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PDF of the poem "Sugar Free Sugar" can be found here: http://sites.google.com/site/stokastika2/sugarfreesugarfinal1.pdf.
I usually do not like to "think" about food in a very direct, intensive way, but ever since I worked with the "grocery store" images from the previous blog, my mind has gone down this "rabbithole" of unfinished projects somewhat pertaining to the "foods" theme. It's funny how my mind is full of these tiny undone, yet nagging projects that never seem to unbother your consciousness until you finish them. So here I am with the advice of Michel Gondry, once you start a project, finish it. This quarter is the theme of "following through," not saying "what I am going to do" but looking back and say "this is what I have done."
This oxymoronish poem "Sugar Free Sugar" has been this recurring thought once every so often, but more often than enough because almost every day I use a little bit of sugar free sugar to sweeten my coffee. I am going to include some OLD COMMENTARY I made back in the Fall of 2008 (when I started graduate school) pertaining to food. See below.
Jack in the Box. Errr. Shxt in the Box. American Food has Morphed into One Giant Cafeteria of Dormfood.
In the Beginning of Sampling American Food, the smells and tastes were novel and exciting. But it was peculiar from the very start that I needed additional digestive aids through the form of herbal laxatives, just for my body to even process and excrete this food. It was funny how my mind never really felt comfortable for having this food inside my body in the first place.
Over time, the taste diminished to some form of overall homogeneous, massive Giant Cafeteria of Dormfood. I mean, ALL of American mass-produced, packaged foods go into this category. This "Shxt Wrapped in a Nice Package" perhaps comes from the same factory sources: a glop of sugar, salt, white flour, and fat, morphed into a million seemingly different products of seemingly different tastes. My mind can't help flashing to the schlop the crew members of the solo ship in The Matrix were consuming.
My former boss in Orange County, Momma, a grandmother from Persia, outright complained in a car drive: "It's not Jack in the Box. It's Shxt in a Box! It's shxt wrapped in very nice wrapping paper! America is outrageous! We foreigners don't know any better! We come here to the States thinking that the food here is safe and good to eat, and everyone in my entire family inflates like balloons! Including myself! And so our health problems trail right after us!"
As my tastes morphed, so did the deterioration of my own health. Primarily in the form of indigestion and pimples. And some weight gain (err, "biomass gain"), which is fortunately back down. Thankfully, I have continued my jogging and have learned how to restrict my diet:
place mental Xs on more than 60% of grocery store and restaurant businesses. A very rigorously restricted, filtered Reality of American food. Thankfully, through learning and behavior modification, we humans have the capacity to shift our perceptions in terms of what is
truly edible, and what is just... "shxt wrapped in a nice package."
As my fisherman friend, Sam Shrout, stated: "When I enter the grocery store, I first go to the right side of the store and find myself and my family some fresh meat, and then I go to the left side of the store, where I find myself some fresh vegetables and fruits, and I skip the entire gut middle." And that's where all the mass-produced packaged "foods" reside. Grocery stores must have gained weight in their guts as well....
And that is why now when there is an opportunity to have a home-cooked meal (with food from a local co-op), I jump for joy and would take this option over any form of excursion to a restaurant.
America is truly the land of Excessive Resources! And if only most of it were Edible in the first place! (Well, I suppose if the food were all edible, then we wouldn't be able to sustain such mass-produced quantities that we perceive in the grocery stores. Secondly, doctors and psychiatrists would be losing a lot of money and the economy would downsize and ... "go to hxll.")
This piece can be submitted to a local newspaper. Best to add a couple of interviews and a few different encounters in the grocery store and fast food. Going down the cereal or candy bar isle.
Going to Carl's Junior, Jack in the Box, MacDonalds. How MacDonalds changed its tune after the Supersize Me film came out.
From One Dissfunctional Diet to Another. Victoria's Graduate Student Diet: The Starving Lion Method: Feed yourself like Insulin through a Tube (aka Werthers Original) and have a real meal at the end of the day. Then go to sleep. If you have three huge meals, it ultimately impacts your productivity level. The drawback: (1) brush more (2) more mouthwash (3) dental problems (well hey, dental problems are way better than having problems with your lungs). The advantage: Increased Productivity to a Certain Degree. Fulfilling the high school visionary dream of being fed through a test tube: eating because you need to eat. Not out of pleasure.
Continuing from Blog 145, BLURB INCLUDED WITH PHOTOGRAPH COLLECTION: The Zen of the Grocery Store (World's Easiest Catch Images, Processed in Time Lag). As I had been processing images, I stumbled across an image set during my frantic videography spree in the Lazy Acres market in quasi-downtown Santa Barbara. I had waited two weeks to receive a go-ahead from the store manager in order to take some footage. It was the first time I ever took pictures in a grocery store, though I seem to go there every single day. I suppose my main epiphany was (1) when I usually enter the grocery store, I am so preoccupied with a to-do list that I completely disregard the (2) sheer QUANTITY of food in an entire store, the FACTORY essence of the store... but placed in this aesthetic ambiance "store front," that you come to forget that you yourself are a part of the machine operation. To me, with a rock crab film or not, these images are timely in the evolution of thinking in my own life, so they are worth showcasing with or without a larger-scaled film. Some of these images can couple the poem / song "Where Stuff Comes From, Where Stuff Goes."
