raw and cooked

the raw and the cooked

In a couple of months’ time, our nonFiction readers will choose a book on Food. Ah, says I, I’ll make a bid for The Raw and the Cooked : classic from the pen of Claude Levi-Strauss.

It’s not going to work! It’s long out of print and our bookseller host seems to imply our choices should come from their shelves. Domage! Amazon has one or two copies – at a price attractive only to collectors of rare books. et in saecula saeculorum.

At this point I’ll come clean. Levi-Strauss’s book is not really about food. So why would I suggest it? It’s because I was thinking about the place of symbols in our everyday life. How the ‘music’ I learned as a little boy was dependent more upon seeing than listening. A page of printed symbols was placed in front of me and I learned to ‘read’ music. Later in life I was fed the idea that this kind of music – the kind that’s read from a page of symbols - was the only ‘real’ music. Other kinds of music – the tunes I heard sung by my schoolmates and the ‘dance music’ I heard on the wireless – these were all of an inferior breed and not worthy of serious study.

Oh dear!

Allowing my mind to meander, I find myself considering the Renaissance distinction between witchcraft and the magic of occultism. The former, by and large, imbibed by imitating those already proficient. The later requiring study of an academic level.

There we are : the raw and the cooked. The former, naturally occurring – like picking berries off a bush. The latter requiring books of instruction and a collection of apparatus - pots pans blades and flame.

This ‘either or’ process was rather high in academic fashion when I first read Levi-Strauss. Computing then was young enough for all of us to be aware of ones and zeros. 1 to indicate that an electrical current was making a connection. 0 to indicate the absence of flow. Today I find it all too readily in the ‘us and them’ attitude. We are the patricians, the cultured ones. They are the descaminados, the mob, those without culture. sicut erat in principio et nunc et semper?

francis cameron, oxford, 7 december 2011

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