Disclaimer

When I started the I Heart This podcast, I thought that I could keep it simple, that I could just talk about the awesomeness of the things I love. But … man … that was naive. Words just never stay where they’re supposed to. So be warned, my relationship with root beer, which is the subject of this episode is … complicated. I take this way too seriously. I mean, it’s just root beer for chrissake, but, what can I say, overly earnest is just how I roll. So, be forewarned, what follows is as much a meditation on the moral and emotional costs of loving things as it is a celebration of those saccharine suds. If you’re not into that, peace out and we’ll see you next episode … Oh, and there’s also some minor spoilers about the NBC comedy The Good Place. And also probably some other stuff I should tell you about that I’m forgetting right now. 

Anyway ….  just saying I warned you. 

Loving It

I want to talk about root beer. And probably the best place to start is to talk about foraging for wild edible plants. 

For most of my adult life, I’ve been the wild foods guy … the guy who will dig up the roots from the side of the road and throw it into a soup pot for fun. If they had such a superlative in high school yearbooks, I’d probably be voted “most likely to stick a weed in my mouth.” In a world of people who follow the paleo diet or “eat right for your blood type,” I have often had the strangest diet in the room. 

This is probably why people are often surprised to learn that I love, love, love, love, love soda. 

Pop … coke … soft drinks … whatever you call it, there’s just something about high fructose corn syrup, artificial colors, and carbonated water. And my absolute favoritest, most loved and cherished for all time … is root beer. 

“Wait! What?” you ask. “How’d the stinging nettle soup guy get into sodium benzoate and red #40?” But hear me out … because I actually think that my wild food adventures have given me some perspective on just what an amazing food root beer is.

Side Note: Now I know what both of the wild plant nerds in the listening audience are thinking, but NO this isn’t going to be a talk about traditional home-brewed sassafras root beers. I mean, I’ve done that … yeah … And they are good. But that’s not what I’m talking about today. I’m talking about the wildly intoxicating saccharine sweetness of a bottle of A&W or Barq’s on tap. The root beer I love is an industrial food through and through, conceived in chemistry and born in a factory. I love root beer in all of its artificialness … artificiality … artificial … some … ness …? 

So, what exactly does foraging have to do with carbonated corn syrup water? 

Well, when you eat like a caveman for a while, you realize just how wondrous and strange our modern diet is. As unconventional as it might seem, foraging is the normal diet. In the 11 or 12 thousand generations of modern humans, the vast majority just ate whatever berry or bug they could get their hands on. Less than four percent would have been farmers, most of whom had a diet based on rice or gruel. And it is not until the last four or five generations out of 11 or 12 thousand that many people could see sugary sweetness as something other than an extravagant luxury. 

We forget this because we mostly think of that long, long period of fishing and digging roots and gathering acorns as the prelude to history. But it’s not. The stone age was the main act. Civilization is just the epilogue. The ease with which I can pick up a bottle of root beer at my local convenience store is the anomaly. I can only get it because I just happen to have been born into this unusual time. (And also this particular place since root beer is pretty much an exclusively North American drink.) 

I think that sometimes, some of us are dimly aware that we live in a time of unprecedented food abundance. But it is so easy to take for granted. Foraging helped me to see just how awe-inspiring my supermarket was. So much food! Even the kings and emperors of the past would be dumbstruck. But there is another aspect of our food wealth, beyond just having a lot of it, that most of us aren’t even aware of. I certainly wasn’t. At least, not until foraging made me aware of it. To see what I’m talking about, imagine, you could travel back in time a few thousand years and visit your ancient ancestors. No matter what language they spoke or where they were in the world, if you handed them a frothy, cold root beer, they’d think you’d brought them the food of the gods. We live not just in a golden age of abundance–but also of deliciousness. Our foods are extravagantly flavorful–culinary explosions of sweetness and delight that our ancestors could scarcely imagine. 

What I am trying to say here, I guess, is that root beer is an enormous privilege–a privilege that I have for no reason except dumb luck. Chances are that there’s a favorite food of yours for which that is also true. Congratulations! Just like me, you’ve won the food lottery. 

Self-conscious About What We Love

I have to admit that I feel … a bit vulnerable talking about how much I love root beer. It’s kinda like admitting to some kind of sin. “Forgive me father for I have sinned. It’s been three months since my last confession and in that time I have consumed twenty-eight fizzy beverages with no remorse in my heart.” 

I would like to not want soda. If I could stop wanting it, I would. But I would not choose to stop loving it. And I think that’s another reason I wanna talk about root beer, because root beer reminds me that wanting and loving are not the same thing. And that neither of them are under our control. And that there is no shame in either wanting things or in loving them. 

I can choose whether to drink root beer or not, but I can’t really choose whether to love or want it. In fact, my body is made for it. The heart of root beer, like all soft drinks, is sugar. And sugar is nature’s purest, most perfect food. I’m not saying this just because I love root beer, but also because it is literally true. The cellular furnaces of my body, the mitochondria, will, if pressed, burn other fuels, but all of their molecular machinery is designed to extract energy from sugar molecules. 

