Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook (28 page)

Over organic wines and much convivial conversation, I even passed on a suggestion (via my dining companion) to “Sir Paul” that I thought might be helpful in his very public efforts to save cute animals. I ventured that if he seriously wanted to see a
lot
of the rarest, most beautiful, and most endangered animals live longer, healthier lives—and maybe even multiply and prosper—he should, I advised, buy a few million dollars worth of Viagra and Cialis, start spreading that stuff around for free where it mattered, with accompanying public service announcements, in the parts of Asia where they think bear’s paw, rhino horn, and tiger dicks are good boner medicine. Unlike these stratospherically expensive traditional Chinese remedies—the end-products of an enormously profitable black market that rewards the killing and even slow torturing of endangered animals—Viagra will actually make your dick hard, and for cheap. Hand out a few million little blue pills to middle-aged Chinese dudes—maybe even throw in a hooker, to boot—I suggested, and you’ll see some changed hearts and minds. Break a centuries-old pattern of truly monstrous and extreme cruelty to what are often the rarest and most beautiful of animals! (I was later told that he’d actually passed this idea along. A conversation I would like to see a videotape of someday.)

After a surprisingly serviceable meal, I felt pretty good about things. I’d been a nice guy, I thought, had made an effort to be open-minded. The meal hadn’t sucked. We’d even managed to find some common ground.

But then, months later, the poor bastard sent me an e-mail asking (innocently enough) for some statement of support—I think, for the Humane Society. Now, I
like
the Humane Society for the most part. I may disagree violently with their policy on—and activities on behalf of—anti–foie gras legislation, but I do like cats and dogs. (I’ve adopted one shelter cat after another for much of my life.) I’m supportive of any effort to stop dog-fighting, to spay animals, and to prevent abuse of domestic animals.

I don’t like circuses and, given the chance, would probably vote against the indenturing of elephants and lions and tigers, or any other animals they might want to stand on chairs or train to juggle. I frankly think Siegfried or Roy—whichever one of those guys got mauled by a tiger—got what he deserved. Tigers, to my way of thinking,
like
to maul people, they’re certainly built for the job, and anything preventing them from doing that on the one hand—while tempting them with a German in a sparkly, cerulean blue suit on the other—is clearly animal cruelty. Somebody who abuses an animal for the sheer joy of it—or solely for purposes of entertainment—should receive, at very least, equal ill treatment.

I’ll go further into PETA territory:

I would have preferred that Steve Irwin, “Crocodile Hunter”—regardless of his saintly conservationist prattle—had ended up as “Crocodile Chow.”
That
would have been some rough but entirely appropriate justice. In my opinion, the loud, irritating little fuck was in the business of disturbing, poking, tormenting, and generally annoying animals, who would have surely been far happier had they never met him. And if Bindi Irwin lived in my neighborhood, by the way, I would have called Child Protective Services on her parents years ago.

So, contrary to my reputation, I’m like Saint Francis of Fucking Assisi compared to what you might think—a friend to animals large and small, feeder of strays, adopter of runt kittens. A man who, though opposed to vegetarian orthodoxy, is still a reasonable fellow, willing, at least, to listen to the other guy’s point of view.

Until, that is, I got back from Beirut, fresh from a war zone, to find in my inbox an earnest plea for support from my vegan dining companion. The urgency of his tone as he described what was happening to stray cats and dogs somewhere grated on me badly. As I read on, I found myself becoming angrier and angrier—soon becoming furious.

I’d just seen a city not very much unlike Miami bombed back twenty fucking years, I answered in a lather of righteous indignation. From a shameful distance, I’d watched, every day, as neighborhoods filled with people were smashed to rubble. I’d woken up and gone to sleep to the rumble of bombs and rockets rolling through the floor of my otherwise comfortable hotel room. And then seen, up close, the faces of people who’d lost everything—and sometimes
everyone
—in their lives: the fear and hopelessness and confusion of thousands of people, packed onto landing craft with the few possessions they could carry, off and away to uncertain futures. For nothing. For the “best” intentions, I’m sure—they always are, aren’t they? But, ultimately, for nothing.

