Each month a contemporary poet presents three poems and one personal essay in which food is consumed, passed over, or reckoned with. Megin is our poet for February, 2014.
In his forward, David Kamp calls Noah Fecks and Paul Wagtouicz “immersion experts.” The Way We Ate (Touchstone Books) started as a photographic blog and developed into more than your typical cookbook where over 100 chefs and food personalities translated their version of an historical event into a dish or cocktail.
Susan Marque talks to Fecks about how a simple idea flowered into something spectacular.
Susan Marque is a second year M.F.A. student at The New School, she has been published in The Brooklyn Rail, Gotham Magazine, Fit Parent and Yogi Times. She is currently working on her memoir Freshman at 44.
Over the past few days, a couple of pieces in the American press — later translated in Italian media — have drawn attention to some of the least glamorous aspects of the culinary trend “Made in Italy.” In The New York Times, a graphic piece by Nicholas Blechman entitled “Extra Virgin Suicide: The Adulteration of Italian Olive Oil” illustrates some of the systemic and long-lasting issues in the extra virgin olive oil commodity chain. The other, “The Death of Italian Cuisine? Kids in Rome are eating just as much junk as kids in America,” appeared on Slate.com. Signed by Jeannie Marshall, the article is an excerpt of her book The Lost Art of Feeding Kids: What Italy Taught Me about Why Children Need Real Food.
The titles are self-explanatory, and both pieces decry the loss of tradition, genuineness, and quality of what Italians produce, sell, and eat. The exposé on olive oil has touched a raw nerve among producers and consumers in Italy. That the sector needs reforms is clear to most, as proved by a new law safeguarding the quality of olive oil that was passed in January 2013, though the EU temporarily suspended its application. However, producers of high quality oil pointed out that general accusations actually hurt those who work well and make sure to distribute only high-quality products, such as the olive oils that carry the IGP mark (indicazione geografica protetta). This was, for instance, the position of Coldiretti Toscana, from the association of agricultural producers in Tuscany. Some Italian readers lamented how the illustration singles Naples out as the main port where the counterfeiting takes place, while others have interpreted the piece as an assault against “Made in Italy” products. If the food blog Dissapore admits that the attack is somehow well deserved, its readers have expressed more varied positions: anger at accusations coming from a country that many Italians feel has nothing to teach them about food; commiseration about corruption and politics in Italy; and critique of the EU policies that allow the place of bottling (rather than the origin of the olives) to be featured on labels.
The inspiration for Marshall’s Slate article is a visit to a pizzeria in Roma, where a waiter asked the writer’s son if he wanted Coke with his pizza, startling his mother and causing some family drama. Many readers — including myself and food historian Simone Cinotto, who commented on the Facebook page of the Association for the Study of Food and Society — found the article slightly passé as we all remember that we already drank Coke with our pizza when we were children, back in the 1960s. Italy has felt the effects of globalization on its food system from the early 20th century, but the arrival of many foreign — in particular American — products intensified during the economic miracle of the 1960s. Marshall states, “There’s an innocence here when it comes to these sugary drinks that reminds me of North America in the 1970s… In Italy sweet soft drinks are perceived as children’s drinks, and there’s an implicit trust that no one would make something for children that was actually bad for them.” Why should Italy be different from other post-industrial societies? I am afraid Italians have lost that innocence quite some time ago; children’s consumption of packaged, mass-produced snacks instead of homemade treats or fruits dates back to the 1970s. Most people are well aware that those foods have limited nutritional qualities and debates about changes in the Mediterranean diet and childhood obesity, which affects the population differently according to class, gender, age, and location, are frequent and far-reaching.
Food habits are changing in Italy for a variety of reasons, partly as a consequence of globalization, and partly as the result of inadequacies in the food system, often connected with the political and economic crisis in Italian society. A few days ago, the police closed 23 restaurants in Rome that were revealed to be money-laundering fronts for the camorra. Noted food writer Stefano Bonilli observed how the news did not seem to particularly upset the restaurant world, especially in the upper segment, which he considers a sign that resignation about the troubles with Italian food is now prevalent.
Not everybody is ready to surrender, though. For instance, Itchefs-GVCI, Virtual Group of Italian Chefs, has proclaimed January 17th as the International Day of Italian Cuisines, which started “as a reaction against the systematic forgery of Italian cuisine and products.” Italian culinary traditions are very popular worldwide. Attention to quality will be necessary to maintain this position in the future, but less sensationalist information would help to maintain a more accurate perception of Italian food.
