Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook (13 page)

When and if the good guys win, will we—after terrifying consumers about our food supply, fetishizing expensive ingredients, exploiting the hopes, aspirations, and insecurities of the middle class—have simply made it more expensive to eat the same old crap? More to the point, have I?

Am I helping, once again, to kill the things I love?

M
y wife and I are speaking
in hushed tones directly outside our daughter’s bedroom door, where we’re sure she’s pretending to be asleep.

“Sssshhhh!! She can hear us,” says my wife, with a theatricality intended to sound conspiratorial.

“No, she’s asleep,” I hiss—a little too loudly. A stage whisper. We’re talking about Ronald McDonald again. Bringing up the possibility of his being implicated in the disappearance of yet another small child.

“Not
another one
?!” gasps my wife with feigned incredulity.

“I’m afraid so,” I say with concern. “Stepped inside to get some fries and a Happy Meal and hasn’t been seen since…”

“Are they searching for her?”

“Oh yes…they’re combing the woods…checked out the Hamburglar’s place—but of course, they’re focusing on Ronald again.”

“Why Ronald?”

“Well…last time? When they finally found that other one? What was his name—Little…Timmy? The police found evidence. On the body…They found…cooties.”

This is just one act in an ongoing dramatic production—one small part of a larger campaign of psychological warfare. The target? A two-and-a-half-year-old girl.

The stakes are high. As I see it, nothing less than the heart, mind, soul, and physical health of my adored only child. I am determined that the Evil Empire not have her, and to that end, I am prepared to use what Malcolm X called “any means necessary.”

McDonald’s have been very shrewd about kids. Say what you will about Ronald and friends, they know their market—and who drives it. They haven’t shrunk from targeting young minds—in fact, their entire gazillion-dollar promotional budget seems aimed squarely at toddlers. They know that one small child, crying in the backseat of a car of two overworked, overstressed parents will, more often than not, determine the choice of restaurants. They know exactly when and how to start building brand identification and brand loyalty with brightly colored clowns and smoothly tied-in toys. They know that Little Timmy will, with care and patience and the right exposure to brightly colored objects, grow up to be a full-size consumer of multiple Big Macs. It’s why Ronald McDonald is said to be more recognizable to children everywhere than Mickey Mouse or Jesus.

Personally, I don’t care if my little girl ever recognizes those two other guys—but I do care about her relationship with Ronald. I want her to see American fast-food culture as I do. As the enemy.

From funding impoverished school districts to the shrewd installment of playgrounds, McDonald’s has not shrunk from fucking with young minds in any way they can. They’re smart. And I would not take that right to propagandize, advertise—whatever—from them. If it’s okay for Disney to insinuate itself into young lives everywhere, it should be okay for Ronald. I see no comfortable rationale for attacking them in the courts. They are, in any case, too powerful.

Where you take on the Clown and the King and the Colonel is in the streets—or, more accurately, in the same impressionable young minds they have so successfully fucked with for so long.

My intention is to fuck with them right back.

It’s shockingly easy.

Eric Schlosser’s earnest call to arms,
Fast Food Nation
, may have had the facts on its side, but that’s no way to wean a three-year-old off Happy Meals—much less hold her attention. The Clown, the King, the Colonel—and all their candy-colored high-fructose friends—are formidable foes. And if the history of conflict has taught us anything, it’s that one seldom wins a battle by taking the high road. This is not a debate that will be won on the facts. Kids don’t give a shit about calorie count—or factory farming, or the impact that America’s insatiable desire for cheap ground meat may have on the environment or our society’s health.

But cooties they understand.

What’s the most frightening thing to a child? The pain of being the outsider, of looking ridiculous to others, of being teased or picked on in school. Every child burns with fear at the prospect. It’s a primal instinct: to belong. McDonald’s has surely figured this out—along with what specific colors appeal to small children, what textures, and what movies or TV shows are likely to attract them to the gray disks of meat. They feel no compunction harnessing the fears and unarticulated yearnings of small children, and nor shall I.

“Ronald has cooties,” I say—every time he shows up on television or out the window of the car. “And you know,” I add, lowering my voice, “he
smells
bad, too. Kind of like…
poo!
” (I am, I should say, careful to use the word “alleged” each and every time I make such an assertion, mindful that my urgent whisperings to a two-year-old might be wrongfully construed as libelous.)

