PART ONE
WHY I EAT
IT’S GOOD TO EAT
My wife, Joan, and I live partly in rural western Massachusetts, where one minute people are discussing the different tastes of bear (very strong) and woodchuck—I guess you don’t ever want to try muskrat, though people do—and the next minute the topic turns to whether turmeric has to be organic. Just the other night in the midst of a hearty meal, we were Googling to see how much more nutritious sesame seeds are with the hulls on than with them off. Not a simple matter, because while the hulls do have food value they also contain—never mind. I try to keep things light by asking how many sesame seeds you should take daily. But these are, after all, matters of life and death.
Speaking of which, I heard the other day that Google has a task force working on an end to death. Not Google’s death, people’s. If eternal life is anything like teen sex (probably not, come to think of it), it will no doubt come along too late for me. But let’s say I get the message, through Gmail: “Hooray, immortality is here! Click for two weeks free.” And I don’t reply right away. Google, again: “Grateful? No? What else do you want?”
Here is my response: “Mashed potatoes with that. And gravy.”
Because there will be a catch. To live forever, I’ll have to give up food, except for Googruel or Gvittles or whatever they’re going to call the only sustenance you can live on forever. Maybe something virtual, you don’t even get to chew. And I’ll have to think long and hard.
“Everybody has their own ideas of paradise. Ours is very traditional,” says Philo Merriday, resident manager of a motel and theme park outside Gatlinburg, Tennessee, known as Heaven on Earth. According to a review this week on FamilyDestinations.com (three stars out of five), Heaven on Earth strives to give guests a foretaste of glory divine. Instead of a pool, Heaven on Earth has a cloud—a gauzy expanse that the reviewer, after lying on it in a long white gown, found “relaxing.” Harp music is piped in, and guests are encouraged to play along on instruments provided on a basis of first come, first served. Attendants passing out complimentary ambrosia and angel food cake are not winged but are otherwise celestially attired, and guests may experience sensations of flying by hooking up to cables on a loop around the complex. No religious services are held. “We’re nondenominational,” says Merriday. “Anyway, church in heaven would be gilding the lily. We want you to feel that you’rethere.”
I grew up on food, among people who were devoted to the joy of getting plenty of it. Some years ago, I visited Mel Blount, the great Pittsburgh Steeler cornerback, on his family farm in Vidalia, Georgia, and wrote this:
“Keep ’em fed,” Mel’s father used to say about his offspring. “Keep ’em fed and they’ll work.” They’re still working—for instance, tossing a crop of fifty- or sixty-pound watermelons along a family bucket-brigade line (“And you can’t stop”) to load them into a truck. And every time I walked into Mel’s mother’s house, she, Alice Blount—at 9:00 a.m., 11:30 a.m., 4:30 p.m., or 9:30 p.m.—she was putting fried chicken, stewed chicken, butter beans, soupy white lima beans, grits, gravy, corn bread, rice, mashed potatoes, thick-sliced bacon, collard greens, biscuits, ham, black-eyed peas, sweet iced tea, and hot sauce onto the table and saying, “Y’all about let it get cold.” When I start eating food like that, it takes me back to when I was fourteen, could eat steadily for hours with impunity, and figured I’d be a sports immortal myself. Inside every thin Southern person is a fat person signaling to get out. Mine has partially emerged, as has Mel’s brother Bobby’s. One night Bobby leaned back from the table, slapped his stomach proprietarily with both hands, and said, “Roy, this is all the savings I got.” Mel has had the football glory, but Bobby (who some say was the best athlete in the family) may well have had more food, and he seems pleased with his end of the deal.
If Google can arrange something like that in perpetuity, farm to table, I’m in. Doesn’t have to be soul food, as long as it’s good. In a lifetime of eating, I have savored Madhur Jaffrey’s home cooking, Donald Link’s prizewinning hot tamales (I was a judge), and an eight-course banquet in the Palace of Versailles. And see “What We Ate in Japan.”
As to healthful eating, I take a positive approach. When I hear that something I like is good for me or anyway better than something else (for instance, that Velveeta has more protein and fewer bad fats than many real cheeses, because it is largely whey), I say, “Hey! Let’s see if we have some in the fridge.” (To mix with RO*TEL. I wouldn’t eat Velveeta without mixing it with something containing an asterisk.) When I hear that something I like is not so good (for instance, that Velveeta is rich in sodium), I say, “Let us not rush to judgment.”
