Breakfast (Again)
The last time I wrote about breakfast, JS reminded me that there are indeed some far-flung corners of the world where minced-pork noodles and other wonderful morning meals are not readily available. You might have to cook them yourself, and you might not be able to find the right ingredients even then. This is a tragic truth.
I suppose the discontentment of globalisation is that it requires all to have equal access, forgetting that without barriers, what remains is mush. It is so in every organic structure. Can you imagine if your whole body decided to do away with its selectively-permeable membranes and mix everything up? You'd not be a viable organism anymore. It is just as true for the world; unless you can maintain some barriers, the virtue of separate qualities is lost.
Think for example of President Obama (well, in a couple of days, that's what he'll be). Much is made of the fact that he is half-Kenyan, half-white-American. Or that he spent his childhood in exotic locales like Kansas, Indonesia and Hawaii. But if everyone was of an indeterminate race or every place had the same quota of McDonald's or Starbucks or Lucky Coffee Shop Braised Pork Noodles, all this would have NO significance at all!
It is all very well to say that one shouldn't care about gender, race, or any of the other primitively simple differentiating elements in human society. But we still choose one breakfast over another. We don't choose to mush everything up in one flat grey or brown disc of homogenised nutrients. We actually spend time preparing food, and write essays that make sense. Homogeneity is rubbish, the lack of discrimination is an enemy.
What? So illiberal and uneducated a view from this blog?
Perhaps. But I'd like to point out that I much prefer the way humour integrates us all. There are Jewish jokes, there are Polish jokes, there are jokes about Englishmen, Irishmen, Welshmen, Scotsmen, Chinese, Japanese... they are all racist jokes. But the interesting thing is that they are all the same jokes. We just re-label them to make fun of someone else. There are very few jokes that can't be transferred to someone else (maybe some Sikh jokes or jokes about unpronounceable Polish or Celtic names); a lot of these are puns that rely on proficiency with a specific language.
The point is that we eventually learn to blend without making too much of similarity or difference, but rather complementarity and a harmony of differences. That's why we eat bacon and eggs, or salted eggs and congee, or bagels with lox. We know the digestive system (from the lips and teeth, down to the other end) will mix everything up and produce a final lump of homogenised crap, but at the input end, we still like to be able to distinguish individual and mixed flavours and aromas all at once.
I suppose the discontentment of globalisation is that it requires all to have equal access, forgetting that without barriers, what remains is mush. It is so in every organic structure. Can you imagine if your whole body decided to do away with its selectively-permeable membranes and mix everything up? You'd not be a viable organism anymore. It is just as true for the world; unless you can maintain some barriers, the virtue of separate qualities is lost.
Think for example of President Obama (well, in a couple of days, that's what he'll be). Much is made of the fact that he is half-Kenyan, half-white-American. Or that he spent his childhood in exotic locales like Kansas, Indonesia and Hawaii. But if everyone was of an indeterminate race or every place had the same quota of McDonald's or Starbucks or Lucky Coffee Shop Braised Pork Noodles, all this would have NO significance at all!
It is all very well to say that one shouldn't care about gender, race, or any of the other primitively simple differentiating elements in human society. But we still choose one breakfast over another. We don't choose to mush everything up in one flat grey or brown disc of homogenised nutrients. We actually spend time preparing food, and write essays that make sense. Homogeneity is rubbish, the lack of discrimination is an enemy.
What? So illiberal and uneducated a view from this blog?
Perhaps. But I'd like to point out that I much prefer the way humour integrates us all. There are Jewish jokes, there are Polish jokes, there are jokes about Englishmen, Irishmen, Welshmen, Scotsmen, Chinese, Japanese... they are all racist jokes. But the interesting thing is that they are all the same jokes. We just re-label them to make fun of someone else. There are very few jokes that can't be transferred to someone else (maybe some Sikh jokes or jokes about unpronounceable Polish or Celtic names); a lot of these are puns that rely on proficiency with a specific language.
The point is that we eventually learn to blend without making too much of similarity or difference, but rather complementarity and a harmony of differences. That's why we eat bacon and eggs, or salted eggs and congee, or bagels with lox. We know the digestive system (from the lips and teeth, down to the other end) will mix everything up and produce a final lump of homogenised crap, but at the input end, we still like to be able to distinguish individual and mixed flavours and aromas all at once.
etched with acid at 6:13:00 pm
1 Comments:
Gosh I'm mentioned. Reading your article makes me wonder about the economist's usage of the Big Mac as a measurment of Price levels. So yes, i wonder if you can find Big Macs in say like Nauru?
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