I had come straight from that—to this: this message filled with whiny, plaintive outrage on the behalf of the strays of Denver or something like that. There were strays in Beirut, too, I spat out, beginning what I’d intended to be a measured, sympathetic response. Surely, I suggested, where
people
were being bombed, and
whole fucking neighborhoods
knocked down to rubble, some doggies got hurt, too? I went on, warming (if not overheating) to my subject, venomously musing that when whole fucking families get crushed in their homes, abandoned pets can become a problem. Having just flown from the tarmac of a floating refugee camp, I now surfed deliriously on a wave of bile. Expanding the scope of my observations to include other places I’d been and other things I’d seen in my travels, I pointed out—any vestige of measured civility gone by now—that it was, perhaps, worth noting as well that
anyplace
where people were treated like animals—stacked in shantytowns, favelas, communes, and hutments—that animals suffered first and worst. Nobody gives a fuck about cute doggies or cats, much less a fucking dolphin or a white rhino, for that matter, when 90 percent of your diet is fucking bread—when you’re lucky enough to get it—or pounded manioc gruel. Where charred monkey on a stick (in fur) is a life-saving gift for a family, I spewed, all those neatly anthropomorphized animals we so love—like your fucking Yorkie (this was a low blow)—are seen as nothing more than bush meat. Sadistically putting the boot in, I gave examples of places where people are concerned that men in black vans might be coming at night to put hoods over their heads and take them away. Possibly for something they may have casually said, or a neighbor might have thought they casually said—or falsely reported they may have casually said.

I believe I might have mentioned Ceausescu’s Bucharest as an example. Plowing under an entire neighborhood and displacing its residents to build a pharaoh-scale palace, the megalomaniacal dictator had created an instant and frighteningly large population of abandoned dogs. Reproducing at an astounding rate, the desperate animals begat countless roving packs of terrifying and vicious feral dogs, wild, aggressive and hungry predators who knew nothing but the streets. Parts of Bucharest became, particularly at night, a potentially dangerous jungle—with all the dog-on-dog, dog-on-man, and man-on-dog violence imaginable. Embarrassed by this all-too-visible phenomenon, the people’s representatives were urged to deal with the matter. The dogs were eventually hunted down and exterminated in great number. If the death of the “Genius of the Carpathians” and his wife is any example (thoughtfully videotaped and broadcast), one can only imagine how gently the dogs were dispatched.

I believe I ended my bilious and cruel masterwork of an e-mail with the image of the gentle and beloved bovines of India, revered, protected by a population of people who worship them as life-givers, divine. Wandering freely through the streets, always and famously with the right of way, they were free as well, I thought my friend should know, to starve slowly to death, to eat garbage already picked over many times by equally hungry humans, often settling on the discarded plastic bags ubiquitous to impoverished communities where hope is almost gone and municipal garbage removal is a sometimes—if ever—thing. The plastic bags, of course, are indigestible, I explained, gradually becoming twisted and balled up in the cow’s guts and eventually—after what is surely a long period of agonizing discomfort—killing them.

Leaving him with this awful image, I ended in FULL CAPS that given the inconvenient and annoyingly complicated relationship between the conditions in which people live and his adorable animal friends, maybe he should start thinking about
people
first.

Granted, my reaction was on a par with suddenly taking a baseball bat to the barista who mistakenly used skim instead of soy milk on your latte, but I was really and truly angry. Not at my poor, unsuspecting friend, undeserving of such treatment (from whom I’ve never heard since). He just wanted to save a few animals, after all. It was just his bad luck that he’d asked
me
for help—and at a very bad time. I was angry at all the shit he made me think about.

And I’m still angry.

But I digress.

From the softer-edged distance of a changed and far more comfortable life, I’ve searched for a root cause, a common denominator that might explain my seemingly rote, instinctive, reflexive scorn for anyone cooking on TV (or in films, for that matter) whom I see, somehow, as unworthy.

What has Guy Fieri ever done to
me
? Why should I care if something Sandra Lee made on her show came from a can—or arrived held aloft by celestial virgins on a cubic zirconium–encrusted sleigh straight from Tuscany or Provence or fucking Valhalla? What does it matter if Rachael can cook or not? People
like
her! What’s my problem? So
what
if the contestants on
Hell’s Kitchen
are transparently delusional and hopeless? I shouldn’t get mad about it, right?

But I do.

Here’s what I’d like to think.