And there is room for positivity today. It may not last (remember when bread, with gluten, was the staff of life?), but lately I have heard good things, from authorities recognized by my wife, about watermelon, avocado, egg yolk, cane syrup, okra, lard, oysters, beef (if raised right), whiskey, hot peppers, coffee, (dark) chocolate, butter!
Butter! Not margarine, no, p’tooey, and none of your quasi-buttery “spreads,” but actual, cow-given butter:
Bananas are yellow in their season.
Butter is always. And better on peas, on
Toast, on corn bread, on corn on the cob.
A baked potato begins to throb
With life, with juice when butter melts
Down, down into each crevice and …
Oh! Nothing elts
Melts the way butter melts.
Truer words were never uttered:
Anything good is better buttered.
But we can’t be complacent about food. As we learn from the media that mice don’t really like cheese, milk doesn’t suit cats, elephants aren’t partial to peanuts (I worked with one, though, who loved M&M’s), dogs shouldn’t be given bones (unless they’re raw, and who keeps raw bones around?), and bananas (as we know them outside the rain forest) are bad for monkeys, we realize that our timeworn conceptions need to be shaken up. You know the expression “acquired taste”? It’s a sneer, is what it is. I once heard George Will, on television, refer to Michael Jackson (his music I mean) as “an acquired taste.” Michael Jackson? Moonwalking? (“Walking backwards forwards,” as someone described it, or maybe the other way around.) Either you can’t help deriving at least some fleeting enjoyment from that weird little dervish’s work, or you can be determined not to: acquired distaste. In today’s changing food environment, you’re crazy not to acquire tastes. I have gone so far as to acquire one for kale.
Like many people, I got my back up against kale. I had been eating other greens regularly and naturally for years and years and years when, boom, kale was the new manna. So was kimchi, but kimchi was a discovery for me (I thought you had to find it where I had found it, in a Korean grocery in Queens, New York), and it was fermented (hey-hey!). The other night at a place in the Bywater neighborhood of New Orleans called Booty’s, which serves street food from around the world, I had a kimchi pancake with pork-belly hash that made me want to shout.
Kale, though, had been around, lurking in the background, and in fact I had enjoyed it as the original green in a Portuguese soup that I went on to make myself: using red beans, canned tomatoes, chorizo sausage (which conspire, those three, in a cloudy liquor), chopped onions, and fresh collard greens. We grow collard greens (and in Massachusetts they don’t get gritty, somehow). Some people look down on collard greens, so more collard greens for me. Who needs kale? was my feeling. But then the other night Joan fried some kale just long enough in a little olive oil with a sprinkling of parmesan, and bingo: a chew that I have to rank (see “Song to Ribs,” “Song to a Nice Baked Potata”) among the best chews in my experience. And it’s healthy, which is fine with me.
I can also eschew with enthusiasm. I do have a weakness for frozen waffles and saltine crackers (oyster crackers even more) and the “mixed-fruit jelly” that you get in a diner (the tublets it comes in should be bigger, though, and more squeezable so you don’t lose so much in the corners). But “nondairy creamer” will never pass my lips. Nor Hostess Twinkies, nor Hot Pockets.
In Salem, Oregon, police who stopped a car being driven erratically grew suspicious when they detected no smell of alcohol and the teenage driver volunteered to take a sobriety test yet seemed to be high on something. They noticed eight empty packets of nondairy creamer on the floor of the car. “Okay!” the driver said. “I was snorting it. It’s legal. Everybody I know is doing it.” Puzzled experts say nondairy creamer has no known narcotic effect, but, as one put it, “If you snort eight packets of anything, you have a problem.”
Indeed we keep an organic garden, which last summer produced five small but delicious fresh-picked ears of corn, alone. (And a bumper crop, thanks to the Missus, of kale.) When Joan is out of town, and I’m tempted to slip away from the organic grocery section, I feel adulterous (see “Steak, Environmentally”), and not in a good way. But where I come from, the worst thing you can be toward food is persnickety. Eating primarily for health is too much like marrying for money. In other words, it’s not completely crazy, but unless a meal or a relationship commences with yum, I don’t see it going anywhere.
And how can anybody keep up with what we should and shouldn’t eat? I notice that people who used to say, “They say,” with regard to what they’ve heard is deadly or not, are now saying, “What they’re saying is…” They used to say lots of fruits, things like groats, and scratchy bread:
“People who eat
Wonder bread
Must be underbred.
