NOT FOR BREAD ALONE.
WRITERS ON FOOD, WINE, AND.
THE ART OF EATING.
Edited by Daniel Halpern.
INTRODUCTION.
Food as Gesture There are ways to think about food and its preparation beyond its actual consumption: thus the essays in Not for Bread Alone: Writers on Food, Not for Bread Alone: Writers on Food, Wine, and the Art of Eating Wine, and the Art of Eating. My idea was to put together a collection that celebrated both the nourishing (and necessary) act of eating, as well as that part that goes beyond merely eating to live-that is, the various social, anthropological, psychological, and philosophical gestures in the non-consuming aspects of food and rituals of eating. Eating our slice of daily bread, but not for the intake of that slice alone.
I entered the resplendent realm of cooking one very early Sunday morning in Seattle, circa 1952, at the age of six or seven, when I served eggs I had poached for an hour or two to my sleeping parents. I had watched my mother poach eggs and understood the technique perfectly: the poaching trays, the arrangement, the proper allotment of water.
However, the notion of time time was yet to enter my burgeoning culinary repertoire. Even then, or especially then, it was was yet to enter my burgeoning culinary repertoire. Even then, or especially then, it was gesture gesture that made an impression on me: the act of serving "the prepared" to another. that made an impression on me: the act of serving "the prepared" to another.
But to me cooking did not truly matter until I used food to do my bidding in the court of women. It was the late sixties and I was undergoing a post-p.u.b.erty period in Los Angeles, a Valley Boy living in a cheap but rustic apartment rented from Apache landlords in Laurel Canyon, just down the street from "the log cabin," where Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention posted rent and held extravagant parties, where I turned up many of the young women I nourished during that time. My small kitchen had a square table with a plastic checkerboard tablecloth, two wicker chairs, and a view of what I liked to describe solemnly as "deep forest." My intention was to give the view a kind of eerie mystery-to set my guests on edge, but to what end I now wonder?
I had rehea.r.s.ed a number of good-looking, if moderately accomplished dishes, but settled on two that seemed to win for themselves the necessary regard. The meals began with spicy corn fritters. I served these with a little creme fraiche and, 1.depending on the intensity of my feelings, a splash of red lumpfish caviar. I followed with a leg of lamb, shank half, injected with garlic splinters and rubbed with olive oil and rosemary. And throughout, plenty of inexpensive zinfandel from Napa, finishing with a simple dessert that would not unduly prolong the evening.
A short time later, I found myself living in Tangier, Morocco, where I taught English and began cooking with a certain earnestness. I lived in the apartment below Paul Bowles, who served as a sort of post-graduate mentor to me. On our afternoon walks through the covered food markets of the Socco Grande, where we shopped for our dinners, we discussed music, literature, stateside gossip, and the mysterious Moroccan culture.
It was in Tangier that I was first seduced by the richness of the dark spices-c.u.min, clove, cinnamon, turmeric, paprika, cardamom-and one fresh herb in particular, kosbour kosbour (coriander), whose aroma still conjures up those intense, profuse, and honest markets, where nothing was masked or disguised. (coriander), whose aroma still conjures up those intense, profuse, and honest markets, where nothing was masked or disguised.
Paul and I often ate together and one of the dishes he most enjoyed was a chickpea dish I made with my two favorite ingredients: c.u.min and coriander. We ate this with our favorite tagine tagine, a stew of chicken rubbed with freshly ground c.u.min, prunes stewed with ginger, and onions sauteed with cinnamon and topped with toasted almonds.
When I left Tangier for Italy, to visit my mother and sisters in Florence, Paul suggested I stop in Venice to see Peggy Guggenheim.
As her guest at the Guggenheim palazzo/museo palazzo/museo, it came to pa.s.s that I had the opportunity to help her, using the few culinary skills I had managed to acquire. It was one of those languid, mid-summer days on the lagoons of Venice; we were looking at various obscure churches in the small back ca.n.a.ls in her chauffeured gondola, talking about her support of Djuna Barnes, one the expatriate stars of the twenties, and of Italian food. She mentioned she had invited a number of friends to dinner, but was going to have to cancel because her chef had taken ill suddenly. Naturally, in a gesture of foolish generosity, I asked if I might help out by preparing a modest meal for her friends.
