I just finished the book on how the 1950s changed food — and since I’ve been asked several times, it was “Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America” by Laura Shapiro — and I keep turning something over in my mind, about the devaluing of the basic work of caring for our physical selves.

There are a lot of facets and lenses through which to view this, including feminism, race and class. By focusing on one specific aspect, I don’t mean to ignore or devalue the others, simply to give more focus.

What struck me about this is how much we have devalued the work that goes into caring for and nurturing our physical selves.

I look at the devaluation of traditional women’s work — of home cooking, caring for a home, making clothing — and I see this as somewhat the leading edge. Because it doesn’t stop there. We devalue work that traditionally falls into the purview of men too now — farming, construction. We have this disconnect with our physical selves.

I’m as guilty of this as anyone. I’m a typical Aquarian; I like to say that if I could wander around as a giant, disembodied brain, I would. But this isn’t just about the mind versus the physical self, because I think it goes deeper than that.

I keep using pictures of food here because to me food is basic — it’s nourishment and comfort and culture all tied together. But it’s like we want to stop seeing ourselves as those thing. We talk about branding ourselves, about marketing who we are.

But I am not a brand. I am not a product. I’m a person, with all the messy, inherent contradictions held in that.

So we start to see ourselves as brands and products. We have put our faith in the markets and value only what the system calls valuable. The work that sustains us is minimized, ignored or outsourced.

Our food is grown in factory farms, processed, reheated. Our furnishings are cheap and disposable and built on a system of abhorrent practices. We turn a blind eye to it, because we don’t want to see. I think, on some level, we want to see ourselves as free from the messy work that comes from sustaining a life and society.

But no matter how smart, how enlightened we are, we still need these things. We need food to eat, shelter from the elements, water to drink. As humans we also crave more than that — we seek out comfortable and aesthetically pleasing surroundings, food that nourishes our souls as well as our mind, the communal breaking of bread that ties us to our fellow humans.

Yet we are so willing to push all that aside for cost and convenience. I am as guilty of this as any young, urban professional. When I am busy (and I am always busy), it’s the cooking and cleaning that slide by the wayside first. It becomes quick, processed food, unbalanced meals, things left undone til later.

I can’t help think, though, that in this I am doing a huge disservice to myself. We all are, because when we as a society begin to view the things that make us human as drudgery, we begin to devalue our own humanity.

I don’t think changing the way we look at every day tasks will solve all the worlds problems. I’m not even sure we can change how we view them. But sometimes I can’t help but think it might make us all a lot more at ease.

I’m reading a book right now about the way the 1950s changed how we eat. It’s really fascinating to see that all the processed food that we’re realizing is so problematic has its roots in the post-war era.

Coming off of WWII, manufacturers had all of these products they’d developed for the war effort — things like processed and frozen food. Having invested all this money into it, they began to look for ways to market these foods to a civilian market. They had a tough time of it at first, because these (male) scientists and corporate decision-makers couldn’t really fathom the idea that women didn’t find cooking and feeding their families to be any sort of fulfilling exercises.

It’s funny, because looking back I think we have this idea that things like processed food came about because they were wanted. That women got sick of feeding their families, threw aside their aprons and demanded a better way.

But they didn’t.

Now there are a lot of discussions that can be had around this — about feminism, about choice, about the role of food in our culture — and all are valid, but they aren’t the part that is sticking with me right now.

What sticks out to me right now is that it was not the consumer that demanded these ‘time-saving’ convenience products. It was the corporations who slowly, carefully, deliberately convinced of us their need. We know we’re subject to the effects of marketing when it comes to luxury goods, but when it comes to things that we consider essential, I think it tends to be more subtle.

I find this particularly striking when it comes to food.Cooking and eating together is a communal activity, an important form of bonding among people. To break bread together is a meaningful thing, and yet to look at the culture today, that has been eroded into a world of fast food and convenient, individual consumption. We’ve taken one of the most ancient, enduring and basic of human activities, one that nourishes both our bodies and our souls, and we’ve handed it over.

More and more as I read the news now, I feel like I am less of a person and more of a product to be used and discarded. We even do it to ourselves, we call it personal branding, and we mold ourselves into  a palatable identity that we can sell to the world. We hand over our data and information to get free services, in turn becoming the product that is marketed to advertisers, and we call it transparency and declare that privacy is dead.

I don’t know how to start to undo these knots that bind us — I don’t even know if we can. But somehow, I think that food seems like a good place to begin.