An interview with Matthew J. Tilden, owner of SCRATCHbread.
by Jessica Sennett
Matthew J. Tilden lets his cooking speak for itself. SCRATCHbread, his grassroots style company located in Brooklyn, has developed an intense following serving what Tilden calls “jaw dropping deliciousness” out of a window on the corner of Bedford and Lexington Avenue. Customers stumble upon a continually evolving menu that he describes as “messy and fun,” one where he fuses eclectic handmade bread with tactile, bold dishes. The “Hot Meatball Sandwich,”which is served on a wheat butter roll encrusted with a Parmesan bottom, is bursting with ground meat, spices, and tomato gravy. His “VegFlat” showcases flatbread topped with colorful house made sauces, pickles, and seasonal organic produce. SCRATCH is a place for casual social gathering. Customers nosh on food at the outdoor standing counter or plop down on two rustic benches. The food is made to be eaten by hand in a moment of carnal glory.
After working for approximately 12 hours, I met Tilden at the kitchen door and on that balmy June Sunday, we wandered to a local bar for coffee and cocktails. Tilden has shied away from public attention, which, he insists, is part of his business philosophy. His food is about the relationship between “the cook” and “the customer”. In the past, he has refused to have his portrait taken in interviews, only featuring his hands and under forearm tattoo, where he branded himself with the company name as a permanent reminder of his ambitions.
Recently, however, Tilden has emerged into the public eye. The photographer Randy Duchaine, captured him in a series of photos exhibited at The Brooklyn Public Library called, Created in Brooklyn. Holding two loaves of Bourbon Wheat bread up to his face as shields, Tilden stares back at the viewer with one clear brown eye, revealing his brown beard and black cloth cap and tee. This is no ordinary baker feeding the surrounding Bed-Stuy community. This guy is pure ninja.
Tilden describes his business model as “anti-bottom line.” His initial inspiration for starting SCRATCH, he says, came from “working for assholes.” Frustrated by the lack of power the employees had been given in his previous high-end culinary jobs made him want to create a different style of food production. He highlighted his priorities on two stout fingers, “customer appreciation and control in the hands of the employees.”
The large “food workshop” kitchen space keeps the energy of the company focused on the vision of creating affordable, multi-dimensional, and nutrient packed feasts. “It’s all about the food, that’s the only thing that matters,” he expressed passionately.
Despite the fact that in the past, Tilden found baking too precise for his style of cooking, he was able to recognize bread and pastry as the perfect medium for his own fledgling company. Tilden brings an intuitive, handcrafted approach to the food he produces, starting – but not ending – with bread. He describes bread as “the world’s most modest superpower.” Any type of flour combined with salt, water, and yeast is the cheapest access point to the food revolution, a perfect platform for a businessman with no starting capital and loads of creative vision.
Tilden’s culinary perspective is deeply connected to his larger appreciation for artistic expression. As a former musician who discovered an empowered sense of self through singing and engaging with his audience, he views food as the most universal source of nourishment that ignites all of the senses. His goal is to blow the mind of the eater. “I see how people eat,” he says, “and working backwards, I concentrate on your reaction before I make the product.” From the beginning to end of the meal, Tilden views the culinary process as a deepening awareness. Through taste and texture, our expectation and perception interacts with our senses creating a passionate, visceral reality.
“Fuck the rules,” he advises intensely, staring me directly in the eye. This piece of advice beats at the heart of his satiating alchemical processes. For Tilden, it has been his intuitive gut and pure drive that has made his dream a reality.
Jessica Sennett is a freelance cheese educator and food project builder. She is using The New School to create a program combining food writing, the arts, and community development. To learn more about her cheese making ventures, you can visit: cheeseinthecity.com
Photo by Randy Duchaine.
by Fabio Parasecoli
A lull followed the appetizers.
Resting our exhausted jaws,
we savored the aftertaste
of sassy stoning
and lavish massacres.
The wing sauce smelled of hype:
cool cruisers in a bar,
gym bunnies on the loose,
with bogus business cards.
We seasoned our meal
with plenty of bitchy charm,
marinated
in the aloofness of pretension.
Shamans smirked
through algid masks.
We would have swallowed anything,
as long as it screamed style,
for sure the favorite fabric
to patch our yawning wounds.
Fabio Parasecoli is an Associate Professor and Coordinator of Food Studies at the School of Undergraduate Studies for The New School for Public Engagement. He also a Senior Editor of The Inquisitive Eater, and regular contributor to The Huffington Post.
