Material witness. (notes).(organic food and the definition of materialism)(Brief Article)(Editorial)

The late philosopher Alan Watts once observed that the commonly accepted idea that Americans are materialists is wrong. Materialists, Watts said, are people devoted to the physical and immediate present. Americans, however, are abstractionists "so preoccupied with saving time and making money that [they] have neither taste for life nor capacity for pleasure."

White bread, Watts says, is illustrative of our anti-materialistic culture. Most of it is "vitamin-enriched Styrofoam ... a squishy and porous pith injected with preservatives and allegedly nutritive chemicals." Such a substance is a fabrication of theory and mathematics, in Watts' view, for it lacks any concrete association with farmhouse kitchens and waving fields of grain on late-summer afternoons--qualities that seem to be baked into real bread.

Of course, this romantic observation occurs in an essay called "Murder in the Kitchen," in which Watts also writes that by "destroying our environment and fouling our own nest ... the world around us looks as if we ...