“If you hug Ronald…can you get cooties?” asks my girl, a look of wide-eyed horror on her face.

“Some say…yes,” I reply—not wanting to lie—just in case she should encounter the man at a child’s birthday party someday. It’s a lawyerly answer—but effective. “Some people talk about the smell, too…I’m not saying it rubs off on you or anything—if you get too close to him—but…” I let that hang in the air for a while.

“Ewwww!!!” says my daughter.

We sit in silence as she considers this, then she asks, “Is it true that if you eat a hamburger at McDonald’s it can make you a
ree-tard
?”

I laugh wholeheartedly at this one and give her a hug. I kiss her on the forehead reassuringly. “Ha. Ha. Ha. I don’t know
where
you get these ideas!”

I may or may not have planted that little nugget a few weeks ago, allowing her little friend Tiffany at ballet class to “overhear” it as I pretended to talk on my cell phone. I’ve been tracking this bit of misinformation like a barium meal as it worked its way through the kiddie underground—waiting, waiting for it to come out the other side—and it’s finally popping up now. Bingo.

The CIA calls this kind of thing “Black Propaganda,” and it’s a sensible, cost-effective countermeasure, I believe, to the overwhelming superiority of the forces aligned against us.

I vividly recall a rumor about rat hairs in Chunky candies when I was a kid. It swept across schoolyards nationwide—this in pre-Internet days—and had, as I remember it, a terrible effect on the company’s sales. I don’t know where the rumor started. And it was proven to be untrue.

I’m not suggesting anybody do anything so morally wrong and unquestionably illegal.

I’m just sayin’.

Posting calorie information is, according to a recent
New York Times
article, not working. America’s thighs get ever wider. Type-2 diabetes is becoming alarmingly common among children.

It is repugnant, in principle, to me—the suggestion that we legislate against fast food. We will surely have crossed some kind of terrible line if we, as a nation, are infantilized to the extent that the government has to step in and take the Whoppers right out of our hands. It is dismaying—and probably inevitable. When we reach the point that we are unable to raise a military force of physically fit specimens—or public safety becomes an issue after some lurid example of large person blocking a fire exit—they surely shall.

A “fat tax” is probably on the horizon as well—an idea that worked with cigarettes.

First they taxed cigarettes to the point of cruelty. Then they pushed smokers out of their work spaces, restaurants, bars—even, in some cases, their homes. After being penalized, demonized, marginalized, herded like animals into the cold, many—like me—finally quit.

I don’t want my daughter treated like that.

I say, why wait?

I don’t think it’s right or appropriate that we raise little girls in a world where freakishly tiny, anorexic actresses and bizarrely lanky, unhealthily thin models are presented as ideals of feminine beauty. No one should ever feel pressured to conform to that image.

But neither do I think it’s “okay” to be unhealthily overweight. It is not an “alternative lifestyle choice” or “choice of body image” if you need help to get out of your car.

I think constantly about ways to “help” my daughter in her food choices—without bringing the usual pressures to bear. “Look how nice and
thin
that Miley Cyrus is” are not words that shall leave my lips, as such notions might drive a young girl to bulimia, bad boyfriends, and, eventually, crystal meth.

So, when I read of a recent study that found that children are significantly more inclined to eat “difficult” foods like liver, spinach, broccoli—and other such hard-to-sell “but-it’s-good-for-you” classics—when they are wrapped in comfortingly bright packages from McDonald’s, I was at first appalled, and then…inspired.

Rather than trying to co-opt Ronald’s all-too-effective credibility among children to short-term positive ends, like getting my daughter to eat the occasional serving of spinach, I could reverse-engineer this! Use the strange and terrible powers of the Golden Arches for good—not evil!

I plan to dip something decidedly unpleasant in an enticing chocolate coating and then wrap it carefully in McDonald’s wrapping paper. Nothing dangerous, mind you, but something that a two-and-a-half-year-old will find “yucky!”—even upsetting—in the extreme. Maybe a sponge soaked with vinegar. A tuft of hair. A Barbie head. I will then place it inside the familiar cardboard box and leave it—as if forgotten—somewhere for my daughter to find. I might even warn her, “If you see any of that nasty McDonald’s…make sure you don’t eat it!” I’ll say, before leaving her to it. “Daddy was stupid and got some chocolate…and now he’s lost it…” I might mutter audibly to myself before taking a long stroll to the laundry room.

