Best Food Writing 2013 (58 page)

That is when, freed from the memories of long-forgotten Sunday-school lessons at the United Methodist Church in Andover, New Jersey, not to mention the fates of the wealthy and social-climbing characters who appear under one of the greatest themes of the greatest Western novels—
money
—that is when the question, unsettling and smelling slightly of curdled crème, wafts from the pan of reducing
jus:
Could
this
be why it's easier to fit a camel through the eye of a needle? Could it all come down to dinner?

To be more direct, I'm sometimes dogged by the possibility that my meals are soulless.

I'd thought I was a palsy of Calvinism until I read an essay by Charles Lamb, a Londoner who wrote in the first half of the nineteenth century. Lamb writes in “Grace Before Meat” that holidays, feast days, and other elaborate gatherings to eat are antithetical to the true spirit of grace. The anticipation of the meal, the exotic aromas, the food itself, and—Lamb would not note this, having kept a cook (his sister), but let's admit it since most of us no longer do—the sheer exhaustive effort of preparation (to say nothing of the impending doom of cleanup!) all combine to distract the diners from the powerful truths attendant to the meal. That someone dedicated time and energy to making it, for example. That one can pay for it. That one has a house in which to eat it. That many people do not. That an animal died for it. All of these facts and more are elusive enough because of their obviousness, unpleasantness, or both. Introduce a current of fragrant steam, Lamb says, and the truths simply float away. They cannot hold up to the turkey done to a turn, the steaming ham, the oysters on their bed of ice—and we haven't even reached dessert yet.

Call Lamb a killjoy if you like. Essayists as a breed practice contrariety; it's the currency in which they trade. If you resist, you can hedge a little and say instead that feasts simply prove we
are
animals, often more driven by our appetites than anything our hearts and
minds might have to tell us. And if you don't believe
that,
think back to your last food coma or hangover, or the day after you stayed up just a little too late with your partner, or ran a little too far in the heat, that time when you knew better but went and did whatever it was to excess anyway, then paid the price. On the other hand, rarely do we say over a morning cup of coffee, clutching our temples, “I read/thought/prayed/painted/petted my dog way too much last night, and man, do I feel like crap.”

Ironically, or maybe predictably, it was
only
at feasts for Christian holidays that my father's family, eager though not devout northern Methodists, ever said grace. My immediate family never said grace at all, no matter what the occasion. My father knew how but was too reticent. Find your own path, he seemed to say, which makes me wonder now if at heart he's really a Unitarian with a Methodist hymnal. And while I remember my grandparents saying grace when the whole family gathered, my grandfather did not ask the blessing, as he called it, when my brother and I stayed with them for a weekend and we sat down to beef stroganoff or pork chops at the small, blue-lacquered table in their kitchen. I suspect that grace works like this for many, though I have known some who said grace before every dinner (which raises the question, why only the evening meal? Is a cup of coffee and toast in the morning worth any less?), including a Catholic family of eight who murmured one sentence, as ritual as genuflection, in one breath:
blessusoLordandthesethygiftswhichweare-abouttoreceivefromthybounty throughChristourLordamen.
There was something reassuring about that ritual, something I liked.

Lamb believes that simpler suppers, eaten in a quiet and mundane atmosphere, offer the opportunity for true grace. This is especially true for the poor, because the poor man may not know where his next meal will come from. Or, if he does have work, he knows
exactly
where the food on his table comes from and knows it is still a combination of good fortune, or blessing, and toil. The sanctity of such a simple meal, Lamb writes, is not obscured by a feast's luxurious food. One's attention, when not compelled outward to the dishes on the table, may turn inward. Uncertainty breeds introspection, and the introspection breeds true gratitude. The famous line from Flannery O'Connor's Misfit may apply here, O'Connor having been a Catholic and interested in grace, though like almost all things relating to
O'Connor's fiction, the Misfit's words are a model of grotesquery: “She'd of been a good woman if it had been someone to shoot her every moment of her life.” We'd be more graceful eaters if there were something to snatch the food from our hands.