She and I then put together a list and, via gondola, "shopped." This meant we went from hotel to hotel, where Peggy was friendly with the head chefs who happily supplied her.
2 An hour after the appointed hour, the guests began to arrive: local artists and politicians, exiled Brits and Americans, a banker, a beautiful Eastern European jeweller, and (Peggy had neglected to prepare me, a hopeful writer of verses), Ezra Pound. Later in the evening, after a quant.i.ty of Veneto red (an Amarone produced by Quintarelli), I reminded him that we had met once ten years earlier on a vaporetto vaporetto plying through a rainy December night from San Marco to Accademia. I had asked, innocently, if he might be the poet Ezra Pound and he had replied, "Nope", in perfect English, keeping things simple. He now said, quietly, "Yes, but you see that wasn"t me." plying through a rainy December night from San Marco to Accademia. I had asked, innocently, if he might be the poet Ezra Pound and he had replied, "Nope", in perfect English, keeping things simple. He now said, quietly, "Yes, but you see that wasn"t me."
I prepared the meal. Red and yellow peppers stuffed with a puree of tuna and various aromatics and followed by simple but enthusiastic fusilli fusilli tossed with sausage and three kinds of tomatoes. For a meat dish, I grilled pork tenderloin (the kind that in this country comes packaged in cellophane) marinated, a la Tangier, in a blizzard of brown spices. tossed with sausage and three kinds of tomatoes. For a meat dish, I grilled pork tenderloin (the kind that in this country comes packaged in cellophane) marinated, a la Tangier, in a blizzard of brown spices.
To close, I presented with immodesty a local thigh-food specialty known as tiramisu tiramisu.
Peggy told me the dinner was well-received. She knew by the invita-tions at meal"s end-gesture for gesture. I left the next day after a lunch on her terrace overlooking the Grand Ca.n.a.l, sitting in the shadow of Brancusi"s Bird in Flight Bird in Flight. As we ate (leftovers), Peggy told me the story of its painful acquisition from the artist himself. They had been "seeing each other in a serious way," as Peggy put it. When the moment eventually arrived for them to break up-which I gathered, from the stories she told me about her many close encounters with the most important men of the first half of this century, was something she got rather used to-she agreed to purchase his Bird in Flight Bird in Flight. At the appointed hour, she went to fetch the piece. Brancusi came out of his house carrying it in his arms. I asked Peggy if it weren"t too heavy for him to carry alone and she replied, "Oh no, he was an extremely strong man." And she added, "You know, he had tears in his eyes, it was very moving. But to this day I don"t know whether those tears were for me because I left him or because he was losing his beloved Bird in Flight Bird in Flight." I like to think, these many years later (and given this context), their final encounter was like a last supper, bird in hand-betrayed first by his love-in-flesh, who in turn robbed (albeit purchased purchased) him of his love-in-silver, both now in flight.
But this is not the gesture I wish to end with. Not with a gesture of parting, but one of arrival. As in introduction. It is reported that Genghis Not for Bread Alone / 3 Not for Bread Alone / 3 Kahn said the first thing one man gives another is his hand. I"m thinking of gatherings of friends and relations, and how the hand and cheek are certainly the first to be put forward. But we expect this gesture of formal greeting (among friends) to be quickly followed by the question that makes coming together such a welcome thing, that pregustatory interrogative we have come this distance to be offered by our good and thoughtful hosts: "What can I get you?"
DANIEL HALPERN.
4
ROSE MACAULAY.
Eating and Drinking Here is a wonderful and delightful thing, that we should have furnished ourselves with orifices, with traps that open and shut, through which to push and pour alien objects that give us such pleasurable, such delicious sensations, and at the same time sustain us. A simple pleasure; a pleasure accessible, in normal circ.u.mstances and in varying degrees, to all, and that several times each day. An expensive pleasure, if calculated in the long run and over a lifetime; but count the cost of each mouthful as it comes, and it is (naturally) cheaper. You can, for instance, get a delicious plate of spaghetti and cheese, or fried mushrooms and onions, for very little; or practically anything else, except caviare, smoked salmon, the eggs of plovers, ostriches and humming-birds, and fauna and flora completely out of their appropriate seasons, which you will, of course, desire, but to indulge such desires is Gluttony, or Gule, against which the human race has always been warned. It was, of course, through Gule that our first parents fell. As the confessor of Gower"s Amans told him, this vice of gluttony was in Paradise, most deplorably mistimed.
