100 Million Years of Food by Stephen Le Read Free Book Online

café. With characteristic impulsiveness and idealism, he wiped the prices off the board.
    Why pay-as-you-can? Shanaka observed during travels among rural groups in Indonesia, the Philippines, and the Amazon that food was shared among neighbors. “Food is a strong gesture of our kinship. Whereas, I find that sometimes in Western societies, at least in Melbourne for example, whenever you go out to a restaurant to eat lobster, it is a means of highlighting privilege and separating yourself from a majority of society. I wanted to see how we could capture that culture of making food available and then seeing everyone eat together from all walks of life, especially because money is such a divisive force in society. I was curious to see if we could use the money that people donated or made available to unite people, the focus being the importance of having a good meal and being able to sit with the rest of the community, the rich and poor, everyone, together and eating.”
    Against the odds (and the objections of his then-partner), Shanaka opened first one, then two more pay-as-you-can restaurants, and a school canteen, drawing out of his skeptical Melbourne residents previously unthinkable fonts of generosity and trust. Shanaka was feted as an Australian Local Hero, appeared on a national stamp, met the prime minister, gave TED Talks, and co-officiated a TV cooking contest with the Dalai Lama. Shanaka’s pay-as-you-can philosophy, considered subversive a decade ago, is now mentioned in Australian educational curricula. The idea has been exported to Dublin, and in 2011 Jon Bon Jovi opened a similarly themed community kitchen in New Jersey.
    However, Shanaka paid a price for following his idiosyncratic path. Heroin addicts dipped into the collection boxes, which eventually had to be locked. He battled for years with the Australian government over $300,000 in unpaid sales taxes owed by Lentil as Anything; eventually Shanaka and his supporters succeeded in having the sales tax law revised, in view of the nonprofit nature of the restaurants. He had to declare bankruptcy at one point but formed another legal entity and bought back the restaurants’ equipment. Shanaka pays himself a basic wage out of the earnings, though child support payments became a legal issue, and he has been threatened with jail over $14,000 in unpaid traffic fines. Businesses and landlords have pushed for the eviction of Lentil as Anything restaurants, in part because they draw in an unsavory crowd of social outcasts. Shanaka is weary of the battles and the restaurant business; he wants out. He has a lot of plans; he has worked with children’s education and reconciliation in Sri Lanka. Like many of us, he wants to challenge deep-rooted social inequities; unlike the majority of us, Shanaka has the courage to do so.
    Shanaka’s restaurants prove that healthy eating does not have to be the privilege of the well-off in society. As Shanaka and many anthropologists have noted, in small-scale traditional societies, food was shared among neighbors. Indeed, the act of sharing food was essential to village life, because it meant that the risk of not obtaining enough food in a foray could be spread among the villagers. Nowadays, this communal aspect of eating has been nearly wiped out in industrialized societies, with people dashing off to a supermarket, farmer’s market, bakery, or deli and returning home to consume the stash of food by themselves, perhaps with some family, occasionally with friends. Eating in a restaurant is not much different, because, as Shanaka noted, the costs of restaurant meals can serve as markers of status, like a fancy car, watch, or purse. For most Americans, this is exactly the point: If you work hard to make money, then you get to splurge on luxuries, including pricey meals. But this raises a question: Is a city or town merely a place with good jobs, safe housing, decent education for the kids, and places to blow