Nice bit of Capon

I'm stunned that I'd never posted this piece before. Brilliant.

Robert Farrar Capon, The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection, 1967, 1969, pp. 39–40.

Economy is not one of the necessary principles of the universe; it is one of the jokes which God indulges in precisely because He can afford it. If a man takes it seriously, however, he is doomed forever to a middle-income appreciation of the world. Indeed, only the very poor and the very rich are safe from its idolatry. The poor, because while they must take it seriously, they cannot possibly believe in it as a good; and the rich, because, though they may see it as a good, they cannot possibly take it seriously. For the one it is a bad joke, the for other, a good one; but for both it is only part of the divine ludicrousness of creation -- of the _sensus lusus_ which lies at the heart of matter. And that is why all men should hasten to become very poor or very rich -- or both at once, like St. Paul, who had nothing yet possessed all things. The world was made in sport, for _sports_; economy is worth only a smile. There are more serious things to laugh at.

O the sad frugality of the middle-income mind. O the humorless neatness of an intellectuality which buys mass-produced candlesticks and carefully puts one at each end of every philosophical mantlepiece! How far it lies from the playfulness of Him who composed such odd and needless variations on the themes of leaf and backbone, eye and nose! A thousand praises that it has only lately managed to lay its cold hand on the wines, the sauces, and the cheeses of the world! A hymn of thanksgiving that it could not reach into the depths of the sea to clamp its grim simplicities over the creatures that swim luminously in the dark! A shout of rejoicing for the fish who wears his eyeballs at the ends of long stalks, and for the jubilant laughter of the God who holds him in life with a daily _bravo_ at the _bravura_ of his being!

Into outer darkness then with the pill-roller and his wife. They have missed the point of the world; they are purely and simply mad. Man invented cooking before he thought of nutrition. To be sure, food keeps us alive, but that is only its smallest and most temporary work. Its_ eternal_ purpose is to furnish our sensibilities against the day when we shall sit down at the heavenly banquet and see how gracious the Lord is. Nourishment is necessary only for a while; what we shall need forever is _taste_.

Pills indeed! Someday, no doubt, the dreadful offspring of that hapless couple will invent flavorless capsules which, when swallowed, will give the user a complete command of any desired language. Let us hope only that when he does, the sane among us will lobby for a law to keep such people from writing poems. Language is no utilitarian abstraction; English, French, Greek, and Latin are concrete delights, relishings by which the flavor or words and syntax are rolled over the tongue. And so in their own way are all the declensions and conjugations of beef, lamb, pork, and veal. Food is the daily sacrament of unnecessary goodness, ordained for a continual remembrance that the world will always be more delicious than it is useful. Necessity is the mother only of cliches. It takes playfulness to make poetry.