We shall never know what that fruit was, which so solicited the longing Eve, which smelt so savoury, which tasted so delightful as greedily she ignored it without restraint. The only fruit that has ever seemed to me to be worthy of the magnificently inebriating effects wrought by its consumption on both our parents is the mango. When I have eaten mangoes, I have felt like Eve.
Satiate at length, And hightn"d as with Wine, jocund and boon, Thus to her self she pleasingly began.
O sovran, vertuous, precious of all trees In Paradise, of operation blest....
And like both of them together: As with new Wine intoxicated both They swim in mirth, and fansie that they feel 5 Divinitie within them breeding wings Wherewith to scorn the Earth: but that false Fruit Farr other operation first displaid....
And so on. But, waking up the morning after mangoes, one does not feel such ill effects as was produced by that fallacious fruit when its exhilarating vapour bland had worn off. One feels, unless one has very grossly exceeded, satiate, happy and benign, turning sweet memories over on one"s palate, desiring, for the present, no more of anything. The part of the soul (see Timaeus) which desires meats and drinks lies torpid and replete by its manger, somewhere between midriff and navel, for there the G.o.ds housed these desires, that wild animal chained up with man, which must be nourished if man is to exist, but must not be allowed to disturb the council chamber, the seat of reason. For the authors of our race, said Timaeus, were aware that we should be intemperate in eating and drinking, and take a good deal more than was necessary or proper, by reason of gluttony. Prescient and kindly authors of our race! What a happy companion they allotted to mankind in this wild animal, whom I should rather call a domestic and pampered pet. How sweet it is to please it, to indulge it with delicious nourishment, with superfluous t.i.t-bits and pretty little tiny kickshaws, with jellies, salads, dainty fowls and fishes, fruits and wines and pasties, fattened and en-truffled livers of geese, sturgeon"s eggs from Russia, salmon from the burn, omelettes and souffles from the kitchen. I have always thought the Glutton in Piers Plowman a coa.r.s.e and unresourceful fellow, who, on his way to church and shrift, was beguiled merely by a breweress"s offer of ale. (How ungenteel Mr. H. W. Fowler must have thought her, and all of her century and many later centuries, for using this word, which he so condemns, for beer!) The Glutton asked, had she also any hot spices? and she a.s.sured him that she had pepper, paeony seeds, garlic, and fennel. And with this simple and unpleasing fare, Glutton was content, and made merry globbing it until night. Glutton was no gourmet, no Lucullus. Nothing recked he of rare and dainty dishes; nothing out of the ordinary entered his imagination. Not for him the spitted lark, the artful sauce, the delicate salad of chopped herbs and frogs.
There are some sad facts concerning eating and drinking. One is that the best foods are unwholesome: an arrangement doubtless made by the authors of our being in order to circ.u.mvent gluttony. It is a melancholy discovery made early by infants, and repeatedly by adults. We all have to make it in turn, only excepting the ostrich. No doubt the Lady 6 in Comus made it later, after she had more fully grown up, though as an adolescent we find her remarking, sententiously and erroneously, to the enticing sorcerer, And that which is not good is not delicious To a well-govern"d and wise appet.i.te.
Even the untutored savage knows better than this. They of Dominica, said Antonio de Herrera, that elegant Castilian chronicler of Spanish travels in the West Indies, they of Dominica did eat, one day, a Friar, but he proved unwholesome, and all who partook were ill, and some died, and therefore they of Dominica have left eating human flesh. This was a triumph for Friars, which must be envied by many of the animal world.
Another sad comestive truth is that the best foods are the products of infinite and wearying trouble. The trouble need not be taken by the consumer, but someone, ever since the Fall, has had to take it. Even raw fruit was, to the exiles from Eden, hard to come by.
Their meanest simple cheer (says Sylvester) Our wretched parents bought full hard and deer.
To get a Plum, sometimes poor Adam rushes With thousand wounds among a thousand bushes.
If they desire a Medler for their food, They must go seek it through a fearfull wood; Or a brown Mulberry, then the ragged Bramble With thousand scratches doth their skin bescramble.
