
Girl Chopping Onions, Gerrit Dou
ONE OF the relatively recent innovations in supermarkets is pre-chopped and pre-peeled and pre-washed vegetables. Our supermarkets don’t have the room for produce from local farmers, but they do have the room for hundreds of packaged “fresh” vegetables and fruits that are all ready to cook or eat without any prep work. They even have pre-sliced onions and brussels sprouts. I realize these chopped vegetables are a great convenience for certain segments of the population, such as old people who live by themselves, but is it possible that so many people don’t have the time to wash their own carrots? This phenomenon, it seems, is related not just to materialism and the economic pressures on families that are inevitable in a materialistic society, which leaves no one with the time to chop, but to the general aversion to manual labor. I once met a woman who said she does not chop any vegetables at all. That would be fine if she were wealthy and had servants to do it or could take her family to a decent restaurant every night or lived in a major city where she could order great take-out prepared by immigrants who do all the chopping. But she actually was a middle class mother in the suburbs. How can you raise a family and not chop onions? That’s like being a violinist and refusing to touch a bow.
A people that cannot chop is rootless. It’s like a country without farmers, deprived of connection to the earth. As it is, most of the fruits and vegetables in the stores resemble plastic play food in doll houses. Vegetables come from dirt, not from factories!! Do people realize that? In the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve probably enjoyed breaking open and sectioning the abundant fruits of the earth. It was play to them to revel in the splendiferous colors and shapes. Every onion is a masterpiece. In our fallen world, chopping is not always play. It truly is tedious, but it’s a tedium that becomes us and improves us.
Pre-handled vegetables are not as healthy. The outer layer of the carrot protects it from drying out and leaching nutrients. I have seen this process close up. When lettuce is broken up and put in a plastic bag, it also, I am convinced, loses nutritional value. I am not a scientist and can’t prove any of this, but it’s just so obvious from the plastic taste of these processed vegetables, which are so lacking in the personality of real food. Nutrition is connected to the spiritual needs of man, so much so that all the dietitians in the world can’t put their fingers on the key to health. It is to be found in the intimate and sacred relationship between the human and the material.
There is perhaps another reason for the decline of chopping. At the cutting board, one is sometimes alone with one’s own thoughts. Some people in our vain, heavily mediated and distracted world, perhaps through no fault of their own, have no thoughts at all. They only have sensations and emotions. Thus they discover at the cutting board that there’s no there there. For these people, much to be pitied, chopping would be therapeutic. Doctors should perhaps send some of the depressed home with prescriptions to chop so many onions and cabbages a day.
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