The Epistemology of the Supermarket
January 1, 2003
About a month ago, my family and I got chickens for the first time. I sheltered them and fed them, and they began to thrive. How elegantly simple, I thought. Dinner (and breakfast) simmering slowly, very slowly, just outside my back door. Of course, it has turned out not to be simple at all. There's the daily watering and feeding and the intermittent cleaning and moving the pen to fertilize a different patch of ground. And the weather and foxes have taken on new significance, both threatening to end my quest for sustenance in a fit of violence. It is fascinating to be responsible for—to care for—my food weeks and even months before I will eat it. In doing so I am clumsily taking up the intricate dance steps performed by most of those who have gone before me. And by repeating and renewing the motions my ancestors knew by heart, I begin to rebuild old ways of knowing. These ways of knowing teach me about this place, this patch of ground; and they teach me about my connections to those who went before me and those who will come after. I have begun, ever so slightly, to think differently about the world. There is epistemology in everything we do. If raising chickens can change the way one thinks about the world, other methods of finding food can have a similar effect. Our culture's dominant way of knowing, when it comes to chickens, is the supermarket. The supermarket sells a highly refined and mediated kind of knowing, just the opposite of what the chicken coop has to offer. The knowledge one gets at the supermarket is sterile, chilled, sliced, and packaged. The supermarket is the Windows operating system of the family table, user friendly to a fault. The guts of the program are hidden beneath the surface. The seamless web of ...
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