And, did they desire anything better, they could not have it at all. Slowly they learned, we suppose, about planting seeds and reaping ears and grinding flour and welding it into that heavy substance we call bread.
Rather more quickly, perhaps, about the merits of dead animals as food, but how long it took them to appreciate the niceties of cooking these, we know not. That is to say, no doubt the students of the history of man know, but I do not.
Once learnt, this business of cooking was to prove an ever growing burden. It scarcely bears thinking about, the time and labour that man and womankind has devoted to the preparation of dishes that are to melt and vanish in a moment like smoke or a dream, like a shadow, and as a post that hastes by, and the air closes behind them, and afterwards no 7 sign where they went is to be found.
Still, one must keep one"s head, and remember that some people voluntarily undertake these immense and ephemeral labours, for pay or for a n.o.ble love of art even at its most perishable, or from not being able to think of a way of avoiding it. All honour to these slaves of baked-meats: let them by all means apply themselves to their labours; so long as those who do not desire to prepare food are not compelled to do so.
If you are of these, and can get no one to cook for you in your home, you should eat mainly such objects as are sold in a form ready for the mouth, such as cheese, bread, b.u.t.ter, fruit, sweets, dough-nuts, macar-oons, meringues, and everything that comes (if you have a tin-opener) out of tins. If you can endure to apply a very little and rudimentary trouble to the matter yourself, eggs are soon made ready, even by the foolish; bacon also. I would not advise you to attempt real meat; this should only be cooked by others; so should potatoes.
But, whatever has been prepared for you, and whoever has had the ill chance to prepare it, there comes the exquisite moment when you push or pour it into the mouth. What bliss, to feel it rotating about the palate, being chewed (if this is required) by the teeth, slipping, in chewed state, down the throat, down the gullet, down the body to the manger, there to find its temporary home. Or, if it is liquid, to feel it gurgling and gushing, like the flood of life, quite down the throat with silver sound, running sweet ichor through the veins. Red wine, golden wine, pink wine, ginger beer (with gin or without), the juice of grapefruit or orange, tea, coffee, chocolate, iced soda from the fountain, even egg nogg-how merrily and like to brooks they run!
My subject runs away with me: I could, had I but time and s.p.a.ce, discourse on it for ever. I could mention the great, the magnificent gourmets of history; I could dwell on the pleasures experienced by Lucullus, Heliogobalus, those Roman Emperors, those English mon-archs, those Aldermen, who, having dined brilliantly and come to sad satiety, had their slaves tickle them with feathers behind the ears until this caused them to retire in haste from the table, to which they presently returned emptied and ready to work through the menu again. These are the world"s great gluttons; to them eating and drinking was a high art.
But they are beaten by one Nicholas Wood, a yeoman of Kent, who, in the reign of James I, "did eat with ease a whole sheep of 16 shillings price, and that raw, at one meal; another time he eat 13 dozen of pigeons.
At Sir William Sedley"s he eat as much as would have sufficed 30 men; at the Lord Wotton"s in Kent, he eat at one meal 84 8 rabbits, which number would have sufficed 168 men, allowing to each half a rabbit. He suddenly devoured 18 yards of black pudding, London measure, and having once eat 60 lbs. weight of cherries, he said, they were but wastemeat. He made an end of a whole hog at once, and after it swallowed three pecks of damsons; this was after breakfast, for he said he had eat one pottle of milk, one pottle of pottage, with bread, b.u.t.ter, and cheese, before. He eat in my presence, saith Taylor, the water poet, six penny wheaten loaves, three sixpenny veal pies, one pound of sweet b.u.t.ter, one good dish of thornback, and a sliver of a peck household loaf, an inch thick, and all this within the s.p.a.ce of an hour: the house yielded no more, so he went away unsatisfied.... He spent all his estate to provide for his belly; and though a landed man, and a true labourer, he died very poor in 1630."
And this is the third snag about good eating and drinking.
Nevertheless, expensive, troublesome, and unwholesome though it be, it is a pleasure by no means to be forgone.
9
WENDELL BERRY.
The Pleasures of Eating Many times, after I have finished a lecture on the decline of American farming and rural life, someone in the audience has asked, "What can city people do?"
