Literature and food for liberty

One of the most striking things about life today is the prevalence of fake food and fake books. Going out to eat, one finds processed breads, foods fried in hydrogenated oils, pop sweetened with fake sugar, and the like. Or in the grocery store, try reading most labels on canned or otherwise processed food without a degree in chemistry. Good luck; the flavors that God gave these things are mostly gone.

Going to the bookstore, I find predominantly fake books. That is, books "edited" by someone or other, volumes with one part poetry and 100 parts commentary, and books about real books. The real books--classics written by eminent authors--are regrettably few and far between. Even at a recent homeschooling conference I attended, the new and used book sales had a disturbingly high proportion of "fake books".

One possible reason why, courtesy in part from John Gatto, is that those who rule today don't want us to find out how to get our own food and learn different ideas. We might get uppity then.

It extends even to which translation of those books that remain might be used. Even in the church, everything from Oswald Chambers to the Bible, "must" be read in a modern translation. But is it that hard to read Elizabethan English? If so, we dispense with Shakespeare, Bunyan, and most good hymns--not to mention most of the documents written by the Founding Fathers.

And thus I wonder if a key part of liberty is to eat real food and read real books. To become familiar on one hand with the physical evidence of God's creation, and on the other to get to know the mind of His image--thus to be better nourished in body and spirit.

Plus, real food and books are often pretty cheap, since most people don't know what to do with them. Yet.