Each month The Inquisitive Eater will feed you three (randomly chosen) food related words. In December, Eli Nunes gave us his science-fiction take with Migration.
Send us your original poetry, prose, or visual art that uses these words.
Shake them, spin them, turn them inside out.
Highlight them or tuck them into the crevices of your work and make us dig.
Play and we will publish our favorite submissions.
January’s Mix:
Pudding
Fritter
Fermented
(Send all submissions via Submittable. Put “The Monthly Mix” in the subject line. All work is limited to 500 words or less.)
By Gianmarc Manzione
I am the guy at work who packs octopus salad into his lunch bag as matter-of-factly as others pack Pizza Pockets, the guy who is as likely to heat leftover balsamic reduction in the lunchroom microwave as others are to heat a box of Lean Cuisine. Often, I wait until the lunchroom is empty before revealing my food, but occasionally a passing colleague will gawk at my repast with an expression of bemusement tinged with actual horror. Even so, it did not really occur to me that my culinary taste made me strange until the day someone spotted a single, raw mountain yam on my desk. (What can I say? I like popping a yam in the microwave now and then.)
At the time, I was holding down a day job writing features for something called the United States Bowling Congress. (Yes, the sport of bowling gets to have its own congress.) I was a poet mingling with a two-story office-load of bowlers; poetry is a passion best kept secret among a crowd like that, if you know what’s good for you.
My epicurean taste, too, was something I did my best to conceal. After all, bowling alleys are places where wings and beer comprise the sixth basic food group. Colleagues who saw me approaching the lunchroom from that moment forward often nudged each other and gossiped about the strange thing someone found on Gianmarc’s desk, a long, white, tubular object from the mountains that looks vaguely like a potato he swears you can eat. I soon earned the workplace nickname “Sweet Potato.”
I discovered the mountain yam while watching an episode of “Chopped” on The Food Network, the channel we have to thank for transforming the culinary arts into a steel cage match. I was disappointed to learn that mountain yams do not take well to microwaves. They develop a disagreeable consistency resembling some foul gruel of baby food and pillow stuffing. I later learned they are best eaten raw, shaved thinly for salads and such.
A mountain yam may not be something people turn to for advice, but it did teach me this: You can only hide who you are until somebody sees what you’re eating.
Gianmarc Manzione received his MFA in creative writing at The New School in 2004. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Paris Review, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. This Brevity, his debut collection of poetry, was published in paperback in 2006. Pin Action: Small-time Gangsters, High-stakes Gambling, and the Teenage Hustler who Became a Bowling Champion, is forthcoming from Pegasus Books in 2014.
Each month TIE highlights a contemporary poet who presents three poems and one personal essay in which food is consumed, passed over, or reckoned with. Gianmarc is our poet for December, 2013.
by Luis Jaramillo
Dana Goodyear is a staff writer at The New Yorker, a celebrated poet, and the author of the new book Anything That Moves: Renegade Chefs, Fearless Eaters, and the Making of a New American Food Culture. She recently visited The New School to have a conversation with Luis Jaramillo about writing, extreme eating, and the frontiers of food culture.
LJ: In Anything That Moves you write a lot about danger and death. Food is of course nourishment, but so many of the stories in the book have to do with people pushing themselves to eat something they don’t want to eat—because of bacteria in the food, because the food is a scorpion. There’s a lot of death having to do with animals, and you even write about eating live animals, so I guess my question is—
DG: What’s up with that?
LJ: What’s up with that?
DG: Lurking in our sense of pleasure in food is a sense of the risk that eating entails. My interest in this subject matter began with the observation that in this moment of great celebration around food, there a shadow side that often goes unnoticed. That tension interested me a lot. That’s the vague notion that I started with and the reason that I wanted to write about food at all. To see the “dangerous” and the “disgusting” be recast as sublime really interested me. There are a million stories you can tell about food that will delight and titillate people, but food as food has certain limitations as a subject matter. Food as a metaphor for culture is endlessly interesting.
LJ: In this book you’re looking at American food and Americans eating food from other countries. You’re not writing about deprivation even though you’re writing about food that comes from deprivation.
