A trillionth of the produce we’re frantically hoovering up from our late-summer garden.
Supermarkets are different from the rest of the world. There, tomatoes grow year round, plump, red and always perfect. Just the right quantity of peaches, plums and juicy grapes come into the store every day, proclaiming that nature on Planet Grocery loves nothing better than to churn out a steady stream of sweet produce, like cars on an assembly line, in lockstep with shoppers’ appetites. Not too much, not too little; just the right amount.
If only nature worked like that on Planet Earth. Here, it doesn’t give a damn about your culinary desires or spending habits. Got a craving for a fresh green salad with cherry tomatoes in midwinter? Tough luck. How about some kale instead?
Kale. Whose stupid idea was that? Photo by Adolfo Félix on Unsplash
Just to emphasise the point, come late summer nature says, “Remember how you would have given your right arm for a tomato six months back? Well watch this.”
The floodgates have recently opened on our lifestyle block (a euphemism if ever there was one). Having sat for months with fruit that looks like it would forever remain green and rock hard, our peach and pear trees are dropping squishy, overripe lumps to the ground faster than our poor, overworked hands can keep up. The apple trees are a little better behaved, holding on to most of their ripe fruit until we pick it. Meantime, the handful of tomato plants that the previous owners kindly left for us are churning out produce the way Kanye West churns out dumb, offensive comments.
It’s a cornucopia. An abundance, a tsunami of tsustenance. Or, as Shakespeare would have said, a glut.
Glut began life in English as a verb, meaning “to feed to repletion”. About 100 years before that, during the 1200s, glutton had appeared, which may make glut a back formation - a shortened version of an existing word which gives rise to a new word with a related meaning. This happens a lot: before edit came editor, donate was preceded by donation, and before anyone could burgle your house, English first had to invent burglars.
Whether we’re talking glut or glutton, the word can be traced back to the Latin gluttire (“to swallow”) and gula (“throat”). The latter appears in modern English as gullet, a fancy word for your oesophagus.
In Christianity, gluttony has a decidedly bad reputation. Not only is it one of the seven deadly sins (or, as I prefer to call them, a quick guide to life’s more pleasurable activities), it’s also the target of some of that religion’s most pointed criticisms.
Pope Gregory, a prolific author who headed the Catholic Church from 590, studied the matter closely and discerned five types of gluttony: eating too early before meals (and, presumably, ruining one’s appetite), seeking delicacies to gratify the “vile sense of taste”, seeking dishes that are too elaborate, eating too much, and eating too eagerly.
He then expanded on this by stating that “it is not the food, but the desire that is in fault”. That is, it’s not the food, it’s you.
Pope Gregory. Not much fun at mealtimes.
A thousand years later, Pope Innocent XI continued the guilt trip by stating “it is a defect to eat, like beasts, through the sole motive of sensual gratification, and without any reasonable object.” Call me a heathen, but sensual gratification seems to me a mighty fine reason to shove something delicious down my throat, especially now that my days as an Olympic gold medal-winning athlete are far behind me.
(While I’m at it, what a crappy thing to say about our animal friends who, if anything, show far more restraint in their eating habits than most humans.)
Morality aside, there’s no question that it may be possible to overdo eating for pleasure. Mukbang, a ridiculously popular form of video show in which the host chows down food before the camera, illustrates the point beautifully. Originating in South Korea to introduce viewers to new dishes and, possibly, to alleviate their loneliness, it’s been criticised for encouraging people to binge on questionable foods. Some mukbangers, as they’re called, will chew food then spit it out off camera, creating the illusion that they’re eating more than they are. Yeran Kim, a professor of communications at Kwangwoon University, coined the term “carnal videos” drawing an unmistakable parallel between mukbang and other videos that share the host’s intimate moments, and pornography.
As anyone with a tight pair of jeans knows, overeating is a recipe for a big butt, aka gluteus. Despite the similarity, gluteus is not related to gluttony, having originated from the Latin glutaeus, or “rump”. Nor is gluten (from the Latin word for “glue”), the substance that gives bread its deliciously chewy texture while also causing problems for those whose guts have trouble digesting it.
What to do with a glut of produce is one of humanity’s most enduring challenges, though not nearly as concerning as what to do with a scarcity. History is littered with horrific famines, most caused by the vagaries of nature, but far too many the result of perverse political policies. The Bengal Famine of 1943 took between two and three million lives; the Stalin Famine - also known as the Holodomor - claimed up to five million; and the Great Chinese Famine (“Great” because it wasn’t the first) took tens of millions, the exact number of which remains unknown. All were caused by indifferent rulers, and why such cruelty isn’t counted among the seven deadly sins (pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony and sloth) is a mystery to me.
In fact, that list is pathetically inadequate. For starters, who in their right mind would call pride, envy, lust, gluttony or sloth a “deadly” sin? A character flaw, maybe. Something to minimise if you want to be a decent or successful person, but not to whip yourself bloody about if you fail sometimes.
And where are the dealbreaking sins like cruelty? Violence? Murder? At the risk of falling into presentism, the fallacy of judging the past on today’s values, I have to say that whoever came up with the seven deadly sins was sadly lacking in moral bearings. And probably a boring guest at parties, to boot.
If you’re lucky enough to have more produce than you know what to do with, you have a number of options. You can (and this is a partial list only) dry it, cure it with salt, make jam or chutney or sauce, bottle it, can it, freeze it, chill it, ferment it, pickle it and, if you’re a willing child of the atomic age, irradiate it. Pulsed electric field electroporation is used in some European and North American industrial settings to preserve fruit juices and potatoes. Its application to domestic settings remains, I suspect, some years off.
We’re still grappling with what to do with our glut. We’ve giving a lot of it away, which makes us feel very virtuous, and eating as much as we can. Some of it will go into jam, the true cornerstone of any nutritious breakfast1, and much of it will be whizzed up in a blender, popped into ziplock bags, and stored in the freezer until this time next summer, when it will be rediscovered and disposed of to make room for that season’s harvest. But I refuse to be too hard on us if that’s what happens. Unlike Pope Innocent, I say it’s not us, it’s nature.
Why can’t it be more like the supermarkets?
Bits and specious
As every Kiwi reader knows, Aussies love taking the piss out of our pronunciation of pen, bed and - dare I say it - deck. (With thanks to Heddwen, author of the wonderful English in Progress newsletter.)
Pope Gregory wasn’t afraid of a good stoush. When Eutychius of Constantinople claimed that the resurrected human body “will be more subtle than air, and no longer palpable”, Gregory challenged him with the biblical account of Christ rising into heaven intact. To settle the matter, the Byzantine emperor, Tiberius II Constantine, was called in. He ruled in favour of Gregory and ordered Eutychius’ book to be burned. In a rare display of tolerance, however, that edict didn’t extend to Eutychius, who died in the traditional fashion, aged 70.
Quote of the week
One of my younger fans made the mistake of heaving a frozen pie at me before it defrosted. It caught me in the neck and I dropped like a pile of bricks.
Soupy Sales, comedian