I'm middle aged, now, yet I can count on one hand the number of blessings I have asked. A few years back we began having my wife's family to Thanksgiving, and I believe that since this tradition started, I have asked the blessing only once. We were in our house, I was the principal cook, but I conceded the duty gladly, my pride about my spirituality bristling even as I did it. Hypocritical, I know, but family relations are complex. I know the words. I feel the words. But I have never been one who, to borrow James Baldwin's expression, sings the tune just because he knows the words (in fact, the more confident my knowledge of the tune, the less likely I am to sing at all). So I just sat at the table, resigned to the Almighty's disappointment. I remember the relief I felt when I discovered, on a January evening, that Lamb had figured out the confusion I felt for me. After the hours of preparation, coordinating cooking times, attempting to make sure the bird reached the table not raw but not dry either, exhausted and buzzed on
half a glass
of third-rate American pinot noir (a pathetic showing for someone who can hold up his end of a bottle), and the kitchen looking like a construction site—well, small wonder that all I wanted was a loaf of homemade bread and a block of good cheese, and maybe some Burgundy. And just the two of us at the table. All that pageantry! I couldn't think.

“I am no Quaker at my food,” Lamb confesses, before going on to describe an appetite that would see him a happy man in today's epicurean culture. “I quarrel with no man's tastes”—unless, it seems, the tastes be insipid. It is not the feast itself he faults; instead, Lamb wonders if the spirit of grace might be more honest if practiced at some time other than immediately before the meal. I remember one afternoon when my mother, for instance, turned to me as she restocked the pantry after the biweekly, hour-long sortie to the grocery store that was known, in our house, as Big Food Shopping, and saying, “I know it sounds corny, but this, for me, is Thanksgiving.” At the time, I had no idea what she was talking about. The food simply appeared in the pantry, and then it appeared on my plate.

My wife and I belong to no church, but we are dedicated locavores. I've come to hate that word, along with other trendy labels, even those that don't apply to me. How locavorism works is, by now, old news: Take out a map. Draw a circle with a radius of fifty or one hundred miles from your town. Eat within that circle. Try it for a week, a month, as long as you can. Accept that explorers from Magellan forward have spoiled us; from that moment when the first ship's hold was emptied in a London harbor of its vanilla, coconuts, and tea, we've craved things we have no hope of growing in our native soil. Keep your coffee, your olive oil, your lemons, your vanilla; I keep mine. A healthy percentage of what you eat will do.

Living this way, you dust your own soil from the potatoes. You taste the same sunlight that comes through your morning window in the lettuce. You taste last week's rains in the melon. You exchange money with the hands that yanked those beets, picked those tomatoes, drove the hatchet down on the chicken's neck, or, if you're lucky enough to live on the coast, dug the clams. But be careful, lest we drift into sentimentality or sanctimoniousness. These are all the precious reasons people love farm shares and farmer's markets. Yet, admit it: There is something purifying about buying a sweet potato or bag of apples without swiping a gas-rewards card. There's also the unavoidable fact that local food always tastes better (a consideration Lamb likely never entertained). Then, there are the setbacks and limitations.

We have a share with farmers who are always apologizing for crops that underperform, or even crash, due to factors well beyond the control of people whose philosophy is organic and then some. Occasionally our farmer writes long letters about pests, wind, hail, and the inefficiency, as he sees it, of his acres. This man has the essayist's drive toward honesty without the essayist's insulating irony, which is always bad news for the psyche. I tell him to pipe down about the strawberries killed by a late frost, or tomatoes in short supply because there was a blight after some fool burned his ruined foliage instead of burying it, turning a localized disappointment into a regional crisis. I say the same to farmers at the market who don't have what I'm looking for, even as I reach for what they do have. A table with generous but not unlimited options is how it
should
be. Surely living in a state where scarcity is scarce has consequences for your soul. Betimes, more wolves, literal and metaphorical, roamed
the boundaries of our imagination. They kept us honest. We seem to have convinced ourselves we've removed the wolf from our doorstep. We've tranquilized him, loaded him into a cage, trucked him forty miles into the woods, and let him out to sniff around a bare hill on wobbly legs as he waits for the narcs to wear off and wonders what the hell happened.

