Feast for the Eyes

I've noticed something curious about Asian males. I don't mean Asian-American males. I mean those from Asia. No, no, I don't mean from Asian. I mean from China. Or perhaps what we used to term as Oriental before that adjective fell from fashion.

Once a Chinese male reaches their 30s or 40s, thoughts of growing food seem to occupy them. My dad spent time trying to make a food garden from rocky Tennessee soil. My coworker grows vegetables too. This desire to be a farmer seems nearly universal among Chinese males.

Contrast that with a typical American male. Those who are interested in growing anything, and I suspect they are few and far between, prefer to grow things that are decorative. Flowers or plants of some sort, mostly to show off, rather than for the functional purpose of growing food.

It reminds me of (as many things do) a film I saw in the 80s. It was a French film called Jean de Florette, which translates to mean, Jean, of Florette. Alas, spoilers follow.

Apparently, the story is of a man named Jean, who has inherited a farm from his mother, Florette, who has passed away. The film appears set around the 1900s. Jean is, if I recall, some sort of tax collector, and wishes to give up city life to move out in the country. He is played by that French everyman, Gerard Depardieu.

He moves in with his wife and daughter, and wants to grow food and live off the land. The Simple Life as it were (shoo, Paris Hilton, shoo Nicole Richie). Alas, his neighbors wish to grow carnations, but to do so require water from Jean's land. Thus, a scheme is hatched to plug up the water source and make it extremely difficult for Jean to prosper on his land, and perhaps he will leave and sell the land. The plan unfolds over the span of perhaps two years.

As the film ends, Jean is killed while trying to get water from explosives (I assume it's underground, and has to do with creating a well). His wife is forced to sell the land since she is unable to take care of it herself. At the end, the daughter is wandering around, and spies the old man and his son unplugging the water, and crowing him prince of carnations. The daughter realizes the treachery, that her father's success has been prevented by neighbors that pretended to be good but just wanted the land to get to the water source.

Do I believe that food has a more fundamental value than decoration? I'm not sure I do. On the one hand, growing vegetables is usuallly not enough to live on, at least for the average hobbyist farmer. It's an activity that is rewarding because the end-product is something you can eat, but it's not enough to live on, especially if you're not vegetarian, but even if you are.

Growing food does have the virtue of being neighborly. If you do grow enough vegetables, you can give them to your friends or coworkers, and they can enjoy in it too. This is less true of nice shrubbery ot plants, which can only be enjoyed if you visit your friends.

This is, as they say, food for thought.