Many questions come to mind with respect to how, and what, and
when, people eat and drink. Human beings still project their
reality in the environment through biological
characteristics-the ability to see, smell, taste, move, jump,
etc.-but some in unnatural ways. Not only do we help vision with
glasses and hearing with aid devices, but even taste and smell
are helped through the appropriate chemistry, in order to buffer
some odor and enhance others. From odorless garlic to tofu
smelling of pork chops, everything is within the possibility of
biochemistry. At the extreme, nutrition is altogether removed
from the context of nature. This is the case not just with people
who are fed artificially, through tubes, pills, or special
concoctions.
What does this have to do with literacy? How is it influenced, if
at all, by the increased illiteracy of the new condition of
human activity? The answers are far from being trivial. An
editorialist from Germany, a country of solid, if not necessarily
refined, eating instincts, went to great lengths to explain the
alienation of nourishment in our age. The final scene he
described is comic and sad at the same time. Some artificially
obtained nutritive substance, molded in the shape of fish, is
fried and served to a video- literate who eats the food while
watching a videotape about fishing. The ersatz experience of
tele-viewing is probably disconnected from the experience of
river, trees, sunshine, and fish biting the hook, not to mention
the taste of fresh fish. Dwindling stocks of fish is one reason
why we can no longer afford the nourishment that results from
direct involvement with nature. Not everyone can or wants to be a
hunter, a fisherman, or a farmer. The romanticism of literacy,
and of the utopian ideologies it helps express, would lead some
to believe that this is possible, even desirable. But maybe not,
since the new scale of humankind does not go unnoticed, even by
those still clinging to the continuity and permanency embodied
in literacy.
Values, rules, and expectations such as health considerations,
efficiency, and taste are embodied in programs and procedures
for which machines are built, new substances designed, and waste
reprocessed. It might make some people shiver, but about 50% of
a person's average caloric intake is the result of artificial
synthesis and genetic engineering. Louis de Funés (in a 1976
French film directed by Claude Zidi) almost wound up as part of
the food processed at Tricatel, a new factory that produces
tasteless food based on the rules and looks of French cuisine,
which the factory effectively undermines. The comedian,
performing as a food inspector, has to decide what the real
thing is and what is the fake. Competing with this burlesque, a
national program, Awakening of Taste, under the aegis of the
Minister of Culture, was set up to encourage French students in
primary schools to rediscover the true national cuisine. That
such a program parallels the effort of the Académie Française to
maintain the purity and integrity of the language is a
convenient argument concerning the interdependence of the ideal
of literacy and that of haute cuisine.
The movie satirizes the human being's relation to food and
technology. Eating something reminiscent of a fish, whether
farmed or synthetically produced, while having video nostalgia
for fishing is not an exception. In the mental gardens we plant
each spring, when magazines and television shows present images
of the beautiful tomatoes we might enjoy in a few months, there
is a virtual space for every practical experience we gave up in
order to satisfy our desire for more at the lowest price. The
tomato in the civilization of illiteracy, hydroponic or garden
grown, ripens faster, is perfect in form, and tastes almost like
we think it should.
Irony and science fiction aside, we are indeed engineering
proteins, carbohydrates, fats, vitamins, and minerals. They are
designed to optimally maintain the human being and enhance his
or her performance. This can be seen as a new phase in the
process of transferring knowledge pertinent to nourishment from
the encompassing and dominating medium of literacy to the many
partial literacies- chemical, biological, genetic-of the
civilization of illiteracy. Having in mind the image of where we
currently stand and the direction in which we are heading, we can
trace human self-constitution with the practical experience of
food.