Did no one explain
About whole grain?”
—Say the elite.
So their childhood
Did not include
Tomato slice red
As a harlot’s lip
On Wonder bread
With Miracle Whip?
At the moment, as I write this, I’m being advised that the only way to avoid eating yourself into an early grave (too late for me, ha!) is to eschew grains—and all other carbohydrates, including orange juice for God’s sake—and get plenty of good healthy (not trans-) fat. Well, I’m not going to give up orange juice, but I hear the part about fat.
Breath is nice,
And some love vice,
And I’m a bear for reading,
But all of these,
Without some peas
Or onions, fall exceeding-
Ly short of feeding.
The human hand
And eye are grand
(Trained or amateurish),
But none of these,
Without some cheese
Or toast that’s warm and beurreish
Really nourish.
So much talk
Today of walk-
Ing, running, sweat, and sleekness!
Let me stress:
Some fat, unless
You’re riding in the Preakness,
Is no weakness.
Suet in you,
Just like sinew,
Throbs with tonic value.
All the weight
From what you ate
That tasted great
Will resonate
Like turtledove timbale, you
Bet. So sing the food chorale (eu-
Peptic musicale), you
Hungry guy or gal, you.
Salut!
That’s where I’m coming from. And am I a butterball? “For a man of your age,” someone said to me the other day, “how do you manage not to be any more paunchy than you are?” He was a friend of mine, and was about to ask a favor, but the next day (in Felix’s oyster bar in New Orleans) I heard something along the same lines from a complete stranger—whom I had asked for a favor. “Could you pass the horseradish?” I said.
“You going to eat all two dozen of them?” she asked. “You’re like an uncle of mine. And he’s dead. You’re not even all that fat.”
Once my then girlfriend (now wife), Joan, and I shared a banquet dais with Mike Wallace of 60 Minutes. He was a powerful presence, as may be imagined. At one point, he reached over and ate, without asking, the glaze off Joan’s crème caramel.
I was not aware of this at the time. If I had been, I would have hurriedly eaten the glaze off mine.
But it must have been legal, droit de TV.
I may be too thick in the middle to be a TV personality (on the radio, people have told me, I sound more portly than I am) or to live in certain parts of California, but you accept all that, and life goes on. My height, I have been told, should be twice my waist measurement. At my point in life, I am in fact settling slightly. In a doctor’s office, I have to stretch to reach my definitive height of six feet even. I can hardly be expected, at this stage, to grow four inches taller. If I thought I could learn to dance the Lindy Hop really well, I would consider going into training. But as a man in Clarksdale, Mississippi, once told me on the radio, “I’m seventy-three years old already.” We were eating fried catfish at the time. I hope people in Clarksdale, Mississippi, still eat fried catfish on the radio.
When I met Satchel Paige, the immortal baseball pitcher, he was openly eating a piece of fried chicken. “But,” I said to him, “I thought you said, ‘Avoid fried foods, because they angry up the blood.’” That remark had, after all, been famously attributed to him. “I said avoid ’em,” he said. “I didn’t say I avoided ’em.” With that in mind, here are some guidelines.
Guideline 1
Eat less gravy than you want. Wait—consider this: you can’t, possibly, eat as much gravy as you want. A book titled Favorite Recipes, Favorite Sayings by Mary Howard Shelfer Morgan, of Tallahassee, Florida, quotes a wise saying by First Lieutenant William Howard Shelfer (1917–44), whom I infer to be her father or uncle who died in the war: “The only way to have enough gravy is to funnel it down from the attic through a hose.” Eating lessgravy than you want, therefore, is feasible on the face of it. It will also enable you to eat less mashed potatoes, or whatever you were going to put the gravy on, than you thought you wanted.
Codicil to Guideline 1
After five potato chips, you are just trying to reclaim the glory of the first two—and you know it.
Guideline 2
Never eat anything promoted as “amazing,” because it might actually be: “Everyone loves Cheetos, the crunchy cheezy [sic] treat that you have to lick your fingers to savor every flavor, but this new amazing flavor infuses American Mountain Dew with the crunchy Cheetos snack. This combo version by Frito-Lay Japan … in cooperation with Pepsi, ensures an authentic taste experience.”
