink Many transactions are embodied in our daily breakfast, business lunch, or TV dinner With each bite and gulp (as with each other product consu the e juice contains frozen concentrate from Brazil The fine Italian veal microwave dinner contains meat froarian or Polish beehives Bread, butter, cheese, cold cuts, ja of the United Nations if all the people involved in producing theetables, not unlike everything else traded in the global rated world in which theif not our taste, at least our propensity to buy

The efficiency reached in the pragmatic framework of illiteracy allows people to es, a plurality of dietary experiences, some probably as exotic as the literacy of ancient Greek, Sanskrit, Ara Even the recipes of the Ros (as in Saint-Bernard-de-Coes in the Pyrnes) or as haute, ready-made cuisine (the Comptesse du Barry food coer, and sea trout ild leeks) The japanese have their sushi+ prepared froanic rhytheration), from wherever the beloved delicacies are still available

The multiplicity of food-related experiences in our tieneity in the civilization of illiteracy It is also an expression of the subtle interdependencies of the many aspects of human self-constitution The democracy of nourishment and the mediocrity of food are not necessarily a curse Neither are the extravagant performances of artist-cooks that fetch a price equivalent to the average annual salary of a generic citizen of this integrated world Difference makes a difference Feht to left)-all use arguments related to how and e eat, as part of the broader how and e live, to advance their causes If nothing else, the civilization of illiteracythose pertinent to nourishe is still ahead of us And no one kno it tastes

The Professional Winner