So The New Yorker showed up last night and on page 53 is a cartoon showing two Zen Buddhist monks, one wearing a fake arrow through his head and a funny nose and glasses. He says to the other monk, who is serious and dour, “Tell me the truth — have I ever made tea come out of your nose?”
I sent it along to many of my friends, with the predictable, self-congratulatory guffawing that one might expect would accompany an out of context New Yorker cartoon. Still, I couldn’t stop reading it and re-reading it and laughing myself silly in a slightly hysterical manner.
“Isn’t this funny–?” I wrote to my friends, several of whom are devout Buddhists with serious practices. “I mean, isn’t this really funny?”
Mostly they agreed, but when I wouldn’t just let it go and get on with my day, they got worried, and frankly, so did I. But for some reason, it hit home, and not because I’m a Buddhist in the way that so many of us claim to be: the sorta-kinda-urban-trendy-Buddhist-until-someone-cuts-me-off-in-traffic-and-then-they’re-an-asshole way, no matter how many Made in China Tibetan trinkets we buy from Anthropologie.
Anyway, I realized that over the last few weeks, I’ve been caught up in a culinary swirl of what Jim Harrison, in The Raw and the Cooked, called a “sump of neuroticism.” The food world has absolutely always been a fount of indiscrete in-fighting and cat-calling and judgement-passing, way back to the days when Julia Child and M.F.K. Fisher supposedly got a colleague dumped from a high-profile Time-Life project because they didn’t like him. And, as I wrote in a recent post, it was Nika Hazelton who said, back in a 1968, Nora Ephron-authored New York Magazine article called Critics in the World of the Rising Souffle that ours “is a world of self-generating hysteria.” Indeed. And it doesn’t seem to be ending anytime soon.
In the last few weeks, there have been public battles over the validity of the locavore movement, and what, exactly, the word itself means: some say that you’re not a true locavore unless you only eat food that’s grown in your relatively immediate vicinity (10 miles? 20 miles? 50 miles?), which is fine, assuming you live in California. Others insist they’re locavores, except when they eat Prosciutto di Parma, or Thai fish sauce, or Burgundian Epoisses. It’s like me saying I’m a vegetarian, except for the small porcine fixation that drags me into the gutter every once in a while.
On the flipside, Ruth Reichl is now topping the masthead of a digitized luxury foods magazine/catalog featuring the work of some well-known writers and journalists (myself among them) side-by-side with click-and-purchase items like white asparagus and ramps and pastured beef from the other side of the country for sums that would make Cartier blush. The press ranted and shouted, even as those complaining likely eat those very foods at high-end restaurants for those very prices, without ever batting an eyelash or thinking twice about it. Beauty really is in the eye of the beholder.
The politics of food is always relative: Not long ago, I was at a cocktail party and walked headlong into an award-winning food politics expert who was nibbling on a previously frozen pig in a blanket while drinking a longneck Bud. Recently, I spent an hour or so watching a panel discussion between Alice Waters, Duff Goldman, and Anthony Bourdain that made my hair go straight up, until, silly me, I realized that Alice and Anthony were basically saying the same thing, albeit differently (very differently): That food is — and should be — important to each of us. That it’s a deeply personal thing. That it’s important to make good choices ethically and culturally and environmentally. But that it’s also about pure pleasure and great flavor and authenticity: if it wasn’t, Alice wouldn’t have opened Chez Panisse for the reasons she did, back in 1971, after falling in love with France.
But, to mangle Bourdain’s message, there are a whole lot of people out there whose idea of a great meal is the $1.99 dinner at Popeye’s because great is also a relative term: for them, great means it’s filling and it’s what they can afford. Our society, comprised of haves and have-mores (as George Bush II once so sensitively called them), has created a food system designed to really only feed rich people (like you and me) high quality, expensive, pristine, lush, organic, well-made, thoughtful products. I don’t have to like Popeyes. I don’t have to eat Popeyes. But should I really pass judgement on the working mother of four who can’t possibly feed her children dinner any other way? I can’t. Would it be better to let them go to sleep hungry? Do I want to see her making better, smarter, healthier choices? Absolutely. The question is, Does she have any?
The key — and we all know this — is to make that high quality, pristine, lush food — the healthy, delicious, unprocessed stuff, unfettered by the likes of Monsanto — available to the masses, and then, to get the masses to eat it … assuming they even know how to cook it, and that’s an even bigger issue. The fact that the average person in this country doesn’t know how to cook themselves a beet, or a piece of fish, is a very serious bit of business. If we don’t rant and rave about that fact with the same kind of fervor that we attach to organics and locavorism, we’re sunk like the Titanic.
All of this said, and given the politicizing-by-necessity, and the factions, and the throw-downs; given the accusations and frequency of hyperbolic bullying and one-upsmanship (“You’re not a locavore; I’m a locavore because absolutely everything I eat is produced three miles away, whether it’s good or it’s dreck”); given the vast qualitative impasse between those that have and those that don’t; given all that, it’s very easy to get so serious that we wind up stumbling around in the dark. We forget what’s also important, and we lose the delicious lightness that makes food — whether it’s a hotdog at my local drive-in (not organic, pretty definitely not pastured) or a plate of fried chicken at The Old Country Store in Lorman, Mississippi or the oysters and pearls at The French Laundry — pleasurable in that almost corporeal way that found the mayor of repressed Lansquenet-sous-Tannes, in the movie Chocolat, rolling around in the window of the chocolaterie, passed out amidst the sweetness of life.
Food is a serious subject; it’s fraught, from almost every angle. But unless we haul ourselves back from the brink a little bit and balance politics with the lessons of culinary pleasure, we’ll find ourselves like the monks in the New Yorker cartoon: at risk of losing our humanity. And if we do, everything we eat — organic, local, high-end, low-end, conventional, processed — will be exactly the same: fuel.
