Food, Glorious Food!

We had dinner with the Clemens last night. What a fun time! It is great getting to know people with similar intersts who live so close. One of those interests is food. I brought lettuce and salad greens from the garden along with a few radishes and a carrot and some peas.
There is a joy in growing your own food and being able to share it. I have been thinking of festivals and the food involved. We as a culture tend to eat the foods of festivals on a weekly if not on a daily basis. The ingredient to bake a cake have become fairly inexpensive and so easily accessible. Vegetables come in packages, some already prepared. Animals have become so cheap that we eat them on a daily basis, sometimes more than once a day.
Back in the day, when man had to grow his own food, simple meals were often repeated without change, day in and day out. If I chose I could pick any part of the world and replicate a meal from that culinary dialect, just by going around the corner to the Fresh and Easy there. Or eat a meal from any continent (excluding Antarctica) at restaurants within 30 miles.
As I was contemplating this this morning on by bicycle, a thought went through my head: we as a culture have such a problem with food. We make "food" to replicate food. Sugar free, fat free, cheese food. Yet we are never satisfied-as exhibited by our obesity problems. I think what is lost in our culture is the joy and satisfaction of being able to grow your own food. We try to fill that gap by eating more of the things that are so easy to acquire, stop our gobs with food that we really have no connection to. Misunderstand simple principles of ration by nature. What grows most in my garden right now are dark leafy greens, peas, beets, leeks, kale, turnips. These are the things nature is telling me that I need right now. I realize of course, that I am fortunate to live in a climate where I can garden all year long.
Speaking of animals, I heard of a youth pioneer trek adventure where each "family" was given a chicken and told that if they wanted meat, they had to kill their own chicken. All but one family had a pet chicken at the end of the trek. I wonder how many of us would be vegetarian if we had to kill our own meat.