FOOD BIOME

 

“Darwin discovered that evolution is not merely about the survival of the fittest but also about charm and sensory delight in individual subjective experience. The implications of this idea for scientists and observers are profound, requiring us to acknowledge that the many wondrous sights and sounds of the natural world are not merely delightful to us; they are products of a long history of subjective evaluations made by the animals themselves.” — Richard O. Prum, Evolution of Beauty 

    I had spent a good chunk of my afternoon bird-watching from my upstairs living window. There was a fledgeling in the corner of the rain gutter waiting for parent food. The tree across the house was the outpost where mom or dad provisionally rest a few minutes hearing their chick sing and knowing it’s still there on the eaves, before darting to its nest and deliver the food that's in their beak-to-baby beak eager to eat. (It was a fast move, the exchange, the morsel could be anything edible and digestible, a dead insect, a crumb, a berry, I don’t know, but the hungry baby was satisfied upon swallowing and stopped tweeting.) The parents (common brown swallows species) repeated the cycle of feeding roughly at fifteen minutes interval of flying out to forage food and returning to deliver dinner. It was a success each time and I was happy for the family birds, not to mention entertained and time well-spent for writing it. 

    So what does this almost ornithological activity have to do with human food blogging? A great deal. Let me explain. One “scientific” interesting observation I made that afternoon: Of the nearby homes in my neighborhood, it appeared that only my blue house where I rent a second floor flat was an aviary niche. It could be that through the years of “adaptation” and “choice,” wild birds (which by the way the book where I derived the above quote-epigraph argues a theory that subjective/arbitrary mate choice for quality of personalities and distinctive styles of cooperation and building were favorable traits that influenced aesthetic evolution, which could be understood as the direct biological reason for the manifestation of beauty) had made an ecological catchment for nesting and storing food of my house because of its functionally and its reproductively optimal presence to raise a brood. All around my house burst all day long (with the exception at night when I can only hear minimal scratches in the walls) restless activities of finches, peckers and swallows communicating diversely, I don’t ever listen to electrically-plugged music during the day when I have wild avian songs easing and wonderful to my heart. The birds have chosen my home as a natural birdhouse where they're free to be homemakers; it seems the soul of this house is a forest subjective to them. It provides. It creates harmony.

    When I prepare my daily meals, I am aware of my well-being and health in accordance to a biological lineage that food coming from the green earth is a source of beauty, if not the origin of all beauty and biodiversity in life. I have mountain apples and mango salad and toasted sunflower bread for lunch, chamomile-coconut tea for drinks. I was raised by a mother from love fed by good home-cooked food, and by the influences of a poetic grandfather who had built an ancestral farm teeming with provisions and victuals from fruit trees and cultivated vegetables and herbs and edible flowers from gourds and squash vines (a favorite salad garnish of mine), and above all a "biome" where I, as a kid, would be connected and ever so, and still am, to the frontiers of the natural world of food.