An early, traumatic, Ronald-related experience can only be good for her.

Well I don’t want some cocaine sniffing triumph in the bar

Well I don’t want a triumph in the car

I don’t want to make a rich girl crawl

What I want is a girl that I care about

Or I want no one at all…

—J
ONATHAN
R
ICHMAN
,
“Someone I Care About”

I’
m dancing.

The twist, actually—or something very much like it. And though I am mortified by the very thought of dancing in front of witnesses, I am not alone in this room. Around me, nine or ten Filipina nannies and their charges are also swiveling their hips and moving to the music in their stocking feet. My dance partner is a two-year-old girl in pink tights and a tutu. The red stuff beneath my fingernails is, I suspect, vestigial Play-Doh.

This, I am fully aware, is not cool. This is as far away from cool as a man can get. But I am in no way troubled by such thoughts. I crossed that line a long time ago. If anything, I’m feeling pretty good about myself—in the smug, Upper East Side, Bugaboo-owning, sidewalk-hogging, self-righteous kind of a way indigenous to my new tribe. I am, after all, the only parent here on this fine Tuesday afternoon, alone among the gyrating nannies, the little Sophias, Vanessas, Julias, Emmas, and Isabellas. My daughter, grinning maniacally as she jumps and twists about three feet below me, is very pleased that I am here. “That’s right, I
do
love you
more
than the mothers of all these other children love
them
. That’s why Daddy’s here—and they’re
not. They’re
getting their fucking nails done, having affairs, going to Pilates class, or whatever
bad
parents do…I’m here for you,
Boo
…twistin’ my heart out—something I would never ever have done for any other person in my whole life. Only for you. I’m a good daddy.
Goooood
Daddy!”

Later, if she’s good, there will be ice cream. I will seat her prominently next to me, facing the street in her Petit Bateau jumper, secretly hoping that passersby will notice how beautiful she is, how cute we are together, what a
great
dad I am. Holding her little hand, or carrying her on my shoulders, I will float home on a cloud of self-congratulation.

I’m through being cool. Or, more accurately, I’m through entertaining the notion that anybody could even consider the possibility of coolness emanating from or residing anywhere near me. As any conscientious father knows in his bones, any remaining trace elements of coolness go right out the window from the second you lay eyes on your firstborn. The second you lean in for the action, see your baby’s head make that first quarter-corkscrew turn toward you, well…you know you can and should throw your cherished black leather motorcycle jacket right in the nearest trash bin. Clock’s ticking on the earring, too. It’s somehow…undignified now.

Norman Mailer described the desire to be cool as a “decision to encourage the psychopath in oneself, to explore that domain of experience where security is boredom and therefore sickness and one exists in the present, in that enormous present which is without past or future, memory or planned intention.”

I encouraged the psychopath in myself for most of my life. In fact, that’s a rather elegant description of whatever it was I was doing. But I figure I put in my time.

The essence of cool, after all, is not giving a fuck.

And let’s face it: I most definitely give a fuck now. I give a huge fuck. The hugest. Everything else—
everything
—pales. To pretend otherwise, by word or deed, would be a monstrous lie. There will be no more Dead Boys T-shirts. Whom would I be kidding? Their charmingly nihilistic worldview in no way mirrors my own. If Stiv Bators were still alive and put his filthy hands anywhere near my baby, I’d snap his neck—then thoroughly cleanse the area with baby wipes.

There is no hope of hipness.

As my friend A. A. Gill points out, after your daughter reaches a certain age—like five—the most excruciating and embarrassing thing she could possibly imagine is seeing her dad in any way threatening to
rock
. Your record collection may indeed be cooler than your daughter’s will ever be, but this is a meaningless distinction now. She doesn’t care. And nobody else will. If you’re lucky, long after you’re gone, a grandchild will rediscover your old copy of
Fun House
. But it will be way too late for you to bask in the glory of past coolness.

There is nothing cool about “used to be cool.”

All of this, I think, is only right and appropriate. Too much respect for your elders is, historically, almost always a bad thing. I want my daughter to love me. I don’t necessarily want her to share my taste for Irish ale or Hawaiian bud.

