Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook (14 page)

I figure, I’m going to spoil the shit out of this kid for a while, then pack her off to tae kwon do as soon as she’s four years old. Her first day of second grade and Little Timmy at the desk behind her tries to pull her hair? He’s getting an elbow to the thorax. My little girl may grow up with lots of problems: spoiled; with unrealistic expectations of the world; cultural identification confusion, perhaps (a product of much traveling in her early years); considering the food she’s exposed to, she shall surely have a jaded palate; and an aged and possibly infirm dad by the time she’s sixteen. But she ain’t gonna have any problems with self-esteem.

Whatever else, she’s never going to look for validation from some predatory asshole. She can—and surely will—hang out with tons of assholes. Dads, I’m assured, can never hope to control that. All I can hope for is that she hangs out with assholes for her own reasons—that she is genuinely amused by assholes rather than needing them to make her feel better about herself.

I wish.

John F. Kennedy said something truly terrifying—guaranteed to make every parent’s blood run cold: “To have a child is to give fate a hostage.”

Something I wish I’d never read. I can only hope she’s happy—even weird and happy will suit me just fine. She will feel loved. She’ll have food. And shelter. A large Italian and Sardinian family—and a smaller American one. She’ll have seen, by the time she’s six years old, much of the world, and she’ll have seen, as well, that not everybody on this planet lives—or can live—anything like the way she lives. She will, hopefully, have spent time playing and running barefoot with the children of fishermen and farmers in rural Vietnam. She will have swum in every ocean. She will know how to use chopsticks—and what real cheese is. She already speaks more Italian than I do.

Beyond this, I don’t know what else I can do.

To him the markets were like the stomach of the shopkeeping classes, the stomach of all the folks of average rectitude puffing itself out, rejoicing, glistening in the sunshine, and declaring that everything was for the best.

—É
MILE
Z
OLA
,
L
E
V
ENTRE DE
P
ARIS

A
lice Waters wants to help
. Shortly after Barack Obama’s election victory, the “Mother of Slow Food” wrote the new president a letter, advising him of his first order of business: that “the purity and wholesomeness of the Obama movement must be accompanied by a parallel effort in food at the most visible and symbolic place in America—the White House.”

Reminding the president that they had helped raise money for him, she proposed that she and her friends, then–
Gourmet
editor Ruth Reichl and restaurateur Danny Meyer, be brought aboard immediately, “as a small advisory group—a ‘Kitchen Cabinet’ if you will—to help with your selection of a White House chef. A person with integrity and devotion to the ideals of environmentalism, health and conservation…”

That there already
was
a chef at the White House, a person of “integrity and devotion,” seems not to have occurred to Ms. Waters. Nor did it seem to matter that this chef had been sourcing and serving largely organic, local, and sustainable food for years—or that there already
was
a kitchen garden. Making the mistake of judging a kitchen staff solely by its customers, Waters, observing—or at least hearing of—the previous tenant, no doubt assumed the worst. But I doubt she considered the matter long enough for even a cursory Google search.

It was, as it so often is, ultimately, all about Alice. “I cannot forget the vision I have had since 1993,” she gushed beatifically, “of a beautiful vegetable garden on the White House lawn. It would demonstrate to the nation and to the world our priority of stewardship of the land—a true
victory
garden!”

She got her garden in the end, as things turned out. Though the new president managed to resist the temptation to appoint Ms. Waters to government office.

As ham-fisted and clumsy as this approach was, a crude and obvious blend of self-aggrandizement and genuine good intentions, it would probably have gone down a lot better had Waters bothered to vote in the previous
forty-four years
. Whatever your politics, you have to admit that the differences both philosophical and practical between Bush and Gore and Bush and Kerry were…striking, to say the least. Those were close contests. Whichever way you went—your vote inarguably
counted
for something. One need only read the front page of the newspaper to see how that decision played out and will continue to play out for some years. So there’s simply no way Alice or anybody else can realistically make the argument that “there’s no difference, man, it’s all the same military-industrial complex.” I am, admittedly, bitter about this. It sticks in my craw. It’s something about Waters that I just can’t get past.

After she had boasted of
not
voting since 1966, it seemed a little…crass of Waters to presume to now tell the president what to do. Particularly as he’d arrived in the White House facing a newly collapsed worldwide financial system, spiraling unemployment, and two wars—both of which were going badly. Americans were being thrown out of work in unheard-of numbers, and here was Alice, leaping on board to promote, among other things, the idea that we should be spending
more
on food. But then, tone and timing have never been a strong point with Waters.

