Eaters

My husband and I have been entertaining guests since we were first together, going on forty-five years. I did the cooking during that time primarily, for many hundreds of guests by now, preparing no doubt many hundreds of meals. They talk these days about the difficulty of finding common ground across a fractured divide, but I can say with certainty that most people, no matter the politics, are quite particular eaters, though it depends. 

My tour of kitchen duty didn't start at twenty-six when I met my spouse; it began when I was around nine when after school my mother used to call from work and tell my two sisters and me what she wanted us to prepare for dinner. I remember standing on a chair in front of the stove, frying frozen fish sticks and french fries; washing and tearing up iceberg lettuce for salad; and of course doing the dishes. When people used to ask my mom why we didn't have a dishwasher her response was common in those days, namely, I've already got three!

By the time I was seventeen I developed a culinary repertoire, and it was also then that I first experimented with vegetarian meals. Inspired by the book, Diet For a Small Planet, I remember some nutty-grainy-beany failures that didn't go over well at all. I graduated to eggplant parm, which like my other nonmeat efforts also didn't go over so well, particularly with my father, for whom a meal was not a meal without a dead animal on the plate. It was then that I realized that much more went into people's tastes than the need for sustenance; that tastes were quirky and in a way irrational. 

Quirkiness is what I came to recognize in many eaters during the half-century since, for who knows what reason, cultural, psychological, or genetic. There are the never-onions bunch; the never-garlics and -mushrooms too. There are the anti-olive types––once I took away the plate of a guest after serving a Greek salad only to discover a row of kalamatas squirrelled under the rim of the dish, arrayed in a perfect arc. My mother used to complain about black pepper; the slightest amount to her made a dish inedible. Once we had the honor of serving Quentin Crisp at our apartment in Brooklyn. I'd made a large meal with many sides, but he ate pot roast and only pot roast and declared that all vegetables were "a big mistake."

It's not just the things people refuse to eat that defines the quirky diner but sometimes the way they eat. I've known people to put a knife under one side of a plate to prevent juices from mixing, willy-nilly. And once I made burritos, smothered with chili, cheese, lettuce and tomato, and a guest approached it by peeling back the layers the way Ahab's crew flayed a whale: first he removed the top veggies, then the cheese and chili, exposing a naked tortilla; he then commenced lifting the tortilla away like a skin, revealing the contents inside. He sorted out the elements of the filling, for which I'd taken care to compose the perfect bite, using the tines of his fork to separate them into component parts, eating each separately. I almost couldn't eat I was so fascinated by the deconstruction, one I didn't think possible and never imagined. 

There are the dieters; I've cooked for many, many. What's interesting is what their regimen allows, often understandably but sometimes not; regimens of seemingly random allowances and prohibitions. Eating for them can be a pleasure and a curse. While others fill their plates they spoon air onto their dish, brag how much they've lost, and then all too often, though not always, to return six months to a year later back at their initial weight, prior to the diet. I remember one woman refusing not just what she called "the carby bits" but the greens and veggies too. I was amazed she could survive on such meagre fare, until I served dessert and her real meal began. I remember thinking I hadn't heard of that plan before. 

Now that I've been a vegetarian consistently for over a decade I've gotten to see plenty of ways people try to compensate for their perceived meat-deprivation. One guest, knowing in advance that he was going to be served meatless fare, explained just after arriving that he'd eaten two baloney sandwiches before coming so he wouldn't "starve to death." Like Quentin Crisp he had an aversion to vegetables in general and, therefore understandably, passed on the salad. He didn't scoff at the veg spring rolls later though because they were fried. Who doesn't love anything fried? (Answer: lots of people, as I've learned.)

When non-veg guests come to stay for several days they seem to tolerate meatless for a day or two, but then their craving for animal flesh and the fear of protein-deprivation induces them to stop at a supermarket to buy a $5.00 rotisserie chicken, no doubt the most abused animal on the planet; the very thing I try never to bring into my home. They plead, I hope you don't mind! Guests will also suggest after two evenings of no meat, Let's go out to dinner tomorrow––which means they're craving a steak or a burger, or any dead animal basically, which they refer to not as a once-sentient being but as "protein"––I gotta have my protein! I don't bother to ask how they think Americans got by, largely on a diet of beans and grains, for almost four centuries. Native people did it for thousands of years before white folk, with only the occasional meat.

There are your drunk diners too. They're entertaining. One guy, I remember, had to be helped away from the dinner table he was so wasted on wine; he apologized the next day, commenting that "the food was great, though," though I doubt he remembered what I'd labored to prepare. One woman we invited to dinner just after arriving in Santa Fe showed up drunk; you could smell it on her across the room. She proceeded to get more pie-eyed the longer she was here. Again I'd prepared spring rolls, a plate piled high with them, and sesame noodles––I was into it for a while––and she proceeded to take up a roll, bite once or twice into it, then drop it on her plate, after which she took another. In a kind of reverse dining-action her dish actually filled with food over the course of the evening, albeit partially eaten. While slurring she pointed a spring roll at my husband and me and cried, People who live in this area are pussies! As I say we'd only recently moved here, and her attitude was that "people with balls," as she put it, live outside the city, away from other humans and among bears and mountain lions, apparently. We never heard from her again after that night, one in which she lamented at length about how her art career had been eclipsed by her more famous sister. 

Granted, there are plenty of people who brag about the fact that they'll eat anything. Some make fun of picky eaters, though I also remember one guy who joined in that chorus left a garden of radicchio leaves on his plate. When we protested, You just made fun of picky eaters, he declared, This is different; radicchio is inedible." I'm extremely fortunate in that my husband is one of those small-c catholic eaters. It works well in a veg household where for him a balanced, composed bite doesn't have to be animal flesh. People invite him to dinner when I'm away and say, You poor thing; how do you do it? He's been "doing it" for many years now without the slightest complaint, and he even seems to be thriving. 

One of the main themes of Bare Life has to do with the question of basics, what humans actually need or are willing to accept in order to live a quality life, apart from what Madison Avenue and capitalism generally try to convince us we need. Food, of course, is fundamental, but the relationship of human animals to it is not at all straightforward; it is often tortured. Unlike many nonhuman animals who down just about anything they can find, human animals have turned food into a fetish, one that they devour, play with, poohpooh, decline, pick through, or enthuse about. Apart from food allergies and other legitimate health concerns that mandate people watch what they eat, everything else seems to be a kind of food madness, occasioned by who-knows-what in a person's life and genes.