Baked muffins in a muffin tin.

“No-Good-Dirty-Rotten” Banana Beer Bread

“Through engagement with mortality—engagement with the life-and-death cycles of raw cooking ingredients both practically and metaphorically—I can encounter
the divine, or pure spirit.”

–Jordan Shapiro, The Eco-Gastronomic Mirror: Narcissism and Death at the Dinner Table

Biosphere 2

In The Eco-Gastronomic Mirror, Jordan Shapiro claims that the gastronomic experience is inherently narcissistic. Every time humans eat food, we reinforce our superiority over the rest of the food chain. Shapiro describes picking an orange from a tree and feeling a sense of divine power by taking away its soul and “cut[ting] off the life force” (54). Additionally, Shapiro believes that taking food away from nature and using it for our own purposes makes it impossible to claim that our food is “natural.” On the other hand, he does not offer his own opinion about how we should view and consume food. Unlike Arizona’s isolated “Biosphere 2” project, our world does not exist in a laboratory where every condition is meticulously controlled and human effects analyzed. There is no way to survive in the real world without being a consumer of it. Continue reading