Out of My Mind (17 page)

My hard drink is bourbon. I enjoy the civilized custom of two drinks every evening before dinner while I watch the news. However, I'm angry with people who give drinking a bad name by doing too much of it. On the other hand, I was pleased with the recent story saying that moderate drinking is good for us.

My most frequent soft drink is a carbonated spring water from France. In most stores, it sells in a green bottle for $1.19 a liter, a sip more than a quart.

One of the strangest success stories in American business is Coca-Cola. It's strange because no one who drinks it knows what's in it. It won the legal right to be called by its nickname “Coke” years ago when it was sued by Pepsi-Cola.

The best idea the Coca-Cola Company ever had was that small, original, green-tinted pinched-waist bottle. In the Army in North Carolina,
I was exposed to Dr Pepper and Moxie but I never took to them. On several trips to Russia, I drank the Russian equivalent of Coke, called Kvas. It tasted like Moxie and the soft drink trucks selling it on the Moscow streets only had one glass and everyone who bought Kvas drank from that glass.

This must have been about when I stopped thinking about drinking and went back to sleep.

A trip to the supermarket is one of the pleasures of my Saturdays. It's satisfying to have worked all week to make enough money to be able to spend some of it on Saturday for things you see in a store. I buy things I don't need. It seems uncaring to say in a world where so many people are starving, but shopping, for many Americans, is entertainment.

I am dismayed lately by the fact that two of my favorite things to eat, oranges and tomatoes, are either so expensive or of such poor quality that I wouldn't think of buying any of either. I'm used to melons being hard, green, expensive and inedible when I buy them anywhere in the eastern part of the United States. This is because they are grown in places like Arizona and New Mexico and are picked before they're ripe. They are then shipped green, arrive green and are sold green. Some melons do not ripen once they're picked. They reach the stores in New York where I foolishly buy one occasionally and they are always rock hard and inedible. One of my New Year's resolutions is not to buy another cantaloupe.

Tomatoes have deteriorated over the past twenty years because of genetic alterations made to their seed by scientists in the business of horticulture. Tomatoes are harder and not so red and juicy as they used to be. It makes them easier to ship and reduces the loss due to rotting in transit. I don't know what these scientists have done to tomatoes but they've done something and it isn't good for those of us who eat tomatoes.

It seems likely that wholesale buyers of tomatoes like McDonald's, Burger King and Wendy's probably prefer these rock hard, pale pink, genetically altered tomatoes because they keep longer and are easier for their short-order cooks to slice and handle. As long as they look sort of red in a sandwich, they don't care that they are hard and tasteless.

Up until this year, oranges have been dependably good and affordable. There's no better and more satisfying taste than a tall, cool glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice, and I miss being able to have one. The so-called “freshly-squeezed” product that comes in plastic milk bottles is good but no match for genuinely fresh-squeezed juice. California oranges are still available, but you shouldn't squeeze a California orange. You peel and eat their navel oranges. They have more meat and less juice than a Florida juice orange. You squeeze a Florida orange—except this year. Yesterday, in my supermarket, the sign over a bin of small Florida oranges said, “Three for $1.99.” It would probably take four of those little oranges to make an acceptable glass of six or eight ounces of juice, and $2.65 for a drink of orange juice is out of my price range.

I am unsympathetic to the tomato growers because they brought on some of the deterioration of their product themselves. However, both orange and tomato growers were victims this year of bad weather. Hurricanes did in their crops and the shortage and consequent soaring prices are not all their fault.

When I'm in a store thinking about getting dinner, I often end up with chicken. I like steak, but I'm uneasy about the animals we kill to get it. I don't have the same feeling about chicken or fish. I have occasionally worried over whether a fish suffers much when it is caught and dies out of water. Is it like drowning for a human?

What follows is a list of the ten best tastes.

No. 1: SUGAR. This sweetener is at the top of the taste list even though too much of it is cloying and unpleasant. It's the most important ingredient in many things we eat—even things we don't consider sweet. When I make bread with six cups of flour I put a full tablespoon of sugar in the flour because of what sugar does for the yeast.

No. 2 : SALT. Without salt, anything is tasteless. I like a little too much salt; a tablespoon in the bread.

(Too much sugar or too much salt is bad for us, but one of the things we all recognize is the direct relationship between how good something tastes and how bad it is for us. The better it tastes, the worse it is for us. There is some eternal equation.)

No. 3: BUTTER. Nothing improves the taste of anything as much as butter. Fake butter was an unfortunate invention and it isn't much cheaper or any better for you than the real thing.

No. 4: BREAD. It is with some hesitation that I put bread on the list because commercial bread in the United States is terrible. How it ever happened that the French eat such great bread every day and Americans eat such bad bread is a mystery.

A great bread-maker in the Bronx, named Terranova, makes a round loaf so hard you can drum on it with your fingers. When I asked him what he put in his bread to make it so good, he said. “It's what I
don't
put in it that makes it good.”

In spite of the waxed-paper-wrapped mush in the supermarkets, almost every city or town has a good bakery where you can get real bread. You can tell a good restaurant before you eat your meal by the bread it serves.

No. 5: CHOCOLATE. Clearly one of the ten best tastes, chocolate is another thing Europeans make better than we do. A chocolate bar from Belgium, Germany, Switzerland or even England is better than
one made here. Vanilla is a good taste but not as important as chocolate. Chocolate is important.

No. 6: CHICKEN. Chicken not only tastes good but it's also cheap and can be cooked in a thousand different ways. It can be baked, fried, deep-fried, stewed or broiled. It's the best leftover you can have in your refrigerator.

No. 7: STEAK: I'm embarrassed to have it on the list but can't leave it off.