Guideline 3
Hard liquor may be better for you, at some yet-to-be-determined ratio, say two fingers to eight ounces, than soft drinks. As a boy in Decatur, Georgia, I would ride my bike to the gas station, in front of which stood a big, rusting, red-metal box with a slide-open door at the top. I’d reach down into that well of ice gradually melting among variously shaped cold bottles randomly heaped, and I’d swush around heavily for a while and come up with a NuGrape. A Grapette. A Sun Drop. An Orange Crush, with its pebbly, thick-walled bottle the color of iodine. A Bireley’s chocolate drink. Bireley’s put out an orange, too. A Nehi black cherry. An RC Cola, a Dr Pepper, a Frostie Root Beer, a Squirt, a Canada Dry ginger ale. Ice water would run down my arm, and I would have myself a very cold, highly satisfactory drink. I don’t think anything has ever struck me as prettier colored than NuGrape foam back then. I was a child, with little experience of the world. But in college English, when I came upon “the blushful Hippocrene, / With beaded bubbles winking at the brim, / And purple-stainèd mouth,” it brought back NuGrape.
As I acquired other tastes, those sugar potions became too icky for me. But I would still enjoy an occasional Coke. I lived near Atlanta, the corporate and ancestral home of Coca-Cola. Coke was the cola, the one on the periodic table; Coke was It. But then It came out with that commercial showing people singing, “I’d like to buy [Oh, not sell?] the world a Coke / And keep it company.” Uh-oh. Conceptually, It had gone Icky. Then It changed Its very essence. Transubstantiated Itself into New Coke, which tasted more like Pepsi! As if Louis Armstrong had decided to imitate Al Hirt! And then, when It saw the reaction to what It had done, It brought back Its old self—now called Coca-Cola Classic, which sounded like a golf tournament. After a while, It discontinued New Coke, which had become known officially as Coca-Cola II, and dropped the “Classic” from old Coke. Today, under Its Minute Maid brand, Coca-Cola sells a juice It calls Pomegranate Blueberry, which is 0.3 percent pomegranate, 0.2 percent blueberry, and nearly all the rest grape and apple juice, dyed dark purple. The picture on the label shows an apple and some grapes peeping from behind a pomegranate and some blueberries. “HELP NOURISH YOUR BRAIN,” it says in big letters on the label. (Some research suggests that antioxidants in pomegranate juice may be good for your brain.) The other day I turned on the television and saw a cat, with a German accent, saying, “What if life tasted as good as Diet Coke?” Talk about icky. Diet icky. And of course people say you really ought to drink Mexican Coke, which is sweetened with cane sugar instead of icky corn syrup, so It tastes like It should. Would whiskey put you through all that?
Guideline 4
If it sounds like the name of a pool hustler (Natural Fats), it’s probably good for you, within reason. If it smacks of sadomasochism (Whipped Spread), it’s not.
Guideline 5
Save room for pie. Pie being the highest form of food. When we say “Sweet as an angel eating pie,” we do not mean icky; we mean sublime. Eudora Welty, in her story “Kin,” celebrates the perfect ending to a pleasant day: “wonderful black, bitter, moist chocolate pie under mountains of meringue.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, according to his friend James B. Thayer, loved pie so much he ate it regularly for breakfast. One morning, Emerson offered several gentleman guests, one after another, a piece of pie. Each gentleman declined. “‘But…,’ Mr. Emerson remonstrated,… thrusting the knife under a piece of the pie, and putting the entire weight of his character into his manner, ‘but … what is pie for?’” There. There you are. That rhetorical question, extended across a broad spectrum of good food, is the answer to Why I Eat. Was breakfast pie bad for Emerson? In only slightly premature old age, the author of “Self-Reliance” began losing his memory, but by all accounts he retained a nice smile. “He suffered very little,” according to his son Edward Waldo, “took his nourishment well, went to his study and tried to work, accomplished less and less, but did not notice it.” More and more, I think of this as my fallback ambition. But might Emerson’s golden years have been even mellower if he had saved room for pie?
Quebec’s premier Lucien Bouchard’s government got a faceful of criticism this week. Members of the Liberal Party opposition demanded to know why $112,440 of taxpayers’ money had gone to fund a symposium on comical activism, starring international slapstick terrorists who throw cream pies at public figures deemed to be taking themselves too seriously. One defensive minister provoked giggles by saying, “Never have we supported pie throwing.” Imagine that in French! The finance minister, Bernard Landry, himself the target just last week of a pie that he managed to dodge, was less nimble in fending off criticism of the funding. “It is not the taxpayers who were pied,” he spluttered, quickly adding—lest anyone interpret that remark as in any way exculpatory—that the pie throwers “have a sense of democracy as weak as their aim.”