DG: So many of the foods that have been exalted as part of this new food movement really are the foods of poverty. I was curious about that. What does it say about how we feel about ourselves at this moment that we are slapping $250 price tags on tasting menus composed of ingredients that a starving person in the woods would eat as a measure of last resort? What’s fascinating is that chefs are telling us that this food is delicious and that it can be nourishing. But I also think it’s part of a larger resistance to industrialized food. In the effort to eliminate risk with a regulatory system, we have introduced all kinds of new risk. What this food movement seems to want to do—although people approach it in different ways and they don’t always agree—is to reintroduce risk into eating. There’s an attempt to roll back some of that regulation, and when the changes don’t come politically or legislatively, things happen under the radar. And people are excited about that. People are excited about doing something illegal with food, which I find really fascinating.
LJ: You’re also writing about the extremes of this movement. Like about the woman who really likes the “pooey” eggs.
DG: I went back and forth about including that quote many times.
LJ: I love it. It paints a picture, for sure. What is it about the people on the fringes of the food movement that drew you to them?
DG: They’re the vanguard, and they are influencing the mainstream. It’s dangerous to write about the future, because who wants to be wrong? But living in California you often feel that you’re on the cusp of something, and a lot of these stories are set in California. Writing about the extreme fringe allowed me to write about the future in the present, not to be making predictions, but to be saying, look, this is actually happening. Pig ears are already a cliché on menus and five years ago they were a real shocker. The ideas of the food avant garde are being absorbed by the mainstream much more quickly than before, maybe because of all the public enthusiasm for food, maybe because there’s been all this pent up desire for this kind of thing. A different kind of fear is starting to be the dominant fear. It’s not the fear of eating a certain part of an animal as much, but a fear of environmental collapse. What is this system that standardizes everything, that gives us big fat juicy steaks for every person every day of the week, what’s that going to do? It’s a matter of competing anxieties, and the anxiety about sustainability has become the dominant one.
LJ: You write a lot about meat, but you also have the great chapter about insects.
DG: The new meat. Eco meat.
LJ: What was the term you used? Small livestock?
DG: Mini livestock.
LJ: I love that term. Where did you get it?
DG: I read it in a scientific paper that was published in an entomology journal—entomologists had analyzed the protein content of insects. It’s so perfect, microgreens and mini livestock.
LJ: It makes insects sound appetizing.
DG: It really does, it sounds really cute.
LJ: Tiny little cows.
DG: When you grow up in America eating American-style, you have an instinctive negative reaction to the idea of eating bugs. That is generations deep and hard to overcome, but who can really argue that eating a cow is a much better idea, when you know how cows are typically raised? What makes eating a cow possible and appealing is all a matter of culture.
LJ: It’s culture but you have the great example of the kid who will eat the dragonfly’s head, but only if someone licks the mustard off of it for him.
DG: That might come from kid culture, which is to say, not yet afraid of insects but has been told that mustard is gross, or maybe his palate hadn’t developed to be able to accept the strident flavor of mustard. There is also individual taste to consider, and that is as various as individuals are various. But we do have these collective ideas, like we say “yech” if someone asks, “would you like to eat a worm?” And I would have said that too. But then I found out that worms are good.
LJ: You eat a lot of things over the course of this book. Whale. The balut [ed: partially developed duck embryos boiled alive and eaten from the shell]. Were you eating all these things because you were writing this book?
DG: I couldn’t be the guide I needed to be for my readers if I were not willing to try these things. But my own inhibitions were challenged. For one thing, I realized that I have them. I didn’t think I did. I didn’t think I was the most macho eater in the world, but I did think I would try anything once. I couldn’t eat the century egg—basically a rotten preserved egg—I just couldn’t eat it.
LJ: It’s cooked and then preserved?
DG: It’s traditionally packed in ash and then buried, not for a hundred years, but for a couple of weeks, and then it essentially ferments. It’s preserved but spoiled—you know that in between state? And I thought, I’ve got to do it, everyone’s watching me. I kind of faked it. I thought that that would be something I would never try. However. Three nights ago I was at an incredible restaurant in San Francisco called Benu, eating the tasting menu and the first thing on the menu was thousand-year-old quail egg in potage. It was absolutely delicious. The context contributed a lot—the potage, the ginger. The century egg was served in Styrofoam in the parking lot of a Chinese grocery store, and while that context was exciting and stimulating in other ways, there were no accompaniments to soften the blow. And it was much larger. [At Benu there] was just a little slice of it, it was more greyish. It was more a texture than a flavor, which was not unpleasant. So yes, there were moments in the reporting when I really discovered there are things I can’t eat. I also discovered there were things I’d be more than happy to eat. Ant eggs, for instance. I don’t like the way the term “ant eggs” sounds, and they’re not even the eggs, they’re the larvae and pupae, but when you say that it doesn’t sound better. Terminology can be important.
