It will be a sad day when "Sanitas Per Escam" becomes"Health via Soylent"

The vegetable vendor is one of the many un-American experiences when visiting with the parents in the old country.  Pushing his cart, he bellows the names of the vegetables he has to sell.  He is so loud that sometimes I can hear him over the phone if I happen to call my parents at the time he is hawking his goods.

He brings the vegetables to people.  Round the corner from where my parents live is a modern supermarket that sells vegetables and more.  The old and the new coexist in the old country.  But, as with many other aspects of life, the vendor pushing his cart is also becoming a rarity.

Here in my adopted country, cities like where I live feature Saturday Markets, through the growing season and when the weather is not atrocious--here, it is from early spring until mid-fall.  Instead of vendors pushing their carts along the neighborhood streets, they congregate at a place.  

The Saturday Market is a diversion from the routine, which is to get the supplies from supermarkets.   "[Buying] food can even be enjoyed as a leisure pursuit, rather than a daily chore"

In generations gone by, before the ubiquity of refrigeration and food preservatives, people were forced to go shopping every day – visiting half-a-dozen different shops to get what they needed for a single family meal. ... The arrival of supermarkets in the Fifties and Sixties was revolutionary. For the first time in history, ordinary people had access to an array of exotic foods from around the world, never before available under one roof. And, what’s more, it was affordable; large chains were able to buy mass-produced food in such bulk that food producers were lining up to offer them the lowest prices possible.

Even in the old country, mother does not buy vegetables every single day from that vendor, or from the supermarket, thanks to the fridge at home.  It is a different world there, here, and everywhere.

But, I suppose even buying groceries in order to cook at home is becoming rarer anymore.  Fancy kitchens seem to be more for decorative purposes than for cooking at home, it feels like.  It is also a phenomenal piece of evidence on the choices we have, without being restricted to eat at home after spending hours working with primary ingredients.  As Rachel Laudan noted:

If we romanticize the past, we may miss the fact that it is the modern, global, industrial economy (not the local resources of the wintry country around New York, Boston, or Chicago) that allows us to savor traditional, fresh, and natural foods. Fresh and natural loom so large because we can take for granted the processed staples—salt, flour, sugar, chocolate, oils, coffee, tea—produced by food corporations.

Even though cooking at home is easier with pre-processed ingredients, so that people like me can jump into a step 6 of the process, apparently quite a few think that cooking at home is a time consuming chore.  Why?

According to the researchers, the answer has to do with a reduction of mental effort. ‘Perhaps the most important and clear-cut effect of packaged foods is that they reduce the complexity of meal planning,’ they write. ‘The family chef can invest less time thinking about the week’s meals.’
In other words, in a world where nearly 100,000 new food and drink products are added to supermarket shelves each year, convenience food offers a valuable freedom from decision-making – a signposted shortcut through the bewildering cornucopia and competing claims of the contemporary food environment.

And, therefore, there are even folks even now who would rather chug synthesized "nutrition."  Even though I intellectually and emotionally understand the changes that have happened even within my lifetime thus far, reading about "Soylent," a few months ago, in "the end of food" made me highly uncomfortable, to say the least.  

Soylent has been heralded by the press as “the end of food,” which is a somewhat bleak prospect. It conjures up visions of a world devoid of pizza parlors and taco stands—our kitchens stocked with beige powder instead of banana bread, our spaghetti nights and ice-cream socials replaced by evenings sipping sludge. But, Rhinehart says, that’s not exactly his vision. “Most of people’s meals are forgotten,” he told me. He imagines that, in the future, “we’ll see a separation between our meals for utility and function, and our meals for experience and socialization.”

When the author of that piece lived a three-day weekend essentially on Soylent, she realized how much eating is more than merely about food:

You begin to realize how much of your day revolves around food. Meals provide punctuation to our lives: we’re constantly recovering from them, anticipating them, riding the emotional ups and downs of a good or a bad sandwich. With a bottle of Soylent on your desk, time stretches before you, featureless and a little sad. On Saturday, I woke up and sipped a glass of Soylent. What to do? Breakfast wasn’t an issue. Neither was lunch. I had work to do, but I didn’t want to do it, so I went out for coffee. On the way there, I passed my neighborhood bagel place, where I saw someone ordering my usual breakfast: a bagel with butter. I watched with envy. I wasn’t hungry, and I knew that I was better off than the bagel eater: the Soylent was cheaper, and it had provided me with fewer empty calories and much better nutrition. Buttered bagels aren’t even that great; I shouldn’t be eating them. But Soylent makes you realize how many daily indulgences we allow ourselves in the name of sustenance.

Eating is not merely about food.  It is about relationships of various kinds:

With the people from whom we buy the groceries.

With the people who share meals with us.

With people who listen to our stories about dining experiences.

Oh well, maybe this is more evidence that I am becoming an old curmudgeon!