The Tower Grove Farmer’s Market ripened in mid-June. Local farmers displayed the fruits of their labors under white canvas tents: zucchini and summer squash and tomatoes pregnant with juice, crates of strawberries and the asparagus from one last harvest before the heat of summer. Packed tables of herbs, lemon basil and thyme graced the air and the greedy noses of shoppers. Freshly slaughtered meat was packed into hamburgers and sold, slathered in homemade ketchup, and organic bakers topped off lunch with a cranberry-bran muffin.

All of this food was made with such care, such artful deliberation that one would have a hard time believing we were in the United States. Americans have lost the art of eating. Ours is a country of frozen dinners high in sodium and other harmful additives; chips that owe their abnormally long shelf-lives to trans-fatty acids; magazines touting the secret to dinner in under 10 minutes and drive-through’s and vacuum-freezer bags that allow the storage of a week’s worth of meals. All of this exists so people can spend less time in the kitchen. Our frantic lives and, let’s face it, America’s Next Top Model are calling us, and we brainlessly obey.

There is something fundamentally disturbing about this. Yes, our lifestyles and poor diet choices are making us fatter than ever, but my concern goes deeper than that. While maintaining our status as the monarchs of fast food, we’ve managed to completely alienate ourselves from what we put in our bodies.

We no longer cherish the preparation that goes into a butternut-squash bisque or the scents arising from bell peppers roasting on a grill. We don’t take time to select good produce, often opting for canned or frozen alternatives because they allow us to go shopping only once a week. I think longingly of Lucien, the grocer’s assistant from the film Ameli?. He handled each vegetable like a type of precious jewel or object.

We’ve lost that in our culture and, with it, a profound part of what makes us human. We become what we put into our bodies; our cells use energy from the food we eat to divide and reproduce. Thus, in the most physiological of ways, we are what we eat. On a sociological level, the ritual of preparing and caring for food helps to set the tone of a civilization. What does this say about ours?

Almost everywhere else in the world, people shop for food daily; they buy what they need for the next several meals and take time and effort to prepare them. This proximity to food and the abundance of market stands guarantees the freshness, quality and locality of ingredients. Europeans aren’t buying peanut butters and jellies that have sat on the shelf for a month, but solid, organic food. They pay attention to what they consume. It is a basic, necessary, and, I would argue, sacred ritual that we’ve alienated from our individual consciousnesses.
I think about these things while I blend the last of the turmeric into the hummus spread and wait for the pitas to warm and crisp in the oven. The crate of strawberries from the market sits on the counter, drizzled with condensation. Basil crawls up my window. I compare these things to the chains of sub shops and gas station fixes of late-night, high-inducing sugar bars, and I can’t help but feel slightly expatriated.

Though it is the aspiration of Whole Foods addicts-and though it reeks of middle-class pretension, I really do believe that in order to reclaim our culture, we might begin by reclaiming food. Not only do we need to eat better, we need to repossess the precision and finesse with which we purchase and prepare our meals. There is something deeply human to be enjoyed in feeling tenderness toward an avocado. Some part of us reaches back to our lost past and remembers sticking fingers in wet dirt and tending the soil until shoots of wheat spring forth.
In recovering our native bond to food, we can recover part of ourselves.

Roberta Singer is a freshman in the College of Arts and Sciences.