Unquestionably, too much pie will make you sluggish. And you cannot truly know, except by some rough principle such as “more than one piece” (but what size pieces?), how much is too much until you have had it. You can, however, know, or believe you know, how much room you have for pie. One’s room for pie is like one’s capacity for love, in this sense: few life-affirming people underestimate their own. So don’t worry about that. But we don’t want to fritter away, so to speak, our room for pie. As we eat our pre-pie courses, we should bear this in mind. Don’t crowd pie out, is what I am saying. Room for pie is like energy reserves, good credit, an ace in the hole. If you’re stuffing yourself with Cheez Doodles, and you know this is wrong, you can try telling yourself, “Stop, you miserable swine.” Which will make yourself say to you, “You’re not the boss of me!” Or you can ask yourself, “What if, in the next moment, a piece of pie comes along? If we eat one more Cheez Doodle, will we have room for that pie?”
BUT NOTHING IS SIMPLE
As a lifelong eater, I know the following:
• We are what we eat. Venison puts hair on our chests, and if we eat food that has been reduced to foam, we are very, very silly.
• We are what we eat eats. Pork fed on garbage, good. Pork fed on germ killers, bad.
• And never forget all the little fellas that make what we eat possible: we are all part earthworm and part bee.
Fine. I’m on board. But food and I used to get along so simply. When Beethoven was composing, he didn’t think; he composed. When I was eating, I ate.
Now … I join a save-the-planet march. Somebody’s sign says, “Eat What’s Good for the Earth’s Digestion.” If that were just a matter of my not giving heartburn to the graveyard, it would go down pretty easy with me. But you also have to factor in the global climate and the global economy and, on a personal note, chronic sinusitis. Iknow you don’t want to hear about it! I don’t want to hear about it! But if I don’t make a clean breast of this, eventually somebody is going to pipe up and say, “What does he know about food? He’s anosmic!”
Yes. As I wend my wondering way toward growing older than dirt, I still have all my original knees, hips, and heart valves, pretty fair semblances at least (knock on wood) of the old bodily functions, and only one good reason to curse my fate.
Recurrent anosmia. See, you never even heard of it. There’s no common term for it. Unscented? Smell-less? Aroma-impaired?
I’m lucky. According to Gary Beauchamp of the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, six million Americans cannot smell at all. My olfactory sense isn’t dead yet, but for twenty years I have been losing and regaining and again losing it. After three surgeries on my sinuses and many courses of antibiotics, I can breathe. But when the smell is gone, I’m tasting-impaired. I still get sweet, sour, bitter, salty, and umami; and spicy hot, which is essentially pain; and the basic textures, which to the tasting-impaired are as useful as the Seven Dwarfs: Crunchy, Slick, Crumbly, Crackly, Gooey, Juicy, and Chewy. But I miss so many subtler flavors it’s a damn shame.
I don’t … smell … well. Stop, I know what you’re instinctively on the verge of saying; I’ve heard it over and over—little play on “well” and “good” there, right? My friend, I have anosmia. I will do what it takes to squash the “well/good” response, if I have to resort to a bad-taste umami joke:
Umami so fat, her ass looks like two pigs fighting over a Milk Dud.
To not smell well isn’t funny. I’m deprived.
So why not try what is called a deprivation diet. I eliminated dairy and gluten. Do you realize what that means? No cheeseburgers, no pizza, no pasta (actually, there are some decent gluten-free versions, assuming you don’t overcook them slightly and turn them into globs, and quinoa’s not a bad gluten-free starchy thing), no ice cream, no macaroni and cheese, no croutons. No … butter. First science tells me, go ahead, love butter, glory in butter, and then science tells me, not so fast.
I went to have my blood tested for antibodies and proudly told the health professional involved that I had already given up dairy and gluten. No, no, she said. That skews the blood tests. So I went back on dairy (butter, I had butter) and gluten (croissant, I had croissant) for a while, came back in for the tests, and found that I had been needlessly eschewing gluten but should keep avoiding dairy (and even goat milk products), and also almonds, lemon, cauliflower (I love cauliflower—there’s a clean watery aspect at the heart of it that I also find in good mozzarella and oysters), and eggs. In the hope that eggs, and those other delicacies, will regain their savor, I have to stop eating them. In their place, lots of herbal supplements.
