The degree to which “consumption” as a concept maps sustenance onto capital is an important realization for all of us to make. My people’s food was a lot of mac-n-cheese, pork-n-beans, and boxed pasta with doctored sauce from a jar. Inexpensive food prepared with care enough to make sure it was tasty and nutritious. As a comparatively affluent adult (or at least one willing to splurge on food over, say, electronics), I take a deep, and very aspirationally classed pride in my love of Humboldt Fog cheese, Muscovy duck breast, and good red wine, a pride that even my critical awareness of the motives hasn’t dampened.

I keep coming back to this because I’m keep wondering how not eating — as in fasting or in anorexia — fits into this. I also wonder about the use of food as a form of control, both socially and individually.

ps To add to the list of Asian American novels about food, _The Book of Salt_ by Monique Truong imagines the life of the Vietnamese cook for Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas; _My Year of Meats_ by Ruth Ozeki follows a documentary filmmaker who interviews families across America about preparing meat dishes. There are many others but those two are my favorites.

I don’t eat much bologna now, but every once in a while my family indulges in fried bologna sandwiches and we recall my father’s penchant for them.

My mother grew up in Nazi Germany and learned under that regime to cook and bake like a professional–but she and my aunt had to trade sandwiches along the railroad tracks during and after the war for coal. My mother’s smoking habit was formed when she was paid in cigarettes to iron GI’s shirts during the Allied occupation–smoking staved off hunger pains.

So my siblings and I were raised with a lot of thought about food and waste. Rarely did we dine out. Sundays and holidays were spent with relatives–nearly every Sunday we went to my great-grandmother’s farm. I didn’t have fast food until high school. In our house we didn’t smell fried bologna when we awoke; we smelled soup. Mom made soup everyday and if you know soup’s history you know that it may be made cheaply and is filling. We suspect that the recipes she handed down would fill a cookbook section called “soup in a time of war.”

I can what’s in my garden and, until recently, was the odd person for putting up preserves, tomatoes, pickles, and peppers. I didn’t make jam this year because I’m out of work and that process is beyond my budget. My friends are disappointed (but only a few of them have returned the jars for re-use)!

Back in 1984 I was amazed at the Super-Sizing of Everything, not only at MacDonald’s but also food sold as holiday gifts. Five-pound canisters of M and M’s, for example. I remember just standing in a department store, thinking about the Ethiopian drought, the rise of homelessness evident in the streets of Reagan’s America, and the sort of (New) Gilded Age excess revealed in the luxury of spending money for candy and other non-essential comestibles. Had economists and historians and other social observers considered food rather than house construction and stocks, they may have been able to predict some of the great disparities in income and health Americans are now seeing.

As humans learned to produce rather than find food they were able to divert attention to other activities like arts and crafts. As the efficiency of food production increased, larger communities became possible.

IOW – food played a major role in the beginning of civilzation.