THE PARABLE OF THE TWO MEALS

Guest Post by Hardscrabble Farmer

There was once in the kingdom two meals. The first meal was made in a restaurant. On the wall of that restaurant hung a framed certificate from the state that stated the restaurant had been found to have a rating worthy of a capital ‘A’. All who entered the restaurant could marvel at this wondrous document before being seated by their server. However, back in the kitchen there was such a confusion of languages and of practices, so much left undone by way of sanitation and food temperature controls, such a low quality of product due to a corporate supplier who always made a point of finding the least expensive food, often frozen and sometime years after it’s harvest that it was not possible to put together a meal worthy of the name.

The owner of the restaurant was so crippled by legal requirements and forced postings of rules in multiple languages- often placed so that they could be read by employees who were themselves unable to read in their own language- that he was unable to cope with the demands of his customers. And while there were numerous pots and pans and utensils, they were frequently unwashed because cutbacks had to be made in the pot washing department to allow for newly mandated increases in wages for the servers. The appliances once sparkling and high tech were now crusted in baked on scum and hardened grease because butter was too expensive, while corn oil was still affordable.

The refrigerators were dirty and home to numerous bacteria colonies so that you could taste them in the salads when you took a bite, despite the cloying taste of artificially flavored bottled dressings. The food would frequently be fried in old oil, left to languish on the pass through for periods of time before the indolent and underpaid waitresses would deign to pick it up so that it had cooled and the sauces had congealed. Often the diners would complain and send back the meal for correction, offending and upsetting the underpaid cook who would do sometimes terrible, often unsanitary things to the meal before sending it back out to the customer. In the end the patron, his digestive tract newly filled with nutritionally dead matter and germ colonies by the millions, not to mention the cooks “special sauce”, would go home to a mild case of intestinal distress and a lighter wallet.

A few miles away there was a small house on a hilltop. It was surrounded by a gardens in full bloom of health, tended to by a family who would plant and harvest by the season and eat their meals from the bounty it provided at the peak of production when each vegetable and fruit was at the height of it’s growth and potential. The father would venture into the garden with his son at the end of the day and pick whatever looked best to them for their evening meal and bring it back to the house where they would wash it clean with water from their well. The mother and daughter would work together, side by side at a humble table making fresh pasta with eggs they had just fetched from the henhouse.

Their kitchen was small, the selection of pots and pans small, but meticulously well maintained and sparkling clean before each use. They added ingredients like maple syrup they had produced themselves, butter the younger girl had made from fresh cream and sea salt and ground meat from an animal they had seen born on their pasture, had raised to maturity, had slaughtered, butchered and stored with their own hands.

As they prepared their meal they spoke excitedly- in a common language- about the day’s work and other things that both interested them and tied them together. They all did this without thought of compensation beyond each others company and when they finally sat down at table to their modest, but delicious fare, their bodies flushed with nourishment, they spoke in glowing terms of flavor and composition and they ate until they were filled. What was left over was shared with the herd dogs, the barn cats, the chickens and the hogs, all of whom enjoyed it immensely.

MORAL: A government certificate is worth the paper it is printed on, nothing more. What matters is what the individual brings to the table.