"Eat responsibly," I have usually answered. Of course, I have tried to explain what I meant, but afterwards I have invariably felt that there was more to be said than I had been able to say. Now I would like to attempt a better explanation.
I begin with the proposition that eating is an agricultural act. Eating ends the annual drama of the food economy that begins with planting and birth. Most eaters, however, are no longer aware that this is true.
They think of food as an agricultural product, perhaps, but they do not think of themselves as partic.i.p.ants in agriculture. They think of themselves as "consumers." If they think beyond that, they recognize that they are pa.s.sive consumers. They buy what they want-or what they have been persuaded to want-within the limits of what they can get.
They pay, mostly without protest, what they are charged. And they mostly ignore certain critical questions about the quality and the cost of what they are sold: How fresh is it? How pure or clean is it, how free of dangerous chemicals? How far was it transported, and what did transportation add to the cost? How much did manufacturing or packaging or advertising add to the cost? When the food product has been "manufactured" or "processed" or "precooked," how has that affected its quality or nutritional value?
Most urban shoppers would tell you that food is produced on farms.
But most of them do not know on what farms, or what kinds of farms, or where the farms are, or what knowledge or skills are involved in farming. They apparently have little doubt that farms will continue to produce, but they do not know how or over what obstacles. For them, then, food is pretty much an abstract idea-something they do not know or imagine-until it appears on the grocery shelf or on the table.
The specialization of production induces specialization of consump-10 tion. Patrons of the entertainment industry, for example, entertain themselves less and less and have become more and more pa.s.sively dependent on commercial suppliers. This is certainly also true of patrons of the food industry, who have tended more and more to be mere mere consumers-pa.s.sive, uncritical, and dependent. Indeed, this sort of consumption may be said to be one of the chief goals of industrial production. The food industrialists have by now persuaded millions of consumers to prefer food that is already prepared. They will grow, deliver, and cook your food for you and (just like your mother) beg you to eat it. That they do not yet offer to insert it, prechewed, into your mouth is only because they have found no profitable way to do so. We may rest a.s.sured that they would be glad to find such a way. The ideal industrial food consumer would be strapped to a table with a tube running from the food factory directly into his or her stomach. (Think of the savings, the efficiency, and the effortlessness of such an arrangement!) Perhaps I exaggerate, but not by much. The industrial eater is, in fact, one who does not know that eating is an agricultural act, who no longer knows or imagines the connections between eating and the land, and who is therefore necessarily pa.s.sive and uncritical-in short, a victim. consumers-pa.s.sive, uncritical, and dependent. Indeed, this sort of consumption may be said to be one of the chief goals of industrial production. The food industrialists have by now persuaded millions of consumers to prefer food that is already prepared. They will grow, deliver, and cook your food for you and (just like your mother) beg you to eat it. That they do not yet offer to insert it, prechewed, into your mouth is only because they have found no profitable way to do so. We may rest a.s.sured that they would be glad to find such a way. The ideal industrial food consumer would be strapped to a table with a tube running from the food factory directly into his or her stomach. (Think of the savings, the efficiency, and the effortlessness of such an arrangement!) Perhaps I exaggerate, but not by much. The industrial eater is, in fact, one who does not know that eating is an agricultural act, who no longer knows or imagines the connections between eating and the land, and who is therefore necessarily pa.s.sive and uncritical-in short, a victim.
When food, in the minds of eaters, is no longer a.s.sociated with farming and with the land, then the eaters are suffering a kind of cultural amnesia that is misleading and dangerous. The current version of the "dream home" of the future involves "effortless" shopping from a list of available goods on a television monitor and heating precooked food by remote control. Of course, this implies, and indeed depends on, a perfect ignorance of the history of the food that is consumed. It requires that the citizenry should give up their hereditary and sensible aversion to buying a pig in a poke. It wishes to make the selling of pigs in pokes an honorable and glamorous activity. The dreamer in this dream home will perforce know nothing about the kind or quality of this food, or where it came from, or how it was produced and prepared, or what ingredients, additives, and residues it contains. Unless, that is, the dreamer undertakes a close and constant study of the food industry, in which case he or she might as well wake up and play an active and responsible part in the economy of food.
