The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved —by Eric Imhof

Beans and rice. Beans and rice. For two weeks we ate beans and rice with every meal. Well, no - there were probably a few breakfasts in there when we didn’t - but the fact that I can’t remember them illustrates my point: we ate a lot of beans and rice. “The beans will give you strength,” we were told. And we certainly needed it; we were working with an experienced team of gritty, bantering masons building cinder-block houses in a small rural town called Ticuantepe near the capital city of Nicaragua. Our group, which was comprised of 5 graduates from the Maryland Institute College of Art’s Community Art Masters Program and 6 high school students from the Academy of Career and College Exploration (ACCE), was there for 2 weeks on a cultural-exchange / service trip through Bridges to Community, a non-profit organization dedicated to building solidarity with international communities. We worked with the masons and we ate with them - along with the rest of the residents, cooks, and children living in the pineapple cooperative where we were staying.

Along with the regularity of the beans and rice, other constants were that we always ate together, at the same times of the day and in the same place: outside on three picnic tables arranged under the canopy of a very large tree that stretched its arms and gave us ample cover when it rained (which it did, every day). We ate together, sharing food from each other’s plates and, more importantly, sharing conversation and reflection. Between bites of fresh tomato and fried plantains (grown literally down the dirt road snaking through the cooperative), we recounted our harrowing, humbling, and otherwise hilarious tales of living and working in a land far removed from the orange streetlights and hallowed row-house corridors of Charm City.

Apart from this important role as catalyst for our “round-table” reflection, the food we were eating was also connecting us to a culture and set of traditions that most of us as North Americans had never experienced before. By taking part in this daily ritual we were learning the values of this rich culture – which, because of its context and history (a story interwoven with foreign colonialism and internal revolution), is rooted in the ideas of resilience, conservation, sharing, and an awareness of social justice.

Much of this paradigm manifested itself at mealtime. By eating outside we were reminded of the origin and production of our food, as well as the farmers who harvested the food and brought it to our table. By eating collectively with the masons, cooks, and children we de-valued any social hierarchy based on nationality, race, class, or age. By practicing a ritual of cleaning our hands, setting the tables, sharing our food, and then clearing the tables we taught ourselves humility and ultimately heightened our mealtimes to the status of a special and meaningful daily ceremony.

It didn’t occur to me how meaningful this was until I was back in the States a few weeks later. I remember the moment: I had come home with a to-go cup of soup from the café where I worked. After taking it out of the microwave (although still slightly cold) and setting up camp in front of the television in my living room - still wearing my company-provided polo shirt - I stared blankly into the screen as I monotonously crumpled up crackers into the soup and shoveled it into my gaping mouth.

I was eating, sure. I was “filling up” with nutrients and vitamins and other characters from the friendly food pyramid. But I was also missing something. I was missing something truly essential. I was missing the conversation, the sharing, the appreciation: not just for the food but for the company I would be eating it with. I was missing the chance to slow down and rest my mind. I was missing the lessons of conservation, social obligation, listening, and awareness of others. These lessons all seemed to be reinforced at the wooden tables where we ate during our two weeks in the pineapple cooperative.

By chowing down my soup in a void of ritual or meaningful inclusive process with others (separating the food from its social, cultural, and societal context), I was also chowing down a value system that belittles any kind of social awareness, traditional importance, or communal ceremony tied to food consumption. I was swallowing the values of corporate America, which sees the consumption of food as akin to the consumption of gasoline: we need to accumulate the calories needed to be efficiently productive during the work day. Period. From the point of view of the company executive, eating alone and quickly lends itself to increased profit because in the short term it contributes to worker efficiency. That is, in a very simplified model: if we can spend less time during lunch break and still pour sufficient nutritional content into our bodies to keep us functioning, then the company has gained extra productivity in the form of that additional time that we can now contribute on the job.

This method of fast, anonymous eating reinforces the bottom line of corporate industrial capitalism, which in its cold ruthlessness leaves no room for any seemingly “trivial” ritual of food consumption that otherwise connects the food to its socio-cultural context. Under the contemporary capitalist model of the United States, food is relegated to the role of fuel. It’s categorized as just another cost in the “human overhead.” As such it loses its importance in forging social identities or accompanying cultural traditions that engender and keep alive the values of cooperation, sharing, conservation, social obligation, and other tenets of a strictly “non-corporate” paradigm.

It is exactly this non-corporate paradigm that I found so refreshingly alive and well in rural Nicaragua. When I returned to the United States to find myself once again eating by myself in front of the television, I was forced to ask myself, “Why?” Well, if the eating habits of many Americans are dictated in a certain sense by the level of our society’s industrial / technological development (and the capitalist ideology it espouses), it follows that the eating habits we observed in Nicaragua were dictated in most part by the same underlying forces. In Nicaragua, however, we fail to see the highly sophisticated level of corporate ownership that emerges from the kind of developed industrial and technological capacity that currently defines the American political-economic landscape. In Nicaragua, especially outside of the cities, we instead observed a mostly agrarian society relying on the export of its agricultural products for its economic livelihood. In the cooperative where we stayed, people took time to congregate and eat because it benefited them to pool their resources, all adding their particular crops to the collective “pot,” as it were, for shared consumption (hence the beans and rice every day). They also had limited mobility due to the poorly maintained infrastructure and thus had a limited choice of venue. In other words, they usually ate together at a place strategically located within walking distance of each person’s adjacent plot because without a reliable mode of transportation it was their only option. They ate together in this manner out of necessity.

Yet the necessities that bear the eating habits we observed and practiced in Nicaragua should not diminish the importance of the societal values that such habits support and sustain. En lieu of returning American society to a time prior to the advancement of capitalism and industrial development (which I would insist is both impossible in practice and counter-productive in theory), the most constructive thing I could suggest would be to sort out what we observe to be “culturally valuable” aspects of such eating habits and then integrate them into our own lifestyles as effectively as we see fit. One way to start is to look at the ways in which food is used ritualistically or to forge social identities in our own culture, whether it be in religious ceremony to symbolize spiritual solidarity (Christ breaking bread at the Last Supper in the Christian tradition, for example), as a cultural celebration of our prosperous history (the Thanksgiving turkey), or even as a benchmark for another year lived (the classic birthday cake). We might ask ourselves what cultural values these mealtimes teach us and then try to apply those lessons to more of our meals on a consistent basis – even if it’s just once a week. One common thread seems to be that ritualistic meal implies a social setting, both in the sense that the food is shared among a group of people and in the sense that the food codifies the values of their socio-historic cultural context that are most consistent with supporting the ideals of social justice. Perhaps the next step is just trying to eat one meal a week with others, highlighting the meaningful activities of helping to prepare the food, setting the table, cleaning up together, etc. By taking this step you will not only be enriching your own life, but you’ll be helping to keep alive the traditions of solidarity and cooperation that I saw to be alive and well among our “fellow Americans” to the South.