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Wednesday, January 17, 2001
Beef and life: Adventures in the food chain By Christopher P. Winner I have known the owner's son, Fabio, for three decades. He is a lanky man of 49 with striking silver hair and a dignified manner. He is exceptionally good at making something un-Italian -- steak tartar -- but there are, I notice, fewer and fewer takers. So I ask the obvious. Yes, he answers, people are eating far less beef, not only in his place, but throughout Europe. They are afraid. I point out that a French restaurant in Paris, among the best, has abandoned beef altogether. It will now serve only foods made from vegetables and flowers. "The problem," sighs Fabio, "is that all this hysteria means nothing -- it's what people have eaten over years. That is where disease begins. Now, beef is probably safer than ever. Yet people are in a panic because they have been led to a TV place of panic, to this place which is kind of a human slaughterhouse, where they can see it, their own illness, and the ugliness of an animal carcass. All of it. That's not where people want to be or what they wish to see." He's right. Lost in the mad cow furor, or perhaps intrinsic to it, is that most of the damage has in fact been done. Those at risk have already eaten their disease, chewing from the dark like some character from the art of Hogarth or Goya. It is most likely at work, gradually, insidiously, like an alimentary sniper, as AIDS is a sexual one. This is a society of fears and anxieties. In the absence of war, and in an age of affluence, Fabio says, we are afraid not of being poisoned by governments but of poisoning ourselves. We run from dying. We demand protection. In a Western society of perks and entitlement it is hard to imagine that until a century ago the average life span was not even 50 years; that five centuries ago medieval homes were boarded up in a useless effort to keep the bubonic plague from entering. Millions died; the wrath of various gods was blamed. Now, in an era of science and enlightenment, it seems only just that the princes of intelligent times save us and our children from malady, keep us from harm's way, ensure what has gradually come to be called "quality of life." But Fabio, while a faithful man, believes none of this. On a break, he travels to Egypt, into the desert, and dwells among nomads. He thinks we've grown too self-indulgent. Like Ernest Becker, perhaps the least quoted great mind of the last century, he thinks we live in constant denial of death. He does not say this morosely. On the contrary, Fabio is laughing. He is skimming through the aisles of his restaurant. He is a successful man at his peak. But he worries that we've forgotten the simplicity that allows us to accept life's array of reversals and its rudest existential truth: we are headed nowhere very quickly. "You know, I pick up the newspaper and I see all of these new pages that you of the press are doing: about health and medicine and the things to keep you young and fit, and it all seems a bit silly, I mean, in the end. We'll end up fooling the kids that they can live forever. And when they wake up, it will be trouble for them." Fabio is right. European life is good, finally without world war, without coercive plagues, without flourishing regimes of hate. In fact, until youth finds its elixir, it may be just as good as it gets. Christopher P. Winner's e-mail address is cpwinner@praguepost.cz
By James Pitkin Ralston and the new jets Postview editorial |
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