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Thursday, June 10, 2010

Welcome to Antoinette's Orders!

Hello! Thank you for visiting Antoinette's Orders. I plan to use this site to share personal stories, my commentary on current events related to food and food justice, and a poem or two. While I'll try and stay somewhat on topic (food and hunger, generally), I'll be engaged in an intensive fellowship experience, moving from North Carolina, to Texas, to Arizona, to Washington, D.C., so I hope you'll forgive any side-tracked discussions of what it means to be a modern nomad, create a community, and be fully alive.

I named this blog Antoinette's Orders after the phrase commonly attributed to then French princess Marie Antoinette, "Let them eat cake." Rather than a mandate to consume as many buttered pastries as possible (which I would enjoy and oblige in a heartbeat), this utterance shows how completely out of touch Antoinette was with the suffering and famine of her people. While men, women and children starved in the streets, Antoinette's flippantly advised her subjects to fill themselves with French cakes, which were far too expensive and scarce to provide a real solution.

Through a revolution of technology, culture, and government policy, the modern-day equivalents of those French cakes have become accessible to the masses. Somewhere between Antoinette's life and mine, simple foods have been replaced by what was once outrageously decadent. And still we are a starving people, but our need has taken a new form. Through an exploration of current events and personal anecdotes I hope to show how out of touch our own food culture is with the true purposes and joys of creating, preparing and consuming food with one another.

1 comment:

  1. Hooray for the new blog! I'm a big fan of this name. Great for you, your passion, and expertise. Can't wait for more!

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