LJ: So if they’re escamoles [ed: the Spanish term] it’s better?
DG: Escamoles sounds much better.
LJ: One of the places you’re not able to eat is at the buffet hosted by Aajonus Vonderplantiz. It sounds really repulsive. It was just all raw, rotted meat?
DG: And a lot of raw dairy. Plates of raw meat. Some of it had been unrefrigerated for goodness knows how long, and then a lot of people were eating that with big hunks of the raw butter I brought. I didn’t want to eat any of it anyway, but because I was pregnant I didn’t feel comfortable eating any of it. Being pregnant was an interesting dimension, which I first thought of as this problem, as this thing I had to hide, both in the moment of reporting and in the writing. I didn’t want the book to be the story of a pregnant lady who goes extreme eating. But then I realized that it gave some stakes, and it made me more sensitive to the risks that were involved. It put me more in the mind frame of the average reader. I had this “say yes” policy—“try it once, it’s not going to kill you”—but the responsibility of being pregnant made me think twice about some things.
LJ: The book is made up of mostly profiles, but you enter into the book here and there. How did you decide when you were going to bring yourself to the forefront of the narrative?
DG: This is the eternal question. I tend to stay in the background. That’s how I’ve learned to report and how to write, and I had to really force myself into this story. My instinct is to hold up Exhibit A and Exhibit B and assume that everyone comes to the same conclusion that I do. I think that may explain why I’m attracted to poems, why I write poems. You let the white space do a lot of work for you. You don’t have to bridge everything for the reader. But when I put the book together, I gave it to a couple of friends, and the overwhelming response was, “this is kind of a scary world, and you’re nice, can you hold our hands and take us through this world?” The logical way of doing that was to use “I” a little bit more than I ordinarily would.
LJ: You spend a lot of time with people in the book. How do you keep track of everything? How do you synthesize it when you’re home with your recordings or notes?
DG: I often do both, make recordings and take notes. Some of it is practical. If I’m in a car with someone writing notes makes me carsick, so I have to have a tape recorder. It’s great to sit in the passenger’s seat while your subject drives. It’s a great way to get people talking. They’re in their car, they’re comfortable, you’re sitting in a spot reserved for friends. This is advice someone else gave me a long time ago, and now I pretend it’s my advice and I give it to other people. I think it’s useful to have a tape recorder for practical reasons, but I try not to rely on tape recorders because they can fail. And on a tape recorder, you’re not going to also say so it’s recorded “when he said that, his left eyebrow shot up in a funny way.” You can’t get the humanness. You can get the exact words, but it’s hard to really describe a person or make it sound like a real person if you don’t also have notes about their physical appearance, their behavior, and the air in the room. I think it’s pretty important. I write a lot, constantly, nervously, because I’m afraid I’ll come home and find I have nothing in my notebook. I go a little overboard, but then I have more to choose from. Unless I’m really pinched for time, or if I know [a subject] is going to be for pure information and not going to be a major figure I do the transcribing myself. That takes a long time. You rehear everything and you process it again differently. I make some sort of weird outline, ending up writing a section that has a bloated three thousand-word thing in the middle, and then I feel safe, something is on the page. I know where I’m beginning, and then the ending comes later. I spend a lot of my reporting time waiting for somebody to say the thing that crystalizes everything, because then I can go home.
LJ: You’re a poet—there’s a lot of really great language in this book. The prose is very clean but there are lots of great words, like chitinous, it sounds like what it is. You also include other people’s language, like the phrase, “the most organy, taily, nosy, brainy,” or the “cow butt flavor” of raw milk. There’s so much great, sharp language. Is that something you listen for?
DG: I’m listening for that rich, specific language. I feel like saying, “Thank you!” when I hear it. What’s fun about entering other people’s universes is that the language is totally different. And that’s where the authenticity comes from, other people’s beautiful, weird ways of describing the things that are ordinary to them. My job is to set up the interesting things that other people say and know. Even if now I know something about food, I’m still going into these specific sub realms I don’t know. My role is to understand what’s basically true and distill that for the reader and then set up the people who really are the authorities and really know what they’re talking about, or really don’t know what they’re talking and are funny because of that. I don’t see myself as a critic passing judgment on these foods, these restaurants, these worlds. I see myself as more of a stage mother, [claps] “Come on everybody, gather around. Now you go, because you’re going to say something really great right now.” Hopefully it’s an entertaining play for the audience.
