No, “oats” is not an acronym for a phrase that nobody can remember. I’m just talking about ordinary oats and, for that matter, ordinary turkeys. I’ve always liked oats: cooked oats for breakfast, oatmeal cookies, oatmeal muffins, raw oats in Swiss muesli and so forth. It would be interesting to know how many recipes call for oats. Still, my interest in this article does not focus on recipes using oats, but rather the oats themselves. When I purchase a box of oats at Publix, I’m always struck by the wording on the top: “Quaker Oats – Est 1877”. Now what’s really interesting about this wording is the date 1877. In a country as future-oriented as the United States, who cares if the Quaker Oats Company was established in the 19th Century? What does it matter to us that the company has a long tradition? And yet, the marketing team at Quaker Oats apparently thinks that it does matter to us.
When I express political and social views that are related in some way to traditional values, I often receive comments that reflect a complete disregard for tradition. It is as if my critics consider tradition to be a hindrance to progress, a burden to be cast off so that we can move forward into a better future. In contrast, the Quaker Oats Company seems to think that tradition is a good selling point, i.e. that tradition actually is important to us, and perhaps they are right. After all, we celebrate Thanksgiving with turkey and all the trimmings, which is a very traditional practice. Moreover, we celebrate it in Florida! We are apparently so desperate for a bit of tradition that we import one from New England. So I am really quite puzzled about the American attitude toward tradition. On the one hand, we wish to break our ties with tradition–with religion, with traditional marriage, etc.–; on the other hand, we celebrate Thanksgiving and buy Quaker Oats. This ambivalence in the American attitude toward tradition should not be overlooked.
However, I must confess that the matter is not quite as simple as I have presented it. In spite of the fact that Quaker Oats has perceived our (perhaps unconscious) longing for tradition, the company is well aware of the future-oriented mentality of the fast-moving US culture, and in order to address this aspect of our thinking, it developed the fast-cooking oat. Whereas the traditional oat flake requires a cooking time of about five minutes, the fast-cooking flake is ready in just one minute. For those future-oriented Americans who acknowledge tradition, but who really don’t have time to think about it very much, the fast-cooking oat is the ideal solution. If you have ever noticed the size of an oat flake, you may have realized that the cooking time is directly proportional to its size. The smaller-cut oats cook faster. So if you are one of those people who only take a little bit of tradition into account, you won’t require much time to think about it. But if you share my taste and you take large portions of tradition and history into account, you will have to let your thoughts simmer for a while. If, for instance, your thoughts on the changing moral values of our culture don’t take anything into account before the 1960s, you have a pretty small oat flake to consider, and it won’t take very long to cook it. On the other hand, if you take into account our heritage from the Greeks and the Romans, if you consider the political and philosophical thoughts of our Founders and if you reflect on the Judeo-Christian elements of our history, the cooking time will be considerably longer.
I don’t mean to be unduly critical of the one-minute oat people. At least, they recognize the value of tradition to some extent. Unfortunately, there is still another group that doesn’t have the time or the interest to think about tradition at all, and for these people, Quaker Oats came up with “Instant Oatmeal”–just add hot water! Granted, these oats don’t have much flavor, but when tradition is totally ignored, the outcome is not very savory. To avoid burdening these people with unnecessary information, the Quaker Oats Company deleted the date of establishment (1877) on this package. After all, there is really no point in mentioning tradition to a group that demands instant solutions to complex problems.
To conclude this piece, let me add a little history into the mix. It was the Enlightenment of the 18th century that distorted and virtually destroyed our understanding of tradition. The irony of our situation today is that we are trapped in the “tradition of the Enlightenment”–a tradition that has blinded us to the value of tradition. The word “tradition” is a Latin derivative, and in its verbal form, it has the basic meaning of “handing something over” or “delivering something”. To live out of a tradition means to deliver something out of the past into the present. Of course, the present will always be new in some sense, but the continuity with the past should be meaningful and apparent. I doubt that the Thanksgiving dinner of the first pilgrims resembled our version of it very much. Nevertheless, they celebrated Thanksgiving, and so do we. So “Happy Thanksgiving” to all of you and enjoy an oatmeal cookie if you like. I’m sure that the pilgrims would not have objected.
Villager Jack E. Bush is a frequent contributor to www.villages-news.com
