The Soul of Good Food

The Soul of Good Food
by Afric de Bláca

an acclaimed new collection of thought-provoking essays

The Soul of Good Food is a non-fiction collection of essays about food, philosophy, literature, life and the universe....a metaphysical meander through everything that interests the author, as seen though the prism of food. A book for people who love to read...

This is a beautiful collection of literary and philosophical essays, looking at life through the prism of food. Authored by Afric de Bláca, this book is exquisitely written and deeply interesting. In the tradition of Alain de Botton and G.W. Sebald, de Bláca explores far and wide in this magical mystery tour.

Part personal memoir, part polemic, part political analysis, part spiritual enquiry, what comes through most is the author's unrelenting quest for authenticity in a degraded world. As de Bláca writes, "food is about so much more than just food...it is the storybook of the world."

Page length: 117

PRICE: $14-75

TESTIMONIALS

"Wow! What's the opposite to dumbing down? Whatever it is, you've done it with this beautiful book----small but perfectly formed. Congratulations!" ----Ariel NYC

"After reading your book, I'll never take food for granted again. You've inspired me to realise that food really does matter in ways that never occured to me before. I've read so many books on nutrition but never been affected to change to natural food until I read your fantastic book, which is not about nutrition at all! You've done something magical! This is a book I'll keep and pass onto my grandchildren!"---Toni, Wisconsin

"You put words to something I have been feeling for a long time--about the fakeness of everything including food. Reading it was like taking some good medicine---except I enjoyed it---perhaps I should say it was more like a healing experience. Thank you for helping me realise what was wrong with my life---it was a lot cheaper than going to therapy! I'm renting an allotment now and growing my own food and it makes me happier than anything I've ever done before."---Mark, London

"Your essay about the nomads was awesome. And the one about your aunt's house in Dublin too--- I'm a Joyce scholar and I loved it!" -----Maryann, Vancouver

"I don't think I've ever read an ebook as good as this one. You should be snapped up by a "real" publisher! Hope you are. You deserve it!"------Charles, Italy (the home of real food!)

"I'm expecting my first baby and have been trying to decide whether to breastfeed or not. Your analysis of the taboo of breastfeeding was fascinating and crystallised the issue for me. I'm so glad I came upon your book before my baby is born because now I realise how food is so important to babies in the first months of life."-----Amy, Sydney, Australia

"I am loving your little book. Read 'Brave New World' years ago---must check it out again after reading your interpretation!"----Pat, New Mexico

Price: $14-75

PRICE: $14-75

READ AN EXTRACT FROM
The Soul of Good Food

EPILOGUE: A SAVAGE OUTLOOK
Following my soujourn with the Berber nomads of the Sahara, I travelled further south, into the Sahel, where I spent some time living in the home of a native family. The family was headed by a strong, independent woman, who, with very little money, managed to cook up a massive feast every evening for the large household living under her roof and any visitors who happened to drop by. The whole day was centred around the meal, the trip to the market every morning to buy fresh produce, the pounding of the flour, the sorting of the beans, the chopping of the vegetables, and finally, the cooking. When the day drew to a close, people gathered beneath the starry sky to share huge earthen bowls of beautiful food, eating with their fingers, breaking fresh-baked bread, talking the night away.
By our standards, they were very poor, but in my eyes, their life had a rich humanity that many Western families have lost. When I told my host that many families in the West only eat together on rare occasions, and regularly eat packaged, processed foods while looking at television. She replied ‘Savage! They eat like dogs!’
For her, to remove the social and ritual aspects of a meal would be to remove the humanity. For her, to remove the connection between our food and the earth which gives it to us, would be a desecration, a blasphemy against nature, an act of uncouth ingratitude. This tribal woman, in her mud-walled home, hearing about the ways of the white man, judged them uncivilised.
I pondered the implication of her words. My illiterate, ‘poor’ African matriarch was right. The more the Bread of Life becomes the Bread of Plastic, the more disconnected we become from nature and the earth which sustains us. Such disconnection creates disturbance in our being----we shift from a sense of wonder at the beauty of creation, to selfish indifference and allow the destruction of our fragile eco-system to take place. At the same time as our planet suffers, so does our society.
The less families cook and eat together, the more we erode the bonds that hold us together and civilise us----we shift from harmony to disharmony, from families and communities to atomised individuals. Where are these trends leading to? Unless we change our ways, they will reach their logical conclusion----an earth in environmental shock, suffering desertification, deforestation, floods and drought, populated by the children and grand-children of the short-sighted creatures, driven by greed and ignorance who allowed this to happen----us.
“You cannot eat money,” was the native American's riposte when the white man wanted to buy his land. Now, in the shrunk world of techno-globalisation, all the earth’s lands are subject to destruction by the short term greed of Western civilisation. Unless we heal our connections to each other and to our beautiful planet, our future may well be a Mad Max nightmare. Savage indeed!
Right now, whether we know it or not, we are dismantling the building blocks of our society in a most casual way. At some future time, this may be recognised as the beginning of the end of a golden era of our civilisation, sneaking in through the backdoor, while we were all too busy to notice. Too busy fulfilling the insatiable needs of the corporate workplace, too busy with the four-hour daily car-commute, too busy weekends, buying stuff we don’t need in retail parks, too busy with everything, except what we really need to be busy with----too busy for our children, too busy to cook for them, too busy to eat with them, too busy to be with them, too busy to know them.
The prophetic and iconic phrase of political philosopher, Herbert Marcuse, comes again to my mind when I consider the disappearance of the family meal and the synthetic nature of the food we eat today---it is, surely, nothing short of 'the desublimation of the culture'.

But equally, when we cook good, natural food and share the ancient ritual of breaking bread with our loved ones, we strengthen our culture and enrich our families and therefore our society. We appreciate the gifts of the earth and care for our environment because we see how it is part of us. We make our world more sublime, our life more wonderful, at least for the duration of a mealtime. We grab back a little bit of the beauty that this 21st century world has stolen from us. We defy its synthetic, plastic, greedy, short-sighted, superficial nature. We rebel against what is cheap and nasty and made only for profit. We celebrate deeper, more eternal values and feel their richness nourish our being. We take our place at the Feast of Life. So let us feast! The time is now! Yes!

----ends extract

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Browse the Table of Contents

SOUL OF GOOD FOOD: CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

FOOD--- A PERSONAL MEMOIR

A Mother and Three Angels

Dining with the Living and the Dead

The Dark-Haired Demeter of Slievenamon

These are the Days………

The Proustian Potential of Food

Manifesto

FOOD AND CIVILISATION

The Lost Sublimity of Food.

A Crisis in the Making

Nourishing Body and Soul

Food and Civilisation

A Meal to Remember

THE POLITICS OF FOOD

Politics on the Shopshelf

Who Murdered my Village? Who Murdered my Food?

The Politics of Food and Authenticity

Petition

FOOD FEMINISM AND FAMILY

Who's Cooking Tonight Dear?

The Great Taboo of Baby-Feeding

Truth Lies and Food

REDEEMING FOOD

Back to Basics

Natural Food

Taking Responsibility for What We Eat

The Time-Money Equation

The Zen of Food

Baba Yaga's Kitchen

Alexander Technique and the Zen of Eating

The Grace of Gratitude

EPILOGUE

A Savage Outlook

Bibliography

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