And speaking of which, an old demon comes to mind. I had wanted to make a to-do list, or The Ultimate List of the Values of Food. The first time this thought came up was derived from a conversation between Bahareh, Barry Spacks, and me, over lunch in spring of 2009. Very relaxing occasion, actually. And Bahareh made this excellent "performance poem" meditating on a tea leaf, in which the leaf, and the process of preparing the leaf in the morning was a very solemn sacred process compared to the chaos and rush of the rest of the day, which includes junk information, junk food (well, what's the difference). I told Bahareh that I have a very systematic point of view with food. My relationship with food varies with space and time, and content of my stomach along with the content of the food. So, the most important thing is to have conscious recognition of my relationship with food at the time in order to prevent any form of negative activities to occur (rushed eating, binging-purging, excessive eating of junk food). Then the idea reoccurred to me in Mike Davis' course on writing and landscapes. Ultimately I would like this poem to be VISPO a systematic list on the values of food. Values are not always mutually exclusive; some overlap and intertwine.
The Values of Food
and the Intricate Coupling of Physical and Mental Consumption, Metabolism, and Excretion.
A Meal for Thought.
Why I eat food. A question every "anorexic" will eventually have to grapple with. >> Medieval Torture. Being gluttonous at the buffet every Saturday afternoon. Your mother forces you to gargle raw garlic and let it sit in your throat for ten minutes. "The pain is there because it's killing all the bacteria!" (age 10, starting off on the wrong foot, hence the beginning of a very severed, sour relationship with food)>> Survival-Replication. If you don't eat (for a month), you die. If you do eat, then you can survive, grow, and replicate on to the next generation. [reptilian, preservation, reproduction] (age 17, first-hand experience) >> Origins-Evolution. Your body and mind evolved to eat so your body can stay in one piece to grow and reproduce... and die at a later date, but your progeny continue on [existential] (age 19, Sam Sweet's evolution course) >> Hunting and Gathering. Food tastes good if you earn it. You went through the labor of catching your own prey instead of mosing into a grocery store and purchasing some human catc chow (I started becoming a fisher girl in February of 2009, age 27, though I went duck hunting once at age 26)
>> Environment-Ecology. You are the summation of elements of your environment. Your body and mind is a unique aggregation and assemblage of elements derived from your environment and you need to continue replenishing the assemblage with more new elements to stay as one large chemical sack [existential] (age 19, Miriam Polne-Fuller's Shoreline Preservation course)
>> Hunger. Your more basal "primitive" part of your mind contains a subliminal neurophysiological "sensor" that beckons the state of "hunger," if your mind is actually operating normally (my sensor shut off and did not experience hunger, until around age 22, my appetite came back)
>> Medicinal-Digestive-Medical. Drinking tea for your cold. Drinking coffee after a rough meal at the Hometown Buffet (my parents still do it!). Making home-made chicken noodle soup to deal with your throat infection. Drinking Gatorade for lost electrolytes after a throw-up incident (age 22)>> Mind Alteration. Stimulation. Depression. Though I'm more drunk when I'm not drunk, I am a pretty altered state simply being normal, or on coffee. I become boring, open, and vulnerable when I'm on beer, but my thoughts slow down with weed. Recreational drugs were never of interest because starvation provided the highest of highs. Starvation + lack of sleep + lack of exercise + computer in your own room = 5days-1week intellectual trance, enlightenment, altered state of reality. Starvation also places my body in a "fighting, hungry lion-tiger syndrome, so my body and mind wants to keep chugging and performing for over 10-12 hours of the day) (starting age 19)>> The Sleeping Pill. Using food to slow down your conscious mind and transform your body into a more visceral, mind-numbing state in the evening. Konks out the brain for sleeping (starting age 19) >> Exercise Prevention, But I Don't Want to Sit on My Xss in Front of the Computer Syndrome. Eating a splendid morning breakfast, like strawberry waffles at Mimi's cafe on a Saturday morning will prevent you from being able to sit down and do any work for the rest of the day. Lazy activity. (starting age 24)>> Study-o-holicism. Particular low calorie, high caffeine food that allows one to consume all day like insulin IV drip, and clench your jaw (like with bubble gum), allowing long-term "intellectual trance." Three-meals-a-day-syndrome does not exist! Coffee, soda, bubble gum, wrthers original, and the like. (starting age 18)>> Safetys and Comforts. Eating foods that are familiar and similar to your known universe of taste buds when placed in a foreign environment, like another country, or even your neighbor's house. (starting age 18)>> Rewards. Pavlov's Dog. Rewarding yourself with a sweet item to symbolize that you made it through the day... for example yesterday, I had a hot chocolate at Starbucks! (starting age 22)>> Subconscious Stress Diversion, Divulsion, Amplification. Stress and fast-paced lifestyles can construct a sloppy mentality with all habits. Binging on an entire half gallon of ice scream late in the night is a great likelihood (which was my entire year at UCLA age 22-23). >> Social Gatherings. Food foraging and consumption as a common endeavor; an opportunity to catch up with family and friends during this window of time, especially during the holidays! (The first time I could sit down and have a meal with friends at a restaurant was around age 21)>> Diversity. Since most of American prepared food has become "one giant cafeteria of dormfood" to my tastebuds, I have come to appreciate home-made cooking, and the meals of local restaurants, bakeries.>> An Art Form. Cuisine. The pleasure of extra time devoted to preparation. The subtleties of flavors, tastes, aromas, and the aesthetic of preparation and presentation.>> An Exact Science. Ecologists tend to be those who like to study their food a bit too much before they eat their meals. Hence, very bad table manners, a laboratory of poking around as an intermediate stage (age 22)
