During a recent ten (10)-day holiday in France, a country whose preparation and presentation of food is, like so many other aspects of French culture (art, architecture, design, fashion, and on and on), quite simply unsurpassed among the nations of the earth, I was intrigued and pleased that I did not encounter a single chef, food handler, or ingredient preparer who wore plastic gloves.
Nor did I see a single jar of Purel.
Despite this conspicuous national flirtation with bacteria, I found that every morsel of French food that entered my mouth was savory, bursting with taste and flavor, and delicious. Moreover, I contracted no disease. (By the way, I saw no fat French, and everybody smoked.)
Comparisons are odious, but I think it proper to ask on this Fourth of July weekend: Why do the French succeed with their "unsafe" food practices, while we Americans fail (and, worse, look ridiculous doing so) with so many of our antiseptic ones?
The answer, I think, extends beyond the world of cuisine. The fact is that living well in a way that is truly human requires the exercise of operative faith.
Take foie gras. One need not like, nor even admire, but one must certainly respect a culture that long ago took steps to discover that if you take a goose, nail its feet to a board, force-feed it corn until its liver bursts, then you may not merely eat that goose's liver but offer it to the gourmands of this world as an exquisite delicacy.
But this gastronomic delight, so counter intuitive and seemingly violative of all reason, required operative faith in order to be discovered, a renunciation of the human impulse to control everything all the time and a belief that there is more to life than that which can be immediately seen, measured, or weighed. And it is this virtue that we in America, with our fanatical obsession with controlled, sanitized, antiseptic, safe-at-all-costs living arrangements, seem to be lacking, to an inhuman degree. From the ubiquitous Purel dispensers and plastic gloves, to 24 x 7 helmeted kids, to trampolines with padded sides, to sunscreen uber alles, to anti-smoking Puritanism, to fetishistic preoccupation with "safe" sex, to the "lifestyle nag" and the helicopter parent, we are increasingly becoming a faithless nation of sissies.
As our blessings are contemplated this Independence Day weekend, we in "the land of the free and the home of the brave" might ask ourselves this question: what am I doing at the personal level to reaunthenticate the heritage of the Founding Fathers?
It is not a heritage based upon fear, faithlessness, and the nanny government. It is one based upon the twin exhortations of "In God We Trust" and "Be Not Afraid".
Nor did I see a single jar of Purel.
Despite this conspicuous national flirtation with bacteria, I found that every morsel of French food that entered my mouth was savory, bursting with taste and flavor, and delicious. Moreover, I contracted no disease. (By the way, I saw no fat French, and everybody smoked.)
Comparisons are odious, but I think it proper to ask on this Fourth of July weekend: Why do the French succeed with their "unsafe" food practices, while we Americans fail (and, worse, look ridiculous doing so) with so many of our antiseptic ones?
The answer, I think, extends beyond the world of cuisine. The fact is that living well in a way that is truly human requires the exercise of operative faith.
Take foie gras. One need not like, nor even admire, but one must certainly respect a culture that long ago took steps to discover that if you take a goose, nail its feet to a board, force-feed it corn until its liver bursts, then you may not merely eat that goose's liver but offer it to the gourmands of this world as an exquisite delicacy.
But this gastronomic delight, so counter intuitive and seemingly violative of all reason, required operative faith in order to be discovered, a renunciation of the human impulse to control everything all the time and a belief that there is more to life than that which can be immediately seen, measured, or weighed. And it is this virtue that we in America, with our fanatical obsession with controlled, sanitized, antiseptic, safe-at-all-costs living arrangements, seem to be lacking, to an inhuman degree. From the ubiquitous Purel dispensers and plastic gloves, to 24 x 7 helmeted kids, to trampolines with padded sides, to sunscreen uber alles, to anti-smoking Puritanism, to fetishistic preoccupation with "safe" sex, to the "lifestyle nag" and the helicopter parent, we are increasingly becoming a faithless nation of sissies.
As our blessings are contemplated this Independence Day weekend, we in "the land of the free and the home of the brave" might ask ourselves this question: what am I doing at the personal level to reaunthenticate the heritage of the Founding Fathers?
It is not a heritage based upon fear, faithlessness, and the nanny government. It is one based upon the twin exhortations of "In God We Trust" and "Be Not Afraid".
We certainly have a few too many people in power who think they know what is best for all of us; as Tacitus points out, “A corrupt society has many laws.” Maybe the turnaround will begin when in the academy, Latin and Greek replace Remedial English and when classes on Western Civilization are part of a required core curriculum. I will go out on a limb and suggest that while dining in France, in correlation with the absence of latex, you also did not see any restaurant patrons in baseball caps or wife-beaters. Our legislators are certainly a miserable lot and it is our polarized philistine and metro-sexual mob that defecate them into office over and over again that is the core problem. Along with Latin, Greek and Western Civ., let’s bring back dueling. Chivalry could go a long way toward instituting reform.
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