When people announce that they are intent on the spiritual life, and are going to practice universal love, I lock my doors, bar my windows and get hold of a gun. For it means that a storm of unconsciousness and hypocrisy is on the way. When people do the most appalling things that people can do, it is always in the name of the highest ideals--like the purely unselfish, ideological war we are now waging in Vietnam; like the "Department of Corrections" with its "facilities" for straightening out poor crooks.
On the other hand, a war waged with the admittedly greedy and bawdy intent of stealing land, property, and women from another country will be relatively merciful, because the army will be careful not to destroy what it is setting out to steal. But wars conducted in the name of high abstractions and lofty principles exhibit the most ruthless disregard for such material and unspiritual things as fields and forests, livestock and human bodies.
This is why the United States is such a danger to the rest of the world. I have often said, "Scratch an American and find a Christian Scientist." Because we have a national belief in the virtue of being "above" mere materiality.
Our reputation for being a purely materialistic civilization is entirely unfounded, for while it is true, money-wise, that we are the richest nation on earth, our capacity for spending money on substantial and material pleasures is almost nil.
The reason is that we are completely hung up and hypnotized by symbols--by words, numbers, measures, and other abstractions which we confuse with the physical world of nature. Our entire educational system is strictly intellectual and cerebral, preparing us to be clerks or bureaucrats without the least knowledge of our five basic relationships to the natural world: farming, cooking, clothing, housing, and lovemaking. We confuse money with wealth, status with enjoyment, success with happiness, and are always about to eat the menu instead of the meal.
Recently, for example, the Congress voted for stern penalties against anyone who should burn the American Flag, and there was much fervent and sentimental oratory, and quotation of patriotic poems. Yet these same politicians are responsible, directly or by default, for burning up what the Flag stands for--the material country and its people--by the total waste of a war-economy, by erosion of the soil, pollution of air and water, and by the most ruthless and improvident exploitation of our raw materials. While Congressmen moralize about the dangerous hallucinations induced by "dope" and its threat to the very sanity of our youth, they themselves are so far out of touch with the most elementary realities as to be, quite literally, blithering idiots. It has hardly been mentioned among them that the energy and treasure which, since 1914, we have expended upon war, could have provided every human being on earth with a decent independent income. And these people think they can "figure", and consider themselves "practical" politicians and "down-to-earth" business-men.
Very recent studies in France have shown, beyond doubt, that the world's most urgent and imminent need is highly increased production of food. This is not a matter of idealism or altruism: it is a matter of immediate, practical, and realistic self-interest, and any politician or corporate executive who is not considering, right now, how to convert the corporate executive, how to convert the war-economy to an agricultural economy is simply out of his mind.
But in the US. it seems that we have lots to eat, and in any case we are so "spiritual"--i.e., hung up on abstractions, that we don't really enjoy food or admit our dependence upon it. Like the British, we eat apologetically instead of with gusto, like the Chinese and the French. We eat food because it is "theoretically" good for us. We concern ourselves with such dietetic and chemical criteria as vitamin, calorie, protein, and carbohydrate content, and hardly give a damn how the stuff tastes. Our bread, the staff of life, is a wheat-based styrofoam injected with various medications, tasting of nothing at all. We prepare these medications in cramped, white, and joyless kitchens like lavatories. We are superficially interested in how food looks, and seduced by full-color, full-page ads of chocolate layer-cake compounded of gas, ticky-tacky, and artificial flavoring. We're not fundamentally interested in the world food problem because we're not truly interested in food. We don't know how to cook it because we don't love the basic materials from which it is made--the fish and cattle, the apples and lettuce, the onions and celery, the wheat and corn--and therefore cooking is not a reverent and subtle ritual. If there is to be any effective revolution in the "American Way of Life," a primary factor must be a change of attitude to farming and cooking. It is therefore disappointing, to say the least, that the only constructive revolution now going--the hippie--has in no way distinguished itself with respect to our eating habits. True, hippies are anything but wealthy, but if we would only take some lessons from the Chinese, it would be possible for us to cook and eat superbly with very little money. Whenever I go marketing for a Chinese meal, the cashier-girl at the supermarket raises her eyebrows and says, "Is that all for today?"
