Food Against AI: On Letting Go, and Holding On, and Being Human

If you know me at all, you know I love food. I mean, I love food. I love eating it, I love making it, I love learning about it, I love eating it (I said that twice). Like dance, like reading and writing, it is one of the main joy-bringers of my life. As with dance, as with reading and writing, I get high on it. Figuratively, you understand; I’m not talking about special brownies. I am actually, though, talking about regular brownies, or a sourdough pizza with burrata, or—now I started thinking about cheese—parmigiano reggiano, you know the kind I mean, the stuff from Modena that Massimo Bottura says runs through his veins (I believe him). Dance, literature, art, whatever it is for you, it could be anything, swimming, travel, whatever: these things we do that make our eyes light up, or occasionally even tear up, that we look forward to and turn to, and that transport us. We engage with them and think, “Fine. Whatever kind of tedium or misery or worse is happening out there, it’s FINE as long as there is this in the world”—really good food is one of those things for me. It is one of those things that has resonated throughout my life, and at times left me in certain ways, and come back.

You know those things? Whatever it is that speaks to your soul (you will note the impossibility of speaking this way about the artifice of artificial intelligence, as souls are one of many things machines don’t have) and called to you as a child, and you couldn’t explain why. You may have followed that spark all the way into a career, or you may not even have cause to ever pause and remember it, or maybe you traveled a path somewhere in between. When I was a child on a health store visit with my dad, I didn’t know why it felt so meaningful to hold the jar of honey with the comb still in it; he told me it came straight from the hive, but I’d never seen it in the jar before. It was something alive and mysterious. I didn’t know why, baking cookies with my mom, I felt such wonder watching the flour mix into the rest of the batter, the moment it turns into an actual dough and you can see it happen. And you’re about a second away from grabbing the beater (we called them lickers!) and licking every last dollop off of it. It was something created and transformed. I didn’t know the meaning in these moments. But I knew there was a deep-running joy there. Wonder and mystery—human experience, embodied delight.

It’s been so fun to see these particular aspects of my childhood come back around. I did not become a cook, or any kind of culinary professional, so it’s a beautiful thing to find a meandering return to these sustaining practices, not just in devouring the results, but in creating them. And to remember that they always meant this much, and to give words to that. There’s a converse way of stumbling into deep meaning, one that isn’t holding on, remembering, and revisiting, but the opposite: letting go of things that meant a great deal to you and making room for something entirely new. Perhaps you were a swimmer or a surfer, and loved it and at some point got injured and had to let go of it. It doesn’t matter what the thing was, you see. Perhaps you thought of food as one of your main anchors, and at some point your gut biome forced a change so drastic that you had to completely revamp your entire frame of mind around it, which was frightening and saddening, because the things we really love become avenues for meaning and identity, for better or worse. And then, perhaps, one day, you found a return. You caught a wave of a different kind, in a different ocean, or taught someone else to. You found that some of the things you had loved most and thought you might never have joy from again came back to you in the most surprising and fulfilling ways, because of that very journey. I suppose there is a profound message here about pain and letting go, and how we can’t see the whole picture all at once, and the idea that, like everything human, holding on and letting go are not opposites but are different sides (or guides) of the same coin, leading us ultimately toward a central path.

These are more ideas that a machine never has to worry about.

I wanted to write about food in this way, both as giver of meaning and as a symbol of growth between childhood and adulthood in my own life, a forsaker and a returner, because I think food is one of the best vehicles we have to talk about being human. In this truly terrible technological moment—I am not talking about advances in healthcare and lifesaving breakthroughs; I am talking about any kind of machine activity that uses language with a pretense of humanity—in this truly terrible technological moment, human activity is the only activity worth engaging. To be human has always been sacred. To do the things that make us human now is doubly sacred: in and of themselves, and as acts of recognition and awareness of that sacredness. Make sourdough: as an act of love for your body and your friends and family, and as a remedy against the ills of non-embodied life. Yes, I think that making a loaf of bread from scratch is part of the fight against every “AI Overview” that shows up on your screen, working to make you stupider, lazier, less whole, more one-sided, less active and curious and ready for struggle, and, above all, less capable of deploying your own self-sustaining and real-world community-given powers.

Perhaps you have let go of what used to bring you joy and found new joys. Perhaps you have circled back around, with delight, to something that always carried a spark for you. “The end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time,” said T.S. Eliot, in his characteristically shiver-sending way. Or maybe you’re at neither point at the moment. To be human is to long. To be human is: to eat, to think, to feel, to create, to move, to suffer, to love … to long. To be involved in a consciousness, a singularly meaningful one, that belongs only to us yet relates us to the vast cosmos. To be aware, sometimes agonizingly, sometimes exhilaratingly, of our existence in time. “‘In fact … you’re claiming the right to be unhappy,’” Aldous Huxley famously recognized of the poor little humans in Brave New World. All of this, and more. We have to remember that the things that really make us human, the deepest points of definition here, that soul we mentioned above, are the ones we will never be able to say, because they are mysteries. And mystery, and therefore meaning, is the opposite of machine—machine, which is, in the most literal sense, dehumanizing.

We know what a machine, any machine, is for, because we made it. We don’t know what we are for. That’s it, friends. A mystery in our telos (in our ultimate end and purpose, because of the mystery in our beginning), which no matter how hard the bots try to explain, they will never, thank goodness, be able to. Therein lies the whole point. To be aware fully of the point would, in part, remove it. “Our true home is wilderness, even the world of every day,” the great American philosopher Henry Bugbee sought to remind us, with no small degree of gratitude. You can’t know why you’re here, in the larger sense, as much as you hunger to. This hunger: impossible for a machine. But you can know some of those smaller points of meaning, the ones that speak to you, the ones that feed and nourish you.

And you know you have to eat.

Every week, as AI’s capabilities and influence grow, the number of articles and people disgusted with it grows, too. This disgust has taken too long (it should have started over two decades ago when Facebook weirdly dropped into college life), but it’s a trend we have to sustain. I do not want a sense of “digital belonging,” as the workplaces frame it these days. In fact, I think this phrase should frighten anyone with eyes and ears and a brain. The place we need to belong is Earth, where we live in the flesh. The question is no more complicated and no less terrifying than whether you want to be a human or an avatar. Paul Kingsnorth, God bless him, has brought us “Artists Against AI,” “Writers Against AI.” We know that whatever AI can do, in the end, doesn’t matter at all. Only being human matters, and a machine will never be human because it cannot sustain mystery, by definition. And it cannot sustain meaning. It cannot sustain at all, because it is divorced from the very idea of sustenance. So I’ve started thinking that Food (real food) is Against AI, as well. Make food. Feed your body. Feed your cells and your soul. The mystery of a sourdough starter, fermenting, decaying in order to create a new rise, or of the perfect solution surrounding the honeycomb, both from the Earth, where we live—start there.

Image Credit: Jehan Georges Vibert, “The Marvelous Sauce” (c1890)