No. 8: POTATO. The taste of potato isn't good or bad until you do something with it. You can bake potatoes, mash them, boil them, fry or deep fry them. You can scallop them and if you're good in the kitchen, souffle them.

No. 9: PASTA. If you have a variety of pastas in the cupboard, you never have to worry about dinner. You can find something in the refrigerator or in the pantry to go with whatever pasta you have on hand. Just don't overcook it.

No. 10: RICE. Rice is on my personal ten best foods list. Basmati rice is best.

No. 11: ONION and GARLIC. I know I said ten, but I can't leave either of these out.

Maybe this was a bad idea. I'm up to eleven and I haven't mentioned the tastes of orange, lemon, tomato, strawberries, peanuts or eggs. I haven't even mentioned two of the world's great tastes: vanilla ice cream with chocolate sauce, or a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich—without chocolate sauce.

More as a matter of habit than plan, we divide our days, weeks and years into parts that don't make sense. We're locked in by the fact that the Earth revolves around the sun “once every 24 hours,” but that figure 24 is arbitrary. Cro-Magnon man should have worked out some decimal system for both time and distance. It might have made more sense to divide the day into 10 equal hours instead of 24. Each hour would be subdivided into 100 minutes and one minute into 100 seconds.

It has always seemed wrong to me that we sleep for seven or eight hours out of every twenty-four but apparently the body needs it. I don't know how eight hours became the standard workday, either. It seems probable that a few hundred years ago most work was manual labor and eight hours was about all of that the body could take. Daylight hours had something to do with it, but we're no longer dependent on the sun for light. Eight hours seems like a short day to me, but I'm not lifting anything heavy.

It's a surprise to Americans traveling abroad to find that in most European countries the workday is shorter than ours. In Germany, many people are working six- or seven-hour days and four-day work weeks with six-week vacations. I feel sorry for people who find work onerous. Emerson wrote, “The high prize of life . . . is to be born with a bias toward some pursuit, which finds him in employment and happiness.”

We all look forward to our weekends. Shopping is a favorite pastime so a lot of it is done weekends, even though many communities still have what are known as “blue laws” (origin unknown), meaning neveron-a-Sunday. Closing stores on Sunday is a custom based on the Biblical warning in Exodus, “Six days may work be done but on the seventh day it will become something holy . . . a day of complete rest . . . .”

Most Christians are selective about what they take from the Bible to live by. The most devout who approve of keeping stores closed on Sundays would stop short of the next line in Exodus which reads: “Anybody doing work on the Sabbath will be put to death.”

We ought to rethink who works which days and what hours. Traffic at 8 A.M. and 5 P.M. has become a major waste of time for too many of us and a terrible source of pollution. We should not all go to work or come home at the same time. We've got to start using more parts of the day and more parts of the week. That would involve more of us working Saturday and Sunday and some of us taking our “weekend” on Monday and Tuesday. We could get used to that.

Pleasant though it is, it's wrong that so many of us take off every Saturday and Sunday. For example, 95 percent of all doctors are out of their offices every weekend. The weekend is when most of us have time to see a doctor and more doctors ought to accommodate patients by taking their two-day break on days other than Saturday and Sunday. Doctors have us where they want us, though. There are more of us who need medical attention than there are doctors to treat us. No other business stacks people up in “the waiting room,” and makes it hard for them to get any service if they get sick on Saturday or Sunday or before 9 A.M. or after 5 P.M. weekdays.

Maybe what we need is a new Cabinet position. The President would appoint a Secretary of Time.

It makes me feel as if I'm off to a bad start in the morning when I don't read everything in the newspaper. Yesterday, I resolved to do that, so I made some calculations.

I estimated the number of words in a column, counted the columns and multiplied that number by the number of words. I then divided the number of words in the paper by the number of words I read in a minute. My arithmetic indicated that if I read yesterday's paper at my speed for ten hours a day, I wouldn't have finished it until next Tuesday—by which time four more papers would be out in my driveway.

The fact is, there is more in a newspaper than any busy person has time to read. You have to approach a newspaper like a buffet. Pass by the table once without a plate to see what they have, then go back and start at the beginning. Don't take more than you can eat. Look through the headlines of the paper and decide what you want to read. Skip the rest. Don't read the obituaries of people younger than you.

Newspapers are better than they used to be. Television news is worse. Newspapers are better for a lot of reasons. Reporters and editors are better educated than they used to be. They take their work more seriously than people in other businesses. They don't think of it as a business. They wish they made more money but they didn't get into the business to make money.

Integrity is a lunchtime topic of conversation among journalists. A group of newspaper people at a social occasion are more apt to talk about ethical considerations in their business than a collection of insurance agents are apt to talk about ethics in their business. Newspaper editors and reporters are obsessed with themselves but it works out best for readers.

There are other reasons for the improvement. Nothing has been more improved by technology than our ability to communicate information and ideas, and no business has benefited more from this than newspapers. During World War II, American reporters covering the air war against Germany from London had to limit their dispatches to what words they could read in three minutes on the only transatlantic telephone line. One enterprising newspaper, the
New York Herald Tribune
, hired a vaudeville performer whose act was speed reading. He could speak 750 words a minute. He talked so fast that no one could understand him. However, his words from London were recorded on a tape machine in New York and then played back at a slow speed which could be transcribed by a stenographer. Reporters for the paper were able to transmit stories with three or four times as much information in them as their competitors.

Today, information pours into newsrooms from all over the world every day. More of this information gets into newspapers than on
television. Television news, working on the advice of analysts who tell producers what people want to hear, largely ignores foreign stories in favor of the latest medical report on the treatment of carpal tunnel syndrome or some other less than deadly affliction.