There is, then, a politics of food that, like any politics, involves our freedom. We still (sometimes) remember that we cannot be free if our minds and voices are controlled by someone else. But we have neglected to understand that neither can we be free if our food and its sources are 11 11 controlled by someone else. The condition of the pa.s.sive consumer of food is not a democratic condition. One reason to eat responsibly is to live free.
But, if there is a food politics, there are also a food aesthetics and a food ethics, neither of which is dissociated from politics. Like industrial s.e.x, industrial eating has become a degraded, poor, and paltry thing.
Our kitchens and other eating places more and more resemble filling stations, as our homes more and more resemble motels. "Life is not very interesting," we seem to have decided. "Let its satisfactions be minimal, perfunctory, and fast." We hurry through our meals to go to work and hurry through our work in order to "recreate" ourselves in the evenings and on weekends and vacations. And then we hurry, with the greatest possible speed and noise and violence, through our recreation-for what? To eat the billionth hamburger at some fast-food joint h.e.l.l-bent on increasing the "quality" of our life. And all this is carried out in a remarkable obliviousness of the causes and effects, the possibilities and the purposes of the life of the body in this world.
One will find this obliviousness represented in virgin purity in the advertis.e.m.e.nts of the food industry, in which the food wears as much makeup as the actors. If one gained one"s whole knowledge of food-as some presumably do-from these advertis.e.m.e.nts, one would not know that the various edibles were ever living creatures, or that they all come from the soil, or that they were produced by work. The pa.s.sive American consumer, sitting down to a meal of pre-prepared or fast food, confronts a platter covered with inert, anonymous substances that have been processed, dyed, breaded, sauced, gravied, ground, pulped, strained, blended, prettified, and sanitized beyond resemblance to any part of any creature that ever lived. The products of nature and agriculture have been made, to all appearances, the products of industry. Both eater and eaten are thus in exile from biological reality. And the result is a kind of solitude, unprecedented in human experience, in which the eater may think of eating as, first, a purely commercial transaction between him and a supplier, and then as a purely appet.i.tive transaction between him and his food.
And this peculiar specialization of the act of eating is, again, of obvious benefit to the food industry, which has good reason to obscure the connection between food and farming. It would not do for the consumer to know that the hamburger she is eating came from a steer that spent much of its life standing deep in its own excrement in a feedlot, helping to pollute the local streams, or that the calf that yielded the veal 12 12 cutlet on her plate spent its life in a box in which it did not have room to turn around. And, though her sympathy for the coleslaw might be less tender, she should not be encouraged to meditate on the hygienic and biological implications of mile-square fields of cabbage, for vegetables grown in huge monocultures are dependent on toxic chemicals just as animals in close confinement are dependent on antibiotics and other drugs.
The consumer, that is to say, must be kept from discovering that, in the food industry-as in any other industry-the overriding concerns are not quality and health but volume and price. For decades now the entire industrial food economy, from the large farms and feedlots to the chains of fast-food restaurants and supermarkets, has been obsessed with volume. It has relentlessly increased scale in order to increase volume in order (presumably) to reduce costs. But, as scale increases, diversity declines; as diversity declines, so does health; as health declines, the dependence on drugs and chemicals necessarily increases.
As capital replaces labor, it does so by subst.i.tuting machines, drugs, and chemicals for human workers and for the natural health and fertility of the soil. The food is produced by any means or any shortcuts that will increase profits. And the business of the cosmeticians of advertising is to persuade the consumer that food so produced is good, tasty, healthful, and a guarantee of marital fidelity and long life.
It is, then, indeed possible to be liberated from the husbandry and wifery of the old household food economy. But one can be thus liberated only by entering a trap-unless one sees ignorance and helplessness, as many people apparently do, as the signs of privilege. The trap is the ideal of industrialism: a walled city surrounded by valves that let mer-chandise in but no consciousness out. How does one escape this trap?
Only voluntarily, the same way that one went in-by restoring one"s consciousness of what is involved in eating, by reclaiming responsibility for one"s own part in the food economy. One might begin with Sir Albert Howard"s illuminating principle that we should understand "the whole problem of health in soil, plant, animal, and man as one great subject."
Eaters, that is, must understand that eating takes place inescapably in the world, that it is inescapably an agricultural act, and that how we eat determines, to a considerable extent, the way the world is used. This is a simple way of describing a relationship that is inexpressibly complex. To eat responsibly is to understand and enact, so far as one can, this complex relationship.
