There’s the song Billy Joel wrote in 1983, ‘And So It Goes’… and the 2014 romantic comedy drama film with those words in its title… and the Kurt Vonnegut biography… and other books and music.
Hearing about current events way back when — the Cuban Missile Crisis, or initial skirmishes in the Vietnam War, for example — friends and relatives would shrug their shoulders and say; ‘And so it goes.’
On TV a couple of days ago, an architect and a filmmaker couple, in Vermont, were preparing food an age-old Peruvian way, cooking meats, poultry, potatoes, corn and a selection of vegetables in one of several earth ovens they’d dug in the ground, in their yard.
Heated rocks at the bottom, and along the sides, of an earth oven, are used to cook seasoned, marinated foods, once a material, of some kind, is placed over the top of the oven in the earth, and then covered with several layers of dirt. ‘Pachamanca’… that’s what this cooking technique is called, “dates back to the Inca Empire.”
In an online NPR story, I learned about that.
And so it goes, with crises and wars, but, fortunately, with better things, sometimes, too. Like an ancient civilization’s way of cooking that’s continuing on at a home in Vermont, and at luaus in Hawaii, too, where cuisine is being cooked the old pachamanca way.
And while we’re talking about age-old cooking and customs, and ancient civilizations, there’s that question, an age-old one, about how civilizations are perceived, after centuries or millenniums of time.
Pachamanca cooking, as primitive as it may seem to be, seems to be holding up just fine. How will our civilization, here in the United States of America, be seen over time?
The Incas, all those years ago, without modern tools and the wheel, created fine architecture, and their buildings were earthquake resistant. Buildings along earthquake fault lines, in the San Francisco Bay Area, meanwhile, have been – and still are – being retrofitted.
Our United States of America civilization does have high tech kitchen appliances, ovens and refrigerators you can program and even converse with. But a lot of appliances are imported from other places.
You can’t program, or converse with, an earth oven, that’s true, but those folks in Vermont sure seemed to be savoring pachamanca cooking, anyway.
And so it goes. Ancient Inca ways of doing things, and our civilization’s way of doing things.