I love and crave root beer and other sweets because those of my ancestors who loved and craved honey or berries or maple sap were more likely to live and find love and have children than those who didn’t. I carry, in my body, the striving and hardships of my forebears. My longing for sugar is their longing to live. 

My body, my nerves, my brain have been sculpted by natural selection to attune to this most magical of molecules. So now, my tongue is covered with microscopic sugar detectors. And when a sugar molecule clicks into place on the end of that nerve it starts an electrical domino chain down that nerve and sets off fireworks of delight in my brain. I am built to love exactly this. 

I think we need reminders about this. It’s easy for us to see our cravings, our desires, our wants as character flaws–that somehow, if we mastered ourselves, we’d want the things that we should want instead–like cauliflower and opera and exercise. 

All of this makes me think of a phone call I got many years ago from my friend, Beth. She was studying music at some college somewhere, and when I asked her how it was going, she gave a heavy sigh and said that she thought that she didn’t belong there. 

Now, this made absolutely no sense. Beth was a gifted singer. She’d written original a cappella arrangements in high school and had been the star of the spring musical twice. That girl could sing. How could she not feel that she belonged in music school? And when I asked her that question she said, “I don’t know. I guess I just don’t like the important music?” 

“What do you mean–the important music?” I asked. 

And she said, “Well, everyone here is into jazz and  … classical and … all of this experimental stuff … and I … I just want to sing showtunes.”  

How easy it is to curb our own enthusiasm–to end up apologizing for the things we love. We start disguising our joy. We preface our stories with, “Well, I know it’s just a cartoon …” We hide the soda in the back of the fridge so that our friends won’t see it. We tell ourselves we don’t belong in music school because we prefer “Oklahoma” to Brahms. 

It’s the type of thing that’s easier to see clearly when it’s happening to someone else … Of course, Beth shouldn’t feel ashamed of loving Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. But it’s much harder for me to see it when it’s the thing that I love that is the object of disdain from other people, especially when they are people I trust or admire. 

“Oh god, the ending to that book was soooo Disney.” or

“Modern art is so pretentious.” or

“Canadian French isn’t real French, you know.” or

In the face of cynicism and judgment, it takes courage to stand up and say unabashedly, “I love this.” But there are people who do! And I am so grateful for the people who champion what they love no matter how uncool or idiosyncratic it is. John Green said it like this: 

“… nerds like us are allowed to be unironically enthusiastic about stuff. We don’t have to be like, “Oh, yeah, that purse is okay.” or like, “Yeah, I like that band’s early stuff.” Nerds are allowed to love stuff, like jump-up-and-down-in-the-chair-can’t-control-yourself love it.”

Or Mary Oliver, whose poem Wild Geese rang me like a bell the first time I heard it.  

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Knowing It’s Bad For Me

But there’s another layer here. My love for root beer is different from Beth’s love of showtoons. Namely, Phantom and the Opera won’t give anyone Type II diabetes. I’m conflicted about loving root beer not just because I’m embarrassed around my kombucha-chugging friends.  Root beer and Orange Crush and Mountain Dew are all objectively bad for me. They’re bad for my teeth, my liver, my heart … So far as I know, they have no redeeming health qualities. Pretty much, they’re just bad. 

And I’ve always known they’re bad for me. As I said before, I would like to not want soda. Even if there isn’t any shame in loving things or people that you aren’t good for you, it’s still hard. What do you do with that kind of love? You can know they aren’t good for you, but that does not make it possible to somehow turn off your love, and it doesn’t make it any easier to give them up. 

Sometimes I think this is hard for us to see. We can watch the woman in the relationship that we know isn’t good for her, and we can’t understand why she stays. “Why doesn’t she just dump the loser?” we ask. But I think it’s easier to understand when we look at children. For much of my life, I’ve been a teacher. And I am painfully aware of how sometimes children are taken from their homes when their parents, or supposed caregivers, hurt them, hit them, or fail to get them the basic things they need. But even when those kids are being rescued for terrible abuse and neglect …  they still love their moms. Of course, they do! Because, it’s their mom! That’s okay. You’re allowed to love your mom, even if she doesn’t know how to love you back. Even if you know it’s better that you don’t live with her anymore. 

Look, I know there is no comparison here. The stakes in my relationship with a soda are so many orders of magnitude smaller that it’s absurd. But, I think, the principle is similar. Even if we keep what we love at a distance, we can’t ignore that we love it, and it’s needlessly painful to try. 

Knowing It’s Bad for Others

But the difficulties don’t stop there. Even if some surprising new scientific evidence showed that, despite all our expectations, root beer was actually some miracle health supplement that delayed aging and improved your sex life and helped you get eight hours of beautiful sleep each night, I’d still have … misgivings. 

Because root beer isn’t just bad for me. It’s bad for my planet. And for my fellow human beings. What if drinking root beer actually is a sin? Not in some Biblical stone tablet sort of way. But in an out-of-step-with-my-own-moral-compass way. 