Bulletin: It’s working! Today I walked around the French Quarter of New Orleans hungrily inhaling the aromarama: gumbo, jasmine, street musicians. And I ate, and the whole righteous taste of Buffa’s red beans and rice swam into my ken, and I smacked my lips in thanks.
Bulletin: That was yesterday. Today, I might as well be eating in Ohio.
Will I never have butter again? To be sure, Joan found me an olive-oil-based confection, every ingredient unimpeachable, which isn’t bad; it resembles butter. But how do you write a poem about it?
That may not strike you as a pressing question. But consider this, one of the truest things I ever wrote:
I Like Meat
Cold meat or hot meat,
Sliced thick or thin.
I guess I’ve just got meat
Under my skin.
If I may paraphrase a Shakespeare sonnet: if that ain’t so, and upon me proved, then no one ever wrote, and no one ever ate. Since writing “I Like Meat,” however, I have become more eco-conscious. I still like meat, but I need to qualify that simple truth. And so I have backed, and filled, and fiddled and fussed, to carve out the following addendum:
But when I shop
For lamb, for example,
I’ll choose no chop
That did not gambol—
So we can say
(You know my wife)
That our entrée
Has had a life.
And though it cost
A leg and an arm
From New Post-Lost-
Paradise Farm,
That lamb chop must,
If we’re to buy it,
Have enjoyed a just
Organic diet.
So we can bleat
With every bite:
“What we eat
Has eaten right!”
Look at that. First, I cravenly blame my wife (and now I’m cravenly crawfishing away from doing so), when, in fact, I have come to share, by and large, her alimentary sentiments; maybe I feel, sometimes, that life would be simpler if I hadn’t, but that’s my problem.
Second, and more crucially, where did that “bleat” come from? Oh, sure, “bleat” popped things into focus—but not into the focus I had in mind. Did I want to imply that people who adhere to a healthy, sustainable, relatively merciful diet are sheep-like conformists? No, that “bleat,” I feel certain, is not what I mean. I think it reflects the depth of my resistance to being picky about food.
High-mindedly picky, I mean. Knee-jerk pickiness, I must have a gift for, because one of the few things I have written that people tell me (with some accuracy) they remember word for word is “Song Against Broccoli”:
The neighborhood stores are all out of broccoli,
Loccoli.
A version of those lines was quoted by The New York Times when the first president Bush took it upon himself to declare his regular-lad distaste (“It tastes like medicine”) for broccoli. Fortunately, the Times did a follow-up story, and I was able to go on record: “Unwilling to join the Bush camp and fresh from a plate of broccoli with garlic sauce, Mr. Blount said this new couplet captured his from-the-heart feelings”:
While others are gorging on chocolate, I’m
Gladsomely crying, “It’s broccoli time.”
That of course was a lie. But I have, over the years, eaten loads of broccoli—have even chosen to cook broccoli for myself. All in all, I am not unfond of broccoli. True, broccoli’s top is too fuzzy and its stalk too stalky (you might say broccoli is all seeds and stems)—but these are the reactions of an infant child. Broccoli is good for us, and we need to—
I don’t know. This book is no recipe for self-improvement, no Maybe What You’re Eating Is What’s Been Eating You. The only thing it proves is that food gets into nearly everything I write. Not literally. With computers, you have to be so dainty to avoid getting the least bit of sauerkraut, bean dip, or even peanut butter into their works. My old manual typewriter—pardon me while I be an old fart—was full of crumbs. Might be a raisin down in there. Grease stains on the platen. And by gum that machine sounded, when it and I were going good, like popcorn a-popping. But a tiny slosh of orange juice, which my old typewriter would have taken in stride, killed the first laptop I ever had. So I sublimate, and nearly everything gets into what I write about food. Certainly food pops up in most of my greatest hits—or so I assume, from the savage cries, during question-and-answer sessions, of “Hey, give us ‘Song to Oysters’!” Which you will find on here, in the “Meat of the Waters” section. And “What’s that thing where people are talking around the dinner table?” Which—oh, here it is, on the next page.
