Food
Many traditional cultures subsist on narrow fare; the Mbuti eat mostly honey during the rainy season, while the Masai eat only meat, milk, and blood year-round. I wish my body were adapted to a time-honored mono-diet, which in my case ought to comprise spaghetti, butter, and Vegeta, an MSG-based soup seasoning that revolutionized Soviet cooking in 1959. Together these ingredients form for my palate an ambrosia so addictive that, like those friends who rent an out-of-the-way Swiss chalet each year for a three-day heroin binge, in my fourth decade I only permit myself to consume it in decontextualized locations. No Vegeta at home, in other words, which is paradoxical because it’s the only food I enjoyed as a child, and thus presumably the food that most reminds me of home—seen in this light, I like how its simplicity masquerades it as a staple, when I’ve never actually met anyone else who independently arrived at, let alone who adores, this combination. I’ve invented the home, I’ve invented the exile, and I’ve invented the shame that I feel as I dig back down toward the fiction that lies, presumably, at the bottom of a pitted aluminum pot that I found in a hostel’s communal kitchen, in the course of avoiding the local cuisine of whatever country I happen to be in.
The mind is at odds with the stomach, which is why, sooner or later, no matter how above the fray you may feel, there will come a time when you will read about a certain diet and it will make sense to you—it will seem like the right fuel for your unrealized strivings. I am embarrassed to say that the diet that made sense to me was the one where you eat only potatoes.
A certain flavor of innocence, maybe the dominant one, is distilled in these moments: when one feeds a creature that does not understand what it means to be fed. I watched as people darted over to crumble their buns and bars before a sparrow who’d winsomely found its way into the sleek expanse of Thessaloniki’s airport, and who hopped amongst the tiny morsels, picking at one, leaping to another, glad in a spastic sort of way, like someone who really didn’t expect the surprise party. I thought of the mendicant kitties that had gathered around the tables in Crete, docile and youthful but already aged by forlornness, like teen mothers, which many of them essentially were, and how they were hissed off, urged to chase the sparrows if they were that hungry. I thought of the refractory eater I was as a child, the story being that they had to sprinkle seed on the windowsill to attract birds into my field of vision, at which point, in the spirit of commensality, I would permit a few spoonfuls of gruel to pass between my teeth, already too aware of the power exercised over me not to spoil its innocence.
Of all the rituals I did not attend to at the little Greek Orthodox church, where I’d been drawn by the tolling bells and by the rustic pleasures that can be found only in amateur singing, and where I did not join in the standings-up-then-sittings-down, nor in the genuflections, in neither the crossings nor the kissings toward Christ (modernity having beaten out of me all my common sense re: mimicry’s proper place in the global body politic), none were remarked upon, none of my omissions even coughed at, until mass was over and I walked unheeding past the baked goods table on my way out. The whole parish pounced on me—you were really going to sit through all that without trying our cookies? Do what you will with His body, but you’ll have to taste ours.
A wall smashed down to bits and grit yields no beauty, and yet we admire knife skills—she still remembers, for instance, watching her grandmother-in-law chop stalks of dill into viridescent flakes smaller than the finest sand, just as I remember the six leeks that remained on the cutting board only as the flag of some forgotten Islamic nation, the vegetable’s natural gradient of white to green having become something more abstract and subtle. Which can be said to have more harmony, a whole onion with its tight sinuous pleats, or the igloo composed of its rhombic remains? I want to say that the first possesses chaos-in-order, the latter order-in-chaos.
Do we still believe that the tomatoes of yore tasted more like tomatoes? It would be better to remember how post-Soviet emigrants arrived in America and were spellbound by the taste of KFC. Everything is always getting better, everything except you.
When I think of touching sandpaper, a ghost of the sensation grazes my fingertip, and when I think of smelling a rose a faint pair-bonded whiff mingles with the air passing my nostril. A first stab at recalling memories of taste suggests concurrence with the pattern—when I imagine licking the flutings of a fresh cone of vanilla soft-serve, I can feel a trace (though farther back on the tongue than I expected) of sweet coolness, firm but yielding. Encouraged, I try to recall the flavor of the sublime bowl of noodles I ate in Qianyang, the warm smoky depths of the beef broth, the vegetal give of the gently seared peppers, but while I can summon the words, the taste itself retreats behind an undergrowth of ulterior sensory inputs—the olive-green of the peppers, the little stools we sat on, the noises of pleasure she made as she ate. It retreats, if I can put it this way, higher up into the brain, and if I try to force it back, back onto my tongue, then it folds itself, like some kind of origami illusion, into an emptiness, the same exact emptiness that slides in my mouth when I try to retaste the morel orecchiette I had in Staunton, or the peach cobbler in New Iberia, or the éclair in Saint-Pierre-d’Albigny. The Taj Mahal does not disappoint when I conjure its slide in my mind’s eye, nor does Ti Ein Afto Pou To Lene Agapi sound infuriatingly inferior when its echo plays on memory’s radio, but a meal remembered invariably collapses into the absence that it was originally eaten to fill. Satisfaction leaves no traces.