Back when I started cooking—back in the heady, crazy, admittedly lower-standard days of the early 1970s, when it was all about speed, endurance, attitude, physical toughness, and the ability to work through every variety of self-inflicted punishment—people handled food differently. The distinction between the way a “professional” and a home cook handled food was easy to spot: the professional cook was rougher with his food. (Obviously, I’m not talking about Lutèce or the Four Seasons or the better restaurants of the day here.) The fact was, cooks tended to slap their meat around a little bit more than was absolutely necessary, to drop portions of fish onto the cutting board with an audible panache that fell something short of delicacy. Looking like you didn’t give a shit—while cranking out food with the speed and efficiency and consistency of someone who did—was something of the fashion. You saw it in the rough, easy familiarity with which professional butchers took apart a primal section, the too-cool-to-be-bothered expression that said, “I could do this in my sleep.”

Simply put, neither I nor the people I worked with—or admired—particularly “respected the ingredient,” as chefs are likely to call it these days. We were frankly brutal with our food. I don’t know exactly when that attitude changed in me—somewhere, I’m sure, around the time I started putting on airs and spouting shit from the Larousse. But over time, without my realizing it was happening, my attitude
did
change, hardening, eventually, into a deeply held belief that doing bad things to food, especially when one does them knowingly—or wasting perfectly good food, or, in general, disrespecting it—is fundamentally
wrong
, a sin (if such a thing exists), a violation of a basic contract with decency, with the world and its citizens. In a word: evil.

Traveling has only reinforced that feeling.

I’m sure that I’m not alone in feeling an almost physical pain when I see somebody cut heedlessly into an unrested steak. Most people I know who have cooked for a living will react with a groan or a wince if they see someone committing an easily preventable crime against food. But most of my friends don’t actually get angry when somebody who knows (or should know) better massacres a perfectly good dish on TV.

I do.

I don’t dislike Guy Fieri, I realized, after many viewings of his cooking shows, much soul-searching at my personal ashram, and many doses of prescription hypnotics. I just dislike—
really
dislike—the idea that somebody would put Texas-style barbeque inside a fucking nori roll. I was, and remain, angry that there are genuine pit-masters who’ve made a calling of getting pork shoulder just right—and sushi chefs who worked three years on rice alone before being deemed worthy to lay hands on fish—and here’s some guy on TV blithely smashing those two disciplines together like junkers in a demolition derby. A pre-chopped onion is
not
okay, the way I look at it—no matter what Rachael or Sandra tell you. The shit in a can is not anywhere nearly as good—and almost always more expensive—than stuff you can often make yourself just as quickly. It’s…it’s just…wrong to tell people otherwise.

It is, of course, ludicrous for me to be insulted on behalf of strangers who would probably find my outrage completely misplaced, embarrassing, and probably even deranged. I don’t claim to speak for them and am unworthy, in any case, of doing so. I’m just saying that some of the shit I see some people doing to food on television causes a physical reaction in some deeply buried reptile part of my brain—and that makes me angry. It makes me want to say mean things. It probably shortens my life every time it happens.

One might expect Thomas Keller, who famously insists on storing his fish in their natural “swimming” position, to feel this way about food being mistreated. But me? Where do I get off, one might well ask?

It’s more an affliction than the expression of any high-minded ideals.

I watch Mark Bittman enjoy a perfectly and authentically prepared Spanish paella on TV, after which he demonstrates how his viewers can do it at home—in an aluminum saucepot—and I want to shove my head through the glass of my TV screen and take a giant bite out of his skull, scoop the soft, slurry-like material inside into my paw, and then throw it right back into his smug, fireplug face. The notion that anyone would believe Catherine Zeta-Jones as an obsessively perfectionist chef (particularly given the ridiculously clumsy, 1980s-looking food) in the wretched film
No Reservations
made me want to vomit blood, hunt down the producers, and kick them slowly to death. (Worse was the fact that the damn thing was a remake of the unusually excellent German chef flick
Mostly Martha
.) On
Hell’s Kitchen
, when Gordon Ramsay pretends that the criminally inept, desperately unhealthy gland case in front of him could
ever
stand a chance in hell of surviving even three minutes as “executive chef of the new Gordon Ramsay restaurant” (the putative grand prize for the finalist), I’m inexplicably actually angry on
Gordon’s
behalf. And
he’s
the one making a quarter-million dollars an episode—very contentedly, too, from all reports.