Sugar cane and sugar beets and corn are the sources for commercial sugar that make root beer and other sodas so delicious. And the mass cultivation of these crops depletes soils, destroys habitats, and leeches fertilizer runoff into waterways. Sugar is a global industry that was built on the backs of the enslaved. Sugar became widely available to the average European only because it was subsidized by the blood of Indigenous Americans and then Africans kidnapped from their homes. In fact, sugar was the economic engine that brought African slaves to the New World in the first place. the Caribbean plantations were the site of egregious abuses of human dignity. 

Sugar today (at least officially) is not produced by slave labor. But that doesn’t mean that the supply of cheap and readily available sugar is made without harm. Human rights abuses in the cultivation of sugarcane remain. And we have shifted from subsidizing sugar with the lives of our fellow humans to subsidizing it with fossil fuels. The only reason sugar (and therefore my favorite root beer) is cheap, is because we are destroying our planet to make it so. What is a person to do? 

For an answer to this troubling moral question, let’s turn to a television sitcom. 

The Good Place, was a television sitcom that aired from 2016 to 2020.  If you haven’t seen it, it’s about four characters who find themselves in the afterlife where it turns out that Ted Danson from Cheers is in charge. Throughout its four seasons, these characters, and their audience, are continually challenged to ask: What is good? And how good is good enough? I know that I did not make that sound at all like a comedy, but trust me, unlike me, the show is actually funny. 

My favorite character in the Good Place is a pathologically indecisive philosopher named Chidi Anagonye, played by William Jackson. In a running joke, Chidi suspects that he has landed himself in the Bad Place because he used almond milk in his coffee even though he knew about its negative environmental impacts. When he finds out that he is in hell, this is the first thing he thinks of to blame. 

Now why do we laugh at that? Growing almonds in California is actually a terrible idea. They really do have way outsized environmental impacts. So why do we laugh (and really I do laugh–Chidi is hilarious). But no one expects to go to hell for something like that. Why not? 

I think that the answer is addressed in a later Good Place episode, when the characters break into the afterlife’s accounting department to find out that in the last 521 years, NO souls had been admitted to Heaven. They’d all gone to hell. That it was impossible in the modern world to live a life without causing harm. 

It turns out that there is nothing special about root beer. It’s not even the worst offender of environmental crimes. There is a moral cost to ALL of our choices. All of our wealth. All of our comforts. All of our nice things. They all cause destruction. Even the most verdant vegan, organic farm is still a farm. They still have to shoot the deer to keep them out of the broccoli. They still kill the “pests.” Farms are, by definition, habitat destruction. For a farm to exist, another ecosystem had to be removed. To support our society, we replace natural ecosystems with an ecosystem designed primarily to feed one species … us. Even if we stopped all farming, we couldn’t stop the violence. (Pause). You cannot eat without killing something. To live, is to participate in that dance of creation and destruction. 

Foraging makes this abundantly clear. It’s hard to ignore the impact of your food when you are the one that uproots the plant, kills the fish, or shoots the deer. You have your hands on it when it dies. 

Knowing all of this doesn’t change the fact that I want to live without causing undue harm. And if I can’t live a completely non-violent life, I at least want to try. I want to do the most good and cause the least amount of pain that I can.  

I’m still figuring out how to do that. I doubt there’s an easy answer. But the world’s most expert foragers, the last remaining people who make their living by hunting, fishing, and gathering in the wild, offer some guidance here. They come from lots of different environments and have lots of different traditions. But most of them agree about a certain kind of foraging ethic. In my understanding, it boils down to something like this: “Whenever something gives its life so that you can eat, it is a gift. You must treat that gift with respect and gratitude.” This kind of thing exists all over the world. And every different people expresses it in their own way. Some leave little offerings of tobacco. Some speak aloud words of thanks to the creatures that will become their food. Some had rituals or songs. But whatever the tradition, the intention is the same … Acknowledge your impact, ask forgiveness for the harm you cause, and promise not to take too much. 

Couldn’t we all do the same? 

Conclusion

So where do we stand with all of this? In the end, how do I drink root beer in an oh-so-less than perfect world?  Wiser people than I have weighed in on the big questions of justice and desire and how to live a good life. I don’t have any authoritative answers. All I can tell you is what I try to do. 

First, I don’t drink much root beer, as much as I love it. There’s nothing new about the idea of moderation. It feels like the right thing to do for both my health and for the planet that I love. But also, I think I appreciate the awesomeness of root beer all the more because it isn’t something that happens every day. I am less likely to take it for granted.  

Second, I try to remember that root beer won’t last forever.  

There will someday be a last bottle of root beer. There will be a last one for me personally because my life is finite. And there will, someday, be a last bottle of root beer in all of human history. Root beer is a temporary thing. How lucky am I to live in the time when it can be enjoyed. Who knows how long it will be?

I try to drink with joy. At once, unapologetic for my delight and mindful of what was sacrificed so that I can enjoy it. I remember that I am participating in the dance of creation and destruction. I try to give my full attention to just how good it is. The world that gave it to me deserves that much. When I think about it like that, even drinking root beer feels a little bit sacred. 

Finally, I try to remember the advice of John Muir, the effervescent American naturalist and explorer, about how to sustain oneself in the wilderness that he so loved. “Eat bread in the mountains,” he said, “and with love and adoration in your soul. And you will have a nourishment that food experts know nothing of.”