Feast or Fetish

A leisurely lunch on a Roman side street with a long lost friend

I’ve been using my little break from technology to catch up on my reading.  Or more correctly, my re-reading.  Like any book lover, I love finding new writers.  But I get just as much pleasure visiting with old friends.  Recently I’ve spent time with Pat Conroy, Michael Lee West, Clyde Edgerton, and Cassandra King, all authors with a decided Southern accent.  I’ve delved yet again into the delicious works of Calvin Trillin, M.F.K. Fisher, Michael Ruhlman, and the definitely non-Southern, but decidedly joyous, Robert Farrar Capon.  If you love food, wine and being alive, really alive, you need to read the magnificent Father Capon.

I’m just revisiting Father Capon’s The Supper of the Lamb and one of the things that strikes me most is how far ahead of his time he was.  He pointed out forty years ago that our food supply and our eating habits were being controlled and shaped by charlatans and con men, though I’m not sure he could have realized at the time how far down the garden path we were willing to be led.  Father Capon knew back in 1967 that margarine is not food.  Margarine is evil.  Butter is divine and its presence in your kitchen brings good tidings of great joy.

Father Capon pointed out that it’s not just the food giants, soda companies and producers of food that contains no actual food who have much for which to answer.  Do not forget the scientists and the nutritionists who are supposed to on our side, fighting the good fight.  How much good, wholesome, tasty food have we been cheated out of eating by the nutrition police?

In my lifetime, they’ve vilified salt, olive oil, butter, lard, pasta, milk, cream, eggs, cheese, pork, beef, meat in general, fat in general, sugar, chocolate, avocadoes, shrimp, coffee, wine and that staff of life - bread.  Those are just the ones I can remember off the top of my head.  And in virtually every case, they’ve come back and said, basically, “Oh, never mind.  We were wrong.  And, by the way, you know the stuff that we came up with as a replacement for the thing we said was bad for you? It causes cancer.  Oops.”

Bread, butter and jam

It was the nutritional fearmongers who bullied McDonald’s into cooking their french fries in trans fat instead of beef tallow.   Well, that worked out really well.  Now they’re getting rid of the trans fat oil and replacing it with a canola oil blend, whatever that is.  I’m not lovin’ it.  Here’s an idea guys - how about frying with a real food product, how about, oh…beef tallow?  And it’s the nutritionists (along with those paradigms of the wholesome life, the politicians) who’ve decide what our children will be fed at school.  And this is the best they could do.  And this.  Ugh.

So to all of them I say, get out of my kitchen and off my plate.  My own conscience will guide my fork to my mouth.  I will decide what to feed my family.  I will endeavor to do it without joining the cult of “healthy eating” and buying into food fads that multiply like rabbits (BTW, my neighbor Enrica makes the best rabbit roasted with rosemary, a drizzle of extra virgin olive oil and a sprinkling of sea salt).  I will do my damnest to avoid being caught up in every nutritional craze that sweeps the nation faster than the new Justin Beiber song. 

Look, I don’t have anything against nutritionists.  They mean well.  But between them and the media, I think we’ve gotten the idea that if we could just adhere to the perfect diet (maybe Asian or Mediterannean), discover the perfect super food (pomegranate, blueberries) or hit on that one item to avoid at all cost (white flour, refined sugar), then we’ll live forever.  We’ll be immortal.  We will drink from the Fountain of Youth, enter the Garden of Eden and walk the earth for all eternity.

Bullshit.  There’s no formula to determine how long a human being will live.  But they make it sound so absolute.  The average life span of an American woman is eighty-five years.  Subtract ten years if you smoke.  Add one year if you eat blueberries every day.  Lose two days for each order of fast food fries you consume.  Gain a few years if you eat enough grams of fiber every day.  Extra credit for every serving of vegetables, but only if they’re organic and locally grown.  Of course, if you had a sunburn when you were twelve, you’re screwed.

A good Southern fish fry

But here’s the thing folks.  Human beings are mortal.  You’re going to die.  I’m going to die.  We’re all going to die.  And nothing you do or do not eat is going to change that.  Yes, there are a few things you can eat or drink that can immediately send you to your heavenly reward - the wrong mushroom, a few peanuts if you’re allergic, a quart of grain alcohol, rat poison.  But most of the rest can be consumed in moderate (and, in my case, sometimes immoderate) quantities.

Since I’m not going to live forever, I intend to enjoy my time on this earth.  So,I choose food.  Good food.  I choose joy.  I choose long, wine-soaked lunches with friends old and new.  I choose flavor and savor over fetish and fear.  At least I know that if I get hit by a bus tomorrow, there’s a very good chance that my last meal will have been a good one.  Hopefully involving lard.  And, through the wonders of the world wide web and the beauty that is blogging, when I do kick off, no one need sigh and say, “what a pity, she’s taken her recipe for key lime pie to the grave.”

We don't look happy, but we are