THE WAY FOLKS ARE MEANT TO EAT
When I was growing up in Georgia, we ate till we got tired. Then we went, “Whoo!” and leaned back and wholeheartedly expressed how much we regretted that we couldn’t summon up the strength, right then, to eat some more.
When I moved to the Northeast, I met someone who said she liked to stop eating while she was still just a little bit hungry. I was taken aback. Intellectually, I could see it was a sound and even an admirable policy. It kept her in better shape than mine did me. I just thought it was crazy.
We have only so much appetite allotted to us in our time on this earth, was my feeling, and it’s a shame to run the risk of wasting any of it. People I grew up with wanted to get on out beyond their appetite a ways, to make sure they used all of it. They wanted to get full. They intended to get full. If a meal left them feeling just a touch short of overstuffed, they were disappointed. I knew a man once who complained about little Spanish peanuts because they never added up to enough to give him any reason to stop eating them until they were all gone, and then he was still up to eating some more. “I can’t get ahead of them,” he said.
But eating right is not just a question of quantity. Primarily, it’s quality. It’s not letting any available goodnessgo unswallowed. The people I grew up eating with didn’t just take a few of the most obvious bites out of a piece of chicken and decide abstractly, “Well, I have eaten this piece of chicken.” They recognized that the institution of fried chicken demands a great deal of chickens, and my people felt bound to hold up their end. They ate down to the bones and pulled the bones apart and ate in between the bones and chewed on the bones themselves. And the bones that weren’t too splintery they gave to the dogs, who were glad to have them. (Unless they’re overbred, dogs generally are Southern.)
And people I grew up with talked while they ate, about what they were eating. When several sides and generations of a family of such folks sat down together around a table, with ten or twelve generous platters in front of them, they sounded something like this:
“… and us to Thy service, amen.”
“Pitch in.”
“I don’t know where to start first.”
“Mmmmm-m.”
“Big Mama has outdone herself tonight.”
“Well, I just hope y’all can enjoy it.”
“I BLEEVE I COULD EAT A HORSE!”
“Would you look at them tomaters?”
“Hoooo, don’t they look good?”
“Now, Tatum, slow down.”
“You let that child enjoy himself.”
“You’d think we didn’t feed him at home.”
“He didn’t get ’ny snap beans! Lord, pass that child some snap beans!”
“Lilah, how ’bout you over there? You need something more. Butter beans!”
“Ooo, land, naw, I’m workin’ on this corn.”
“Come on, just a dab.”
“Well, you talked me into it.”
“Mmmmmm.”
“Awful early, to be gettin’ this gooda corn.”
“Eunice, would you send that okry back around?”
“Look at me, just a-puttin’ it away.”
“I’M EATIN’ LIKE A FIELD HAND!”
“Little more tea, to wash it down?”
“Mm-m, these greens!”
“ANYBODY WANT ANYTHING?”
“I will have one more heppin’ of that squash, if nobody minds.”
“It’s so gooooood.”
“Little corn bread, to sop that juice?”
“One more moufful of ham, then I do have to stop, sure nuff.”
“Look at all this chicken left! Have a little more there, Charles.”
“Where would he put it?”
“And just a spoonful of that gravy, to put on my peas.”
“Charles! We didn’t raise you to mix your gravy with your peas!”
“Celia, now you let that child eat the way he likes it.”
“Mm. Mmm. Mm.”
“More rolls, anybody?”
“I think this is all I can hold.”
“You better eat some more of this good chicken!”
“No’m, I got to save room for pie.”
“Pie? There’s pie? All this and pie?”
“Now, Neetie, you know good and well we wouldn’t let you go home and tell people we didn’t serve you anypie.”
“Look at that pie.”
“What is in this pie?”
“This pie is so goooood.”
“Ah-mm, m.”
“How do you get your crust to do like this, Big Mama? My crust won’t do like this.”
“Aw, your crust does fine.”
“Mm, m, m.”
“Mmmmmm-m.”
“Well, I have eat myself sick.”
“Mm-hm. Wadn’t ’at goooood?”
“I don’t think I could … touch … another … bite.”
“I’M ’BOUT TO POP!”
“Mm.”
“Yes, Lord.”
“Them tomaters was specially good.”
“Got plenny more now, I could slice right up.”
“Noooo, noooo. I’d die.”
Copyright © 2001 by Valerie Shaff and Roy Blount Jr.