Through the Cooking Glass

While this is a blog mostly about food, it is also a blog about tradition. While traditional foods and preparation methods are important to me, traditions unrelated to food are also very important to me.

Weston A. Price’s book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration first demonstrated to me that many traditional diets (though not necessarily all) promote extreme health. Modern trends in heart disease, obesity, cancer, and other diseases demonstrated to me that the modern American diet has serious flaws. Though not the first sign to me that wanton disregard for tradition can create problems, it was one of the most important.

I recently read “The Lessons of History” by Will Durant (which I highly recommend). Will Durant spent the majority of his life studying history and wrote a multi-volume set of history books that are approachable by armchair historians like myself. “The Lessons of History” is a unique book in that Mr. Durant condenses the lessons he learned from history into a single, concise volume. One of the overarching themes of this book is that civilizations come and go and they follow a predictable cycle from rise through collapse.

For as knowledge grows or alters continually, it clashes with mythology and theology, which change with geological leisureliness. Priestly control of arts and letters is then felt as a galling shackle or hateful barrier, and intellectual history takes on the character of a “conflict between science and religion” Institutions which were at first in the hands of the clergy, like law and punishment, education and morals, marriage and divorce, tend to escape from ecclesiastical control and become secular, perhaps profane. The intellectual classes abandon the ancient theology and — after some hesitation — the moral code allied with it; literature and philosophy become anticlerical. The movement of liberation rises to an exuberant worship of reason, and falls to a paralyzing disillusionment with every dogma and every idea. Conduct, deprived of its religious supports, deteriorates into epicurean chaos; and life itself, shorn of consoling faith, becomes a burden alike, to conscious poverty and to weary wealth. In the end, a society and its religion tend to fall together, like body and soul, in a harmonious death.

The problem is that at the hight of a civilization, the “intellectuals” feel wise enough to judge and discard the traditions that formed their very civilization. As Will himself once observed, “What is wisdom? I feel like a droplet of spray which proudly poised for a moment on the crest of a wave, undertakes to analyze the sea.”