But if you pursue locavorism to its depths, eating every meal as far off the industrial food chain as possible, accepting both the disappointments and surprises of your agricultural community, you cannot help but see that a sacred trust exists there.
My life is in your hands.
The farmer feeds me, and in return I pay him from the expenditure of my energies in different fields. We know this, though inevitably we forget it. But once you acknowledge that sacred trust, you see that you cannot ignore a deeper truth:
I probably need the farmer more than he needs me.
This is especially the case if you're trading on literature to buy your carrots, but that is another essay.

Four years of a mostly local diet has taught me lessons about grace that an equivalent amount of Sunday School had only barely begun to suggest, and which Charles Lamb saw on the bulging tables of his friends: Grace can issue from many places, but one of them is certainly from the honest recognition and expression of vulnerability. Grace is born of fragility, from acknowledging the wellspring of provisions that maintains the thinnest barrier against disaster. And finally, grace is one's humble, deep, and constant hope that those provisions continue to arrive.

As a rule, human beings—animals in general—don't like to feel vulnerable. We'll do anything to end, or at least temporarily forget, a feeling of physical vulnerability in particular as quickly as possible. I say this risk aversion is mostly a good thing. It keeps us from playing in the traffic. And yet it was Rilke (a killjoy if ever there was one) who observed that, given the chance, human beings will also orient themselves toward the easiest of the easy. Historically speaking, in this country at least, our feelings of vulnerability—
mortal
vulnerability—may be at an all-time low. Or maybe nothing regarding our vulnerability has changed, and our powers of distraction are greater. That's partly the story of technology, and innovation, and progress, but it's also a story of human behavior. Some of the least graceful people I know are the most strident, loathe to show any vulnerability at all.

If the locavore movement, which is now burning comet-like across our country with all the sizzle of a fad, has a deep virtue, it's an invitation to vulnerability, and, with it, mindfulness. Perhaps even grace. That CSA farmers and growers' cooperatives are doing this in a country that excels at oblivion—in general, but especially when it comes to food—is no small thing. And if such mindfulness
is
a small thing, well, we have to start somewhere. Brillat-Savarin argued that a country's fate rests on how it eats. In many ways—economically, environmentally, physically, and yes, spiritually—we're just now beginning to see how right he was.

That Easter Sunday, as I prepared the chicken for roasting, I thought about the farmers down the road who had raised and killed it. The wild leeks, and the garlic, too, had come out of the ground not too far away, and I considered the miracle of spring, how everything keeps happening more or less when it should, in spite of us. Someone, somewhere, had produced a miracle of salad greens—in a cold frame or greenhouse, I couldn't tell. It hardly mattered; we hadn't eaten a salad in months. The onions and potatoes were fall storage crops. The carrots too. All grown and washed by a neighbor, or that's how I've come to think of the growers scattered across this muddy, brown, and sparsely-populated place: friends and neighbors. As I cooked, I thought of these people and how different life would be without them. I realized that I do this often. I had never thought of that recognition as something like grace, seeing it, instead, as a practice that kept me honest. Life would be less savory for sure without them. Less healthy, too. Sadder? Absolutely.

When my wife and I sat down to eat, even though it was just the two of us, I still did not ask a blessing. Shyness, I guess. Reticence. More like my father every year. To be sure, I could do worse. I felt nonetheless aware, and awake, and grateful.

The neighbors and friends, as Lamb might have predicted, vanished from my mind before I even put the first bite in my mouth. As I've said, it had been months since we tasted romaine. The candles sputtered. The music played. I can't remember what we talked about, though I remember the chicken had roasted well and the white Burgundy was good.