LJ: Writing an essay is different than writing a book. How did you put these pieces together?
DG: I struggled with it. For a New Yorker story, the shape of a story has to be fairly well understood before you even embark on it: who the characters are, why these characters, why the reader cares, why does the reader need to read this next week. I knew I wanted to explore the subject of meat but I couldn’t go to The New Yorker and say, “Meat. I want to report meat.” But the reporting for the book was different because I could enter a subject and wander around in it. Being untethered was sometimes nerve wracking. The question of how to frame it perplexed me until the book was due. To make an arc the narrative had to be inclusive enough so that these very varied worlds could exist under its protective shape. After I’d been reporting long enough, I realized that this really is a little world. I started running into my subjects unexpectedly. That gave me confidence that the arc this wasn’t going to be a false arc. These people really do belong together, and they really are carving out a new way of eating.
LJ: You live in LA and report in LA. The book is a really great portrait of LA’s vast diversity.
DG: There’s so much going on there. The LA attitude toward food is becoming the prevalent attitude toward food. Its geographical location and the influence of the immigrants that live there with their cultures preserved intact is a big part of it. Jonathan Gold has charted a lot of that territory. People haven’t traditionally thought of LA as a food city, but it is a future food city. It’s a bit the Blade Runner thing, but it’s also a landscape of undiluted original cultures living side by side. The chefs working in LA tend to be really experimental. They’re not burdened by the sense that LA is a great food city and they have to make it there. They’re free because of the low opinion that New York and Chicago and San Francisco have had of LA food. There’s not a prevailing European tradition there. It’s got a Wild West aspect to it. I’m interested in the people who are defying the prevailing norms, and breaking some rules, and doing things that other people haven’t thought to do. And being really radically open when it comes to what they think of as food.
LJ: One of the personal narratives that emerges is about what you will eat and not eat—I mean you, personally—and you formulate some rules at the end of the book. You’ll try anything once, but you don’t want to be the first person to eat something ever, and you don’t want to be the lasDG: I had to question what I had done—my bounderish adventurism in eating the whale. I didn’t know enough to make that choice. Maybe it’s an endless problem. Would I eliminate all food options for myself if I knew everything about every aspect of risk, both microbiological and macro ecological? What would I be left eating? Each person has to find her own way in the world with this. When I learned what I learned about whales I realized I’d made an irresponsible decision. I’d made a polite decision, an I’m-a-traveller-up-for-anything decision. But I didn’t know what kind of species it was. It was probably minke because that is what usually is served in Iceland. I didn’t know the relative population health of minke or anything like that, so I did come to that rule. It’s complicated, though. The cultural norms about whale eating have shifted completely in a very short span of time. The righteousness with which someone would say “oh my gosh you ate whale,” is pretty false, because if you go back fifty years, our government is telling us to eat whale, and our government is telling the Japanese to eat whale. Now we prosecute Japanese chefs who serve it here.
LJ: I like how you say that there is a fair amount of xenophobia in even the idea that whale is taboo.
DG: There is. We have such a short memory for these things. However, that’s not a reason to eat something that might be an endangered species. And it wasn’t even good.
LG: I love the chapter that starts with neophilia and neophobia, “loving and fearing the new.”
DG: Those responses are built into being human. We are curious about food. Novelty and food have always gone hand and hand. We are almost hard wired for food fads; there’s a biological drive there, a survival instinct to find something new to eat. The fear is self-protection. As an eater, I’m stimulated by new things—hence my “say yes” policy. But there are some risks that are too burdensome. Like the tailless whip scorpion. There’s no history of eating the thing. I’m interested in eating new things because they expose me to new cultures, not eating things that have never been eaten. A culinary tradition is a good thing.
LJ: You wouldn’t have balut again.
DG: No.
LJ: Oof, that description of something that felt like a soft tooth when you were chewing.
DG: It was so horrible. Horrible. I did think that it was kind of the perfect food. You know exactly what it is, you haven’t been alienated from the source. It’s a complete meal. It’s convenient. I couldn’t eat for the rest of the day. If I were on a diet I would make myself eat a balut every other day. After eating it I really was full all day, full physically and full mentally.
LJ: It doesn’t worry you to eat brains?
DG: I know it’s not a great idea, the calves’ brains. I don’t like eating brains, but I haven’t tuned into my anxiety about the pathology. I’m tuned into my anxiety about the injustice of