In Lily Tomlin’s one-woman show, The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, one of her characters is sitting in a diner with visitors from another planet. One of the aliens picks up a container of non-dairy creamer and says “Trudy, this is what we’re made of.”

In homage, for years, in my family, whenever we ate something that was super-processed, we referred to it as “alien food.” As in, “What is this soup made of?” “Aliens.” There is even a cake that my mother makes from a mix that we just refer to as “aliens cake.” This Kahn-Troster-ism can be very confusing if you join our clan at a later date, as my husband discovered when he innocently asked what was for dessert, and got the answer “aliens.” Alien food was not something we were defensive about, but the fact that it had its own term signified how small a part of our diet highly-processed food was. And any time I indulge in something with a long list of unpronounceable, unrecognizable ingredients, or with no real nutritional value, I think “This is what we’re made of.”

The more I get involvement in the food movement, though, the more I realize that we’re made of aliens, too.

Alien food is everywhere. Think for a moment about the fact that Pizza Hut has just announced that its pizzas are going all natural. What on earth belongs in pizza that isn’t natural unless you are eating gummy bear pizza? And why is Splenda with fiber being marketed as a health food?

I used to think that I could avoid eating too many aliens by cooking from scratch and eating lots of whole foods. And indeed, if you rifle through our pantry, there aren’t too many things made with high fructose corn syrup (though my husband and I have weaknesses for Diet Coke and Splenda, respectively) or other weird forms of alien life.

But I’ve learned I am wrong. There is a powerful moment at the beginning of The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Michael Pollan compares the Mexican idea of a person being made from corn (because it was abundant in their diet), to the modern person literally being corn to our very building blocks. Not only is corn in everything we eat (in obvious and not-so-obvious ways), but it’s also fed to everything we eat as well. We’re turning into corn from our cells on up.

And it gets worse. I was recently rereading an article Pollan wrote in 1998 called “Playing God in the Garden,” where he looks both at the enormous amount of pesticides modern agriculture requires and at genetically modified crops (which have only become more ubiquitous in our food in the past decade). What does it mean to eat a tomato with a flounder gene? And what effect does that have on us? It boggles the mind to the point that I am tempted to hide under my covers and only eat non-dairy creamer: at least I can be sure that is pure, unadulterated aliens.

What are we made of? The Torah tells us what we are made of. In Genesis 2:7, God makes the adam (earth creature) from the adamah (the soil). Our purpose is to till and tend the soil that formed us, and to live off the results. We are supposed to be in sync with the land that nourishes us. It’s not up to us to play God or to abuse our stewardship of the earth.

We have a choice: to continue to eat as though it’s fine to be made of aliens or to be earth creatures. I think if most of us thought about what we were putting into our bodies, we would no longer regard it as a choice, but as a moral imperative.

In the meantime, pass the aliens cake.

Photo credit to www.alienzoo.com.