What can one do? Here is a list, probably not definitive: 13 13 Partic.i.p.ate in food production to the extent that you can. If you have a yard or even just a porch box or a pot in a sunny window, grow something to eat in it. Make a little compost of your kitchen sc.r.a.ps, and use it for fertilizer.
Only by growing some food for yourself can you become acquainted with the beautiful energy cycle that revolves from soil to seed to flower to fruit to food to offal to decay, and around again. You will be fully responsible for any food that you grow for yourself, and you will know all about it. You will appreciate it fully, having known it all its life.
Prepare your own food. This means reviving in your own mind and life the arts of kitchen and household. This should enable you to eat more cheaply and give you a measure of "quality control." You will have some reliable knowledge of what has been added to the food you eat.
Learn the origins of the food you buy, and buy the food that is produced closest to your home. The idea that every locality should be, as much as possible, the source of its own food makes several kinds of sense. The locally produced food supply is the most secure, the freshest, and the easiest for local consumers to know about and to influence.
Whenever you can, deal directly with a local farmer, gardener, or orchardist.
All the reasons listed for the previous suggestion apply here. In addition, by such dealing, you eliminate the whole pack of merchants, transporters, pro-cessors, packagers, and advertisers who thrive at the expense of both producers and consumers.
Learn, in self-defense, as much as you can of the economy and technology of industrial food production. What is added to food that is not food, and what do you pay for these additions?
Learn what is involved in the best best farming and gardening. farming and gardening.
Learn as much as you can, by direct observation and experience if possible, of the life histories of the food species.
The last suggestion seems particularly important to me. Many people are now as much estranged from the lives of domestic plants and animals (except for flowers and dogs and cats) as they are from the lives of the wild ones. This is regrettable, for these domestic creatures are in diverse ways attractive; there is much pleasure in knowing them. And, at their best, farming, animal husbandry, horticulture, and gardening are complex and comely arts; there is much pleasure in knowing them, too.
And it follows that there is great displeasure in knowing about a food economy that degrades and abuses those arts and those plants and animals and the soil from which they come. For anyone who does know something of the modern history of food, eating away from home can be a ch.o.r.e. My own inclination is to eat seafood instead of red meat or 14 14 poultry when I am traveling. Though I am by no means a vegetarian, I dislike the thought that some animal has been made miserable in order to feed me. If I am going to eat meat, I want it to be from an animal that has lived a pleasant, uncrowded life outdoors, on bountiful pasture, with good water nearby and trees for shade. And I am getting almost as fussy about food plants. I like to eat vegetables and fruits that I know have lived happily and healthily in good soil-not the products of the huge, bechemicaled factory-fields that I have seen, for example, in the Central Valley of California. The industrial farm is said to have been patterned on the factory production line. In practice, it invariably looks more like a concentration camp.
The pleasure of eating should be an extensive extensive pleasure, not that of the mere gourmet. People who know the garden in which their vegetables have grown and know that the garden is healthy will remember the beauty of the growing plants, perhaps in the dewy first light of morning when gardens are at their best. Such a memory involves itself with the food and is one of the pleasures of eating. The knowledge of the good health of the garden relieves and frees and comforts the eater. The same goes for eating meat. The thought of the good pasture, and of the calf contentedly grazing, flavors the steak. Some, I know, will think it blood-thirsty or worse to eat a fellow creature you have known all its life. On the contrary, I think, it means that you eat with understanding and with grat.i.tude. A significant part of the pleasure of eating is in one"s accurate consciousness of the lives and the world from which food comes. The pleasure of eating, then, may be the best available standard of our health. pleasure, not that of the mere gourmet. People who know the garden in which their vegetables have grown and know that the garden is healthy will remember the beauty of the growing plants, perhaps in the dewy first light of morning when gardens are at their best. Such a memory involves itself with the food and is one of the pleasures of eating. The knowledge of the good health of the garden relieves and frees and comforts the eater. The same goes for eating meat. The thought of the good pasture, and of the calf contentedly grazing, flavors the steak. Some, I know, will think it blood-thirsty or worse to eat a fellow creature you have known all its life. On the contrary, I think, it means that you eat with understanding and with grat.i.tude. A significant part of the pleasure of eating is in one"s accurate consciousness of the lives and the world from which food comes. The pleasure of eating, then, may be the best available standard of our health.
