Diverse Opinions, Pt. I

You are what you eat.  We’ve all heard this expression, perhaps even repeating it in those intermittent moments of trying to lose weight or improve our dietary intake. Since entering the American lexicon in the 1930s, the saying has been a rallying cry for nutritionists for whom the connection between how we look and how we feel seemed self-evident. But does it apply to all of us, collectively?

Eating and identity has also served as an underlying assumption about our experience as Americans, famously captured in the national metaphor of the melting pot. Growing out of the waves of European immigration in 1800s, it became an essential element of our national mythos. Where else could diverse peoples find a new start and become assimilated in the cauldron of a welcoming and redemptive America? Like most symbols that endure, the melting pot defined life as it was thought to exist for many people in our country—that is, to the degree that they adopted the language, values and aspirations of their new nation. In this 21st Century moment of our collective history, it is but one of several images that attempt to depict whom we really are and how we can and should live together.

While a powerful and enduring image for so many who came to these shores looking for freedom, opportunity or sanctuary, it has never quite fit everyone who labored, fought, sacrificed and died in pursuit of the American dream. From the first footfalls of Europeans on the muddy Virginia riverbank they named for their king, race, ethnicity and, at times, religion, presented largely impassable barriers to social assimilation in this land of so much promise. Jefferson’s lofty declarations of equality, liberty and the pursuit of happiness were slow in coming to women, to those of African descent, and to others among the huddled masses yearning to breathe free who risked all to become Americans. It remains to be seen how long and how far the arc of freedom will take us.

For many of European descent, this country did become a cauldron in which they, in time, could assimilate. This was clearly evident by the mid-18th Century, when shared ambitions for freedom divided colonists into us versus them camps vis-a-vis the rebellion. Our national identity was born in conflict, tested by revolution, forged through constitutional trial and error, partisan politics, a second war with England, decades of antebellum compromise and strife and refashioned in a bloodbath of internecine strife. Given the lasting ramifications of the Civil War, we have never managed to become the monochromal culture that a melting pot so idealizes. Instead, the diversity of races, ethnicities, religions and political philosophies—played out both regionally and nationally—has made us resemble another culinary option that, although coming into popularity over a century later, aptly describes our nation since the 1860s: the TV dinner.

Segregation has always been an easier model for humans to accept, and it was the norm among tribes and hamlets geographically isolated from one another long before the advances in transportation, communication and technology made our world a smaller and more accessible place to live. While urbanites have long been exposed to people of different races, ethnicities, religions and lifestyles—resembling the mixed veggies compartment in TV dinner trays—most of us have lived in small villages, on farms or rural homesteads. In such habitations neighbors and passers-by looked, talked and acted much like us. The 20th century brought the urban experience to ever enlarging regions of the country, creating new tensions and challenges for those who struggled with those issues of identity and compatibly that inevitably surface when space and power must be negotiated and shared.

The TV dinner, with its clear aluminum partitions keeping everything separate and unmixed, resembles the ghetto phenomenon that so divides and compartmentalizes people along economic, racial, ethnic and even religious lines. What Swanson applied to frozen dinners, city planners built into the matrices of urban life and suburban flight. What works in the food preservation industry does not necessarily lend itself to the cultivation of a healthy and cooperative society. 

As a child of the 1950s I grew up with TV dinners, my special treat when mom and dad indulged in an evening out. I also was all too familiar with segregation, separate but equal, discrimination and so many daily reminders that we were not the great melting pot, at least not outside the confines of my own WASP community. Yet America has never been a fixed menu kind of a place.  In fact, the efforts of so many people who labored, sacrificed and even gave their lives on behalf of the fulfillment of constitutional ideals have produced a change in our country that I believe is best captured in a more apt dietary metaphor that first came into currency in the 1960s:  the salad bowl.

Unlike a melting pot, there is no distinctive, overriding flavor in a salad that transforms the ingredients into a uniform concoction wherein textures and tastes can not easily be distinguished nor separated. Unlike the compartmentalized TV dinner tray, each of the culinary choices in a salad bowl coexists in the same, shared space, tossed and mixed up yet not absorbed into the others. Salad bowls offer a variety—dare I say diversity—of colors, consistencies and flavors—each distinct on its own yet combining to create a mixture—not a dilution—that is satisfying, whether the ingredients are eaten together or separately.

There was a time when America’s mythologies extolled the unique virtues of our supposed melting pot in creating a culture of assimilated citizens. Yet that proved to be more a virtual reality projection than an actual day-to-day experience for most of our citizens. Our four hundred years of history have more closely resembled a salad bowl of mostly compatible, mostly coordinated elements. Yet the American salad bowl has been and remains as different in composition and balance as are the many salad varieties that can be found on restaurant menus coast to coast. To make this analogy complete, all we have to do is add some distinctive regional flavors, such as Thousand Island, the American Ranch, Italian, Cajun, Chipotle, Soul, in dressings that can be creamy, oily, chunky or smooth, to see how varied and diverse the American salad bowl has become.

If we really are what we eat (and, more to the point, swallow), it is high time we return to our salad days and turn from the easy TV dinners being prepared for us by chefs more interested in selling their easily consumed products and ideologies while all of us suffer indigestion on a national scale.  Diversity has been and will continue to be our blessing and our unique profile among the nations of the world. But that ingredient of our national character flourishes best in bowls in which our heritage and identities can be expressed, honored and coexist—and not in melting pots or TV dinner trays.

 With the Olympics in mind, I’d like to continue thinking out loud about diversity in next week’s essay. It is a topic that both inspires and troubles me in this very important moment of our history.