Let it be said that, on balance, I would like the world to look, someday, much like Alice probably wants it to look. A city on a hill—or many cities on hills—surrounded by unbroken vistas of beautiful countryside; small, thriving, family-run farms growing organic, seasonal, and sustainable fruits and vegetables specific to the region. Healthy, happy, antibiotic-free animals would graze freely over the land, depositing their perfectly odorless, organic shit back into the food chain so other wonderful things might grow…The schoolchildren of the inner cities would sit down each day to healthy, balanced, and entirely organic meals cooked—by happy, self-actualized, and enlightened workers—to crispy perfection. Evil lawyers and stockbrokers and vice presidents of development for Bruckheimer Productions would leave their professions and return in great numbers to work the fields of this new agrarian wonderland, becoming better people in the process. In this New Age of Enlightenment, the Dark Forces of Fast Food would wither and die—as the working poor abandoned them to rush home between jobs and cook wild-nettle risotto for their kids. It would all be clean and safe and nobody would get hurt. And it would all look…kind of like Berkeley.

Or Italy. Not the real Italy, mind you. But the Italy of wine labels. The Italy of romantic-weekend comedies, where lonely, wistful divorcees end up getting joyously boned by lusty young handymen who wear bandannas around their necks and speak with charming accents. The Italy of
I Love Lucy
, where Italian peasants pick and stomp grapes themselves.

Spend any time in the real Italy, however, and you quickly realize that Italians don’t really pick grapes much anymore, and they certainly don’t stomp them either. They don’t pick tomatoes—or olives—and they don’t shear their sheep. Their tomatoes and olives are picked largely by underpaid Africans and Eastern Europeans, seasonal hires, brought in for that purpose—who are then demonized and complained about for the rest of the year. (Except when blowing motorists in the off-season—as can be readily observed on the outskirts of even the smallest Italian communities these days.) The vaunted soil of Italy is as advertised, depending on who you are and where you live. If you live near Naples, though, the chances are good that your farmland is a not-so-secret dumping ground for toxic industrial waste from the north. Here, the true stewards of the earth are neither chefs nor grandmothers nor slow-food devotees. They’re the Naples-based fraternal organization, the Camorra. And the old man growing olives in his backyard in Chi-anti probably doesn’t make a living selling olive oil. He gets by renting his house to Germans.

So, who will work the Elysian Fields of Alice’s imaginary future? Certainly not her neighbors—whose average household income is currently about $85,000 a year. Unless, perhaps, at the point of a gun. And with Waters’s fondness for buzzwords like “purity” and “wholesomeness,” there is a whiff of the jackboot, isn’t there? A
certainty
, a potentially dangerous lack of self-doubt, the kind of talk that, so often in history, leads to actions undertaken for the “common good.” While it was excessive and bombastic of me to compare Alice to “Pol Pot in a muumuu,” it is useful to remember that he was once a practicing Buddhist and, later, attended the Sorbonne. And that even in his twisted and genocidal “back to earth” movement, he might once have meant well, too.

Who will work these fields?

No. Really. Somebody’s going to have to answer that question soon.

If, somehow, we manage to bring monstrously evil agribusinesses like Monsanto to their knees, free up vast tracts of arable land for small, seasonal, sustainable farming, where’s all the new help coming from? Seems to me, we’re facing one of two scenarios. Either enormous numbers of people who’ve never farmed before are suddenly convinced that waking up at five a.m. and feeding chickens and then working the soil all day is a desirable thing. Or, in the far more likely case, we’ll revert to the traditional method: importing huge numbers of desperately poor brown people from elsewhere—to grow those tasty, crunchy vegetables for more comfortable white masters. So, while animals of the future might be cruelty-free, which would allow those who can afford to eat them to do so with a clean conscience, what about life for those who will have to shovel the shit from their stalls?

Okay. Let’s say the entire American economy upends itself in fabulous and unpredictable ways, that America suddenly craves fresh vegetables with the ferocity it now has for chicken parts (or anything else) fried in batter—that the boards of directors and top management at Monsanto and Cargill and Con-Agra and Tyson and Smithfield are all indicted, convicted, and packed off to jail (something I’d very much like to see, by the way) for…I don’t know…criminal mediocrity. That farming suddenly becomes the profession of choice for a whole new generation of idealistic Americans. Groovy. I know I’m for it.

I am a proud hypocrite. I feed
my
two-and-a-half-year-old daughter exclusively organic food. My wife is Italian. Around my house, we’re more than willing to wait until next year for fresh tomatoes. We enjoy the changing of the seasons and the bounty of the surrounding Hudson Valley—and, of course, the bounty of Spain and Italy as well, readily available at Agata and Valentina, the fantastic but nosebleed-expensive Italian market in our neighborhood, New York’s Upper East Side. This celebrity-chef thing is a pretty-good-paying gig.