And this pleasure, I think, is pretty fully available to the urban consumer who will make the necessary effort.
I mentioned earlier the politics, aesthetics, and ethics of food. But to speak of the pleasure of eating is to go beyond those categories. Eating with the fullest pleasure-pleasure, that is, that does not depend on ignorance-is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world. In this pleasure we experience and celebrate our dependence and our grat.i.tude, for we are living from mystery, from creatures we did not make and powers we cannot comprehend. When I think of the meaning of food, I always remember these lines by the poet William Carlos Williams, which seem to me merely honest: 15 15 There is nothing to eat, seek it where you will, but the body of the Lord.
The blessed plants and the sea, yield it to the imagination intact.
16 CHARLES SIMIC.
On Food and Happiness Sadness and good food are incompatible. The old sages knew that wine lets the tongue loose, but one can grow melancholy with even the best bottle, especially as one grows older. The appearance of food, however, brings instant happiness. A paella paella, a choucroute garnie choucroute garnie, a pot of tripes a la mode de Caen tripes a la mode de Caen, and so many other dishes of peasant origin guarantee merriment. The best talk is around that table. Poetry and wisdom are its company. The true Muses are cooks. Cats and dogs don"t stray far from the busy kitchen. Heaven is a pot of chili simmering on the stove. If I were to write about the happiest days of my life, many of them would have to do with food and wine and a table full of friends.
Homer never wrote on an empty stomach.
-RABELAIS One could compose an autobiography mentioning every memorable meal in one"s life and it would probably make better reading than what one ordinarily gets. Honestly, what would you rather have? The description of a first kiss, or of stuffed cabbage done to perfection?
I have to admit, I remember better what I ate than what I thought.
My memory is especially vivid about those far-off days from 1944 to 1949 in Yugoslavia when we were mostly starving. The black market flourished. Women exchanged their wedding rings and silk underwear for hams. Occasionally someone invited us to an illicit feast on a day everyone else was hungry.
I"ll begin with the day I realized that there was more to food than just stuffing yourself. I was nine years old. I ate Dobrosav Cvetkovi "s burek burek, and I can still see it and taste it when I close my eyes.
Burek is a kind of pie made with fillo dough and stuffed with either ground meat, cheese, or spinach. It is eaten everywhere in the Near East and Balkans. Like pizza today, it"s usually good no matter where you get it, but it can also be a work of art. My father said that when Dobrosav retired from his bakery in Skopje, the mayor and his cronies, after is a kind of pie made with fillo dough and stuffed with either ground meat, cheese, or spinach. It is eaten everywhere in the Near East and Balkans. Like pizza today, it"s usually good no matter where you get it, but it can also be a work of art. My father said that when Dobrosav retired from his bakery in Skopje, the mayor and his cronies, after 17.realizing that he was gone, sent a police warrant after him. The cops brought him back in handcuffs! "Dobrosav," they said visiting him in jail, "how can you do a thing like that to us? At least make us one last burek burek, and then you can go wherever your heart desires."
I ate that famous burek burek forty-four years ago on a cold winter morning with snow falling. Dobrosav made it illegally in his kitchen and sold it to select customers who used to knock on his door and enter looking like foreign agents making a pickup. The day I was his guest-for the sake of my poor exiled father who was so good to Dobrosav-the forty-four years ago on a cold winter morning with snow falling. Dobrosav made it illegally in his kitchen and sold it to select customers who used to knock on his door and enter looking like foreign agents making a pickup. The day I was his guest-for the sake of my poor exiled father who was so good to Dobrosav-the burek burek came with meat. I ate every greasy crumb that fell out of my mouth on the table while old Dobrosav studied me the way a cat studies a bird in a cage. He wanted my opinion. I understood this was no fluke. came with meat. I ate every greasy crumb that fell out of my mouth on the table while old Dobrosav studied me the way a cat studies a bird in a cage. He wanted my opinion. I understood this was no fluke.
Dobrosav knew something other burek burek makers did not. I believe I told him so. This was my first pa.s.sionate outburst to a cook. makers did not. I believe I told him so. This was my first pa.s.sionate outburst to a cook.