When you see the children of the perennially cool—on shows like
Behind the Music
—they look sheepish and slightly doomed, talking about their still-working rock-’n’-roller dads, as if they are the reluctant warders of some strange breed of extravagantly wrinkly and badly behaved children. Kids may not be old enough to know what cool
is
, but they are unerring in their ability to sense what
isn’t
.

No kid really wants a cool parent. “Cool” parents, when I was a kid, meant parents who let you smoke weed in the house—or allowed boyfriends to sleep over with their daughters. That would make Sarah Palin “cool.” But, as I remember, we thought those parents were kind of creepy. They were useful, sure, but what was wrong with them that they found us so entertaining? Didn’t they have their own friends? Secretly, we hated them.

Turning thirty came as a cruel surprise for me. I hadn’t really planned on making it that far. I’d taken seriously the maxims of my time—“Never trust anyone over thirty” and “Live fast, die young”—and been frankly shocked when I found that I’d lived that long. I’d done everything I could think of to ensure the opposite result, but there I was—and without a Plan B. The restaurant business provided a degree of stability in that there were usually people who expected me to get up in the morning and go somewhere—and heroin, if nothing else, was useful in giving me a sense of
purpose
in my daily movements. I
knew
what I had to do every day for most of my early thirties: get heroin.

Of my first marriage, I’ll say only that watching Gus Van Sant’s
Drugstore Cowboy
—particularly the relationship between Matt Dillon’s Bob and Kelly Lynch’s Dianne—inspires feelings of great softness and sentiment in me. It’s a reminder that even the worst times can be happy ones—until they aren’t.

By my late thirties, I found that I was still lingering, and I admit to a sense of disappointment, confusion—even defeat. “What do I do
now
?” I remember thinking. Detoxed from heroin and methadone, and having finally—
finally
—ended a lifelong love affair with cocaine. Where was my reward for all this self-denial? Shouldn’t I have been feeling good? If anything, all that relative sobriety pointed up a basic emptiness and dissatisfaction in my life, a hole I’d managed to fill with various chemicals for the better part of twenty-five years.

At forty-four, shortly after writing
Kitchen Confidential
, I found myself suddenly with a whole new life. One minute, I was standing next to a deep fryer, pan-searing pepper steaks—and the next, I was sitting on top of a dune, watching the sun set over the Sahara. I was running road blocks in Battambang; tiny feet were walking on my back in Siem Reap; I was eating at El Bulli.

Shortly before the breakup of my first marriage, I embarked on the equivalent of a massive public works project in my apartment: new shelves, furniture, carpets, appliances—all the trappings, I thought, of a “normal” and “happy” life—the kind of things I’d never really had or lived around since childhood. I wrote a crime novel around that time, in which the characters’ yearnings for a white-picket-fence kind of a life reflect my own far more truthfully than any nonfiction I’ve ever written. Shortly after that, I cruelly burned down my previous life in its entirety.

There was a period of…readjustment.

I recall the precise second when I decided that I wanted to—that I was going to be—a father.

Wanting a child is easy enough. I’d always—even in the bad old days—thought fondly of the times my father would carry me aloft on his shoulders into the waves off the Jersey Shore, saying, “Here comes a
big
one!” I’d remembered my own five-year-old squeals of terror and delight and thought I’d like to do that with a child someday, see that look on my own child’s face. But I knew well that I was the sort of person who shouldn’t and couldn’t be a daddy. Kids liked me fine—my niece and nephew, for instance—but it’s easy to make kids like you, especially when you’re the indulgent “evil uncle.”

I’d never lived in an environment where a child would have been a healthy fit—and I’d never felt like I was a suitably healthy person. I’d think of fatherhood from time to time, look at myself in the mirror, and think, “That guy may
want
a child; he’s simply not up to the job.” And, well, for most of my life I’d been way too far up my own ass to be of any use to anyone—something that only got worse after
Kitchen Confidential
.

I don’t know exactly when the possibility of that changing presented itself—but sometime, I guess, after having made every mistake, having already fucked up in every way a man can fuck up, having realized that I’d had
enough
cocaine, that no amount in the world was going to make me any happier. That a naked, oiled supermodel was not going to make everything better in my life—nor any sports car known to man. It was sometime after that.

The precise moment of realization came in my tiny fourth-floor walk-up apartment on Ninth Avenue. Above Manganaro’s Heroboy restaurant—next building over from Esposito Pork Shop. I was lying in bed with my then-girlfriend—I guess you could diplomatically call it “spooning”—and I caught myself thinking, “I could make a baby with this woman. I’d
like
to make a baby with this woman.
Fuck
, I’d not only be
happy
to make a baby with this woman, I think…I’m pretty sure…I’d actually be
good
at it.”

We discussed this. And Ottavia—that was (is) her name—also thought this was a fine idea, though of my prospects for a quick insemination she was less optimistic.

“Baby,” she said (insert a very charming Italian accent—with the tone and delivery of a busy restaurant manager), “you’re old. Your sperm. Eez—a dead.”

Assuming a long campaign, we planned to get at it as soon as I returned from shooting my next show. In Beirut.

Of that episode I’ve written elsewhere. Long and short of it: my camera crew and I were caught in a war. For about a week, we holed up in a hotel, watching and listening to the bombs, feeling their impact rolling through the floors. After some drama, we were evacuated from a beach onto Landing Craft Units by American Navy and Marine personnel and taken first to a cargo vessel in the Med and then on to Cyprus.

My network had very generously provided a private jet to take me and the crew back home. None of my crew had ever been on a private jet before, and we slept and played cards and ate omelets prepared by the flight attendant, finally landing on a rainy, gray morning in Teterboro, New Jersey. We walked across the tarmac to a small private terminal, where Pat Younge—the president of the network—and Ottavia, as well as the crew’s wives and family, were there to meet us. It was, to say the least, an emotional homecoming with much hugging and crying.

I took Ottavia back to my crummy apartment and we made a baby. Nothing like eight days of fear and desperation to concentrate the mind, I guess. A few weeks later, we were in a car on the way from LAX into Los Angeles, where I was about to appear as judge on
Top Chef
, when we got the news from Ottavia’s doctor over the phone. There are photos of me, sitting on a bed in the Chateau Marmont, holding five different brands of drugstore pregnancy tests—all of them positive—a giddily idiotic grin on my face. Strangely, perhaps, I had no fear. At no time then—or since—did I have second thoughts. “What am I getting into?” never flashed across my brain.

I was the star pupil at Lamaze class. If your water ever breaks at the supermarket and I’m nearby? I’m your boy. I know just what to do.

I look back on my less well-behaved days with few regrets. True, the responsibilities of marriage and fatherhood demand certain behavioral adjustments. But my timing couldn’t have been better. I find myself morphing—however awkwardly—into respectability just as things are getting really hot on the streets for any of my peers who are even semi-recognizable. The iniquitousness of Twitter and food-and chef-related Web sites and blogs has totally changed the game for anyone with a television show—even me. You don’t have to be very famous at all these days to end up with a blurry photograph on DumbAssCelebrities.com. You don’t want your daughter’s little schoolmates reading about her daddy, stuttering drunk, two o’clock in the morning, at a chef-friendly bar, doing belly shots from a chunky and underdressed cocktail waitress—something that could well have happened a few years ago. In a day when a passing cell-phone user can easily get a surreptitious photo of you, slinking out of the porn shop with copies of
Anal Rampage 2
and
MILFBusters
under your arm, and post it in real time, maybe that’s a particularly good time to trade in the leather jacket for some cotton Dockers.

I love the saying “Nobody likes a dirty old man or a clean little boy.” I was, unfortunately, overly clean as a child—the fruit of a fastidious household. I shall try and make up for those years by doing my best to avoid becoming the former. Like I said, my timing—even without the daddyhood thing—was good.

It’s all about the little girl. Because I am acutely aware of both her littleness (how could I be otherwise) and the fact that she’s a blank page, her brain a soft surface waiting for the irreversible impressions of every raised voice, every gaffe and unguarded moment. The fact that she’s a girl requires, I believe, extra effort. Dada may have, at various times in his life,
been
a pig, but Dada surely does not want to ever
look
like a pig again. This can’t possibly be overstated. As the first of two boys, I can’t even imagine what it must be like for a little girl to see her dad leering at another of her sex. This creature will soon grow up to be a young
woman
and that’s something I consider every day.