Food? Cooking!

I first tasted food in the crowded but livable Brooklyn neighborhood where my parents rented a small, dark one-bedroom apartment.

My mother didn’t have to buy or cook the food since it came directly from her body. When little me outgrew that, he was placed in a “high chair,” for a very different kind of nutritional experience.

Into his little mouth a “baby spoon” with tepid gooey glop was placed. If he didn’t like the store-bought Cream of Wheat or Cream of Rice, Larry spit it out, or just turned his head away.

Eventually store-bought “baby foods” in sturdy little jars appeared at the tips of those spoons. Having no words yet, and not yet understanding the meaning of sounds directed to me as language, I nevertheless quickly let whoever was trying to feed me know my preference: Bananas.

Traditional families from the “old country” knew that you could mash up bananas, and save the cost of the jars. But little me could tell the difference between store bought and homemade, 

The difference was sugar.

A crucial difference for the growing mega-bucks factories (eventually to be mega-bucks multi-national corporations) who manufactured the little jars. They soon tore down forests in tropical countries to plant sugar cane. They had already torn down forests to plant fruit trees.

Add steamship lines, fueled by non-renewable heavily polluting coal. Add a lot more things for production and distribution.

But at the bottom of the vast enterprise were humans. Clearing the land, planting and harvesting it. Rowing the ships, then loading the coal and working the hot, dangerous engine rooms. Unloading the vessels. Loading the trains that met the ships and tore up more fertile lands and natural streams and rivers to deliver food related cargo that eventually wound up in our homes.

My mother, who presided over our end of the food chain (my father neither shopped nor cooked) was the last link. 

I was fed an “American” diet until adolescence. At breakfast , eggs (usually scrambled), toast (usually white with salted butter), store bought (sugared) cereal. Milk delivered by a…milkman!

Later in the day sandwiches (more white toast) with cheese or salami and maybe an apple for lunch. Meat (lamb chops or hamburger) for dinner, with mashed steamed potatoes and boiled peas or carrots. And more milk, soon bought at newly appearing supermarkets, replacing milkmen. Condiments, on the table only at dinner, were limited. Mustard, mayonnaise, ketchup.

I think about my long ago feeding years when I am bombarded with TV and newspaper advertising about food and cooking. No recognition in those ads that most of the food products rely on real, mostly low paid, humans. 

Now it’s getting even worse. Our isolation from the realities of our nutrition advances apace. Take “Venba,” for example. Never heard of it? 

Keep reading.

“Venba” is a video game that arrives at a time when we are already saturated with fake “facts” from actors on television who seem happy that a fat-drenched sandwich or pizza is in their hands and mouths. 

Men, women, cute kids, babies, all ethnicities. We pause from such horrors as death in the Middle East to bring you Subway and Pizza Hut. 

Most of us interface with food workers only in the checkout lines of supermarkets where they stand like automatons, pushing items over scanners. For this they are usually not paid enough to afford rents anywhere near where they work. Or to feed their families.

My mother’s principal means of interfacing was to go shopping on the convenient local street, where there were small stores selling fruits, vegetables, cheese, eggs, “notions,” fish and meat. It was where I got my education about food.

My mother knew all of store owners and they all knew her. “Feared” her would be more accurate. If a store clerk made a mistake adding up numbers on the paper bags they all used, she would spot it immediately. If there was an error calculating or reading the scale weight for fruit she caught that, too.

But the height of her tyranny took place in the butcher store.

When she was seen approaching there was a visible bustle inside. The two brothers who owned it scampered to put bloody piles of flesh on the low counter in front of us. “Two sirloins, five lamb chops, one pound chopped sirloin, trim ALL the fat!” she would command. Knives (an amazing variety, all razor sharp) flashed, blood and guts were swept to the sawdust on the floor.

Very occasionally a piece of flesh caught her eye that she thought inferior. 

Perhaps you can imagine the ensuing turmoil.

For me, a slow process had begun. 

First I began to spurn lamb chops, which looked like pieces of an animal. Then steak, which resembled human wounds. Then hamburgers and hot dogs. Who knew what was in them? Then meatballs that got transformed into falafel.

As I ate my way through life, even in tummy heavens like Paris, London, and San Francisco, being a “foodie,” or even a wine snob, never appealed to me. Taste and flavor are great. So are comfortable clothes, books, and travel, which are much more rewarding an expenditure, at least for the few I have tried.

Which brings me to “Venba.”

“The Food is Virtual. The Feeling is Real.” (NYT 11/26/2023). 

“A touchingly diasporic story,” writes Lewis Gordon, who specializes in the world of video games. “Venba is interested in food’s emotional resonance…putting it in conversation with other video games and memoirs.”

Just what the world’s been waiting for, right? A food battle between virtual entities, not a flesh and blood food fight between my mother and her butchers!

Pass the veggies, brown rice, and soy sauce please. Maybe a glass of inexpensive Medoc or Malbec or Merlot. 

You can look up Venba for yourself, if you’re interested in yet another way to substitute a tasteless screen for a real meal. And to add a few more charges to your monthly bill.

Me, I’d rather take a walk or look at the moon or fall asleep thinking about days gone by and to come. Many that there have been, few that remain.

 (Larry Bensky welcomes comments. Lbensky@igc.org.)