Most experienced gourmets will admit that Chinese cuisine is the best on earth, with French a close second. For the Chinese and the French are, in general, true materialists: people who love and cherish material and natural things. The Chinese, in particular, have never made a hard-and-fast distinction between the spiritual and the material, the mental and the physical, for they regard nature as a spontaneous, self-regulating organism which is an intelligent pattern or process rather than an artifact or mechanism. They call this intelligent process the Tao, or the way of Nature, and the art of life is not to conquer or dominate the Tao, but to cooperate with it as one uses the wind to sail a boat.
Thus in preparing fish or vegetables, the Chinese have realized that less cooking is better than more. Their steamed fish is always moist and succulent, and their vegetables fresh and crisp. We boil our vegetables to a dull green, presumably to disinfect them, and in most restaurants they are simply left uneaten. But the Chinese "stir-fry" them for from one to three minutes in a small amount of very hot sesame or soy oil, often mixing them with nuts, and with such condiments as soy-sauce, salt, monosodium glutamate, sugar, and fresh ginger.
There isn't space here to go into a whole exposition of Chinese cooking, but hippies who want to eat cheaply and begin to learn this astonishing art should patronize the less fancy-looking Chinese restaurants of San Francisco, New York, Chicago, and other great cities. Avoid chop-suey and chow-mein, which are "missionary dishes" made up for Westerners, and concentrate on their won-ton, egg-flower, and seaweed soups, and on such dishes as chicken-almond, black mushrooms, pea-pods with water-chestnuts, sweet-sour pork with pineapple, and beef with oyster sauce. (Some of the soups, such as wo-won-ton, i.e., won-ton soup with five ingredients, are a meal by themselves.)
The best book I know about Chinese cooking is Secrets of Chinese Cooking by Tsuifeng and Hsiangju Lin (Prentice-Hall, 1960), and there is also a very inexpensive paperback, The Complete Book of Oriental Cooking by Myra Waldo (Bantam Books, $60). Basic requirements are a chopping board, a medium-sized sharp knife, a big spoon, a pancake-turner, a skillet, and a generous saucepan--plus chopsticks and bowls, skillet, and a generous saucepan--plus chopsticks and bowls.
Do not be beguiled by the so-called "Zen macrobiotic diet;" it takes an expert to use it properly, and has no connection with Zen. Actually, Zen monks have an atrocious diet, consisting almost entirely of rice, noodles, pickled vegetables and tea. Most of them look vaguely green, and survive only because of their excellent constitutions. The older priests, who have only graduated from the monastery, have somewhat better fare, but monks are supposed to live in holy poverty. While some of the ingredients used in the macrobiotic diet are fine organically grown substances, the average user of this method will end up with a lousy case of malnutrition.
It is my firm experience that one should trust cooks and avoid dietitians, for the two classes of persons are almost mutually exclusive! Trust the cook who is well trained in one of the great traditions of cuisine, whether it be Chinese, French, Indonesian, or Italian. He judges with an experienced tongue and belly, not with a test-tube. (Incidentally, for those who live on the West Coast, I would also strongly recommend Japanese cuisine, as we have many markets selling its ingredients. It is a bland greaseless fare, very easy on the stomach.)
Lin Yutang has said that, "A fish which has given its life for you, and is not cooked well, has died in vain." There is simply no way of surviving without taking the lives of other creatures, be they meat or vegetable. Biological existence is a mutual eating society, and every fish on a platter could say, with Christ, "This is my body which is given for you." So also, the Hindus have the saying, "Anon Brahman," or "Food is the Godhead, "for they see the whole finite universe as the divine power giving itself away. The only proper response to this situation is to make your chopping-board and stove an altar, at which you celebrate divine mysteries with the utmost devotion.
But because you must kill to eat, always remember that, to some extent, you are an irremediable rascal. This will season your holiness with a certain twinkle in the eye, a sauciness, which will preserve you from the abominable cruelty and thoughtlessness of those who aspire to be 100 per cent sweetness and light. Do not try to be saints; be content with being completely human, for true sanctity is a divine gift which, when imitated is only a plastic flower.
Copyright © 1995 Joan Watts Tabernik & Anne Watts