But what about the Upper Peninsula of Michigan? Or somewhere on the margins of Detroit? What if I were an out-of-work auto worker, living on public assistance or a part-time job? At least I have time to dig a “victory” garden, right? What does Alice suggest I do if I don’t live in the Bay Area, my fields turgid with the diverted waters of the Colorado River?

Not a problem! “You have to think of a different kind of menu,” says Alice. “You eat dried fruit and nuts. You make pasta sauces out of canned tomatoes…you’re eating different kinds of grains—farro with root vegetables. All the root vegetables are there, and now, because of the heirloom varieties, you can have a beautiful winter palette…Turnips of every color and shape! Carrots that are white and red and orange and pink! You have different preparations of long-cooking meat…Cabbages!…”

Basically, you can eat like a fucking Russian peasant, is what she’s saying. I don’t know if that’s what they want to hear in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan or Buffalo.

And…what about the healthy, pure, wholesome, and organic foods that Alice says I should be buying—particularly if I have children? If I’m making an even average wage as, say, a sole-providing police officer or middle manager? Regular milk is about four bucks a gallon. Organic is about twice that. Supermarket grapes are about four bucks a bunch. Organic are six. More to the point, what if I’m one of the vast numbers of working poor, getting by in the service sector?
What should I do? How can I afford that?

Asked this very question directly, Alice advises blithely that one should “Make a sacrifice on the cell phone or a third pair of Nike shoes.”

It’s an unfortunate choice of words. And a telling one, I think. You know, those
poor people
—always with their Nikes and their cell phones. If only they’d listen to Alice.
She’d
lead them to the promised land for sure.

What else should we be doing? Alice says we should immediately spend 27 billion dollars to ensure every schoolchild in America gets a healthy, organic lunch. More recently, she added to this number with the suggestion that fresh flowers on every lunchroom table might also be a worthwhile idea.

This is, after all, “more important than crime in the streets. This is not like homeland security—this actually is the ultimate homeland security. This is more important than anything else.”

Which is where Alice really loses me—because, well, for me, as a New Yorker, however quaint the concept, homeland security is still about keeping suicidal mass murderers from flying planes into our fucking buildings. And organic school lunches might be more important to you than crime in the streets in Berkeley—but in the underfunded school systems of West Baltimore, I suspect, they feel differently. A healthy lunch is all fine and good—but no use at all to Little Timmy if he gets shot to death on the way to school. In fact, 27 billion for organic food for Timmy seems a back-assward priority right now—as, so far, we’ve failed miserably to even teach him to read. What kind of dreams can a well-fed boy have if he doesn’t even have the tools to articulate them? How can he build a world for himself if he doesn’t know how to ask for—much less how to get—the things he wants and needs? I, for one, would be very satisfied if Timmy gets a relatively balanced slab of fresh but nonorganic meatloaf with a side of competently frozen broccoli—along with reading skills and a chance at a future. Once literate, well read, and equipped with the tools to actually make his way in this world, he’ll be far better prepared to afford Chez Panisse.

As of this writing, not too far from Berkeley, just across the bridge, in San Francisco’s Mission District, they line up every Tuesday for the $1.99 special at Popeye’s Fried Chicken. They don’t stand in the street waiting for forty-five minutes to an hour because it’s particularly healthy chicken, or organic chicken, or conscientiously raised chicken—or even good chicken. They do it because it’s three fucking pieces for a dollar ninety-nine. Unless we respect that reality, Alice? We’re lost.

I remember well, when I was eleven and twelve years old, demonstrating against the war in Vietnam. My dad and I would travel to Washington. Later, my friends and I would march in New York. And what left a powerful impression in my mind, a lesson worth remembering, was how deeply and instinctively the construction workers, the cops and firemen—the very people whose families were most likely to be affected by the war—how they hated us. The message was lost—coming as it did from what they saw (rightly) as a bunch of overprivileged college kids, whose mommies and daddies were footing the bill for educations these folks would unlikely to ever be able to afford for their own kids. Here were these loud, self-absorbed ideologues who looked unlike anyone from their world and who lived nothing like them—but who had no problem talking down to them at every opportunity about the problems of the “working classes”—usually from the steps of Columbia University. The actual “working classes” we were shouting at knew what work was—every time they rolled into bed at night and woke up the next day. Who were these seemingly unemployed, hairy, pot-smoking freaks with their compliant girlfriends and their big talk about the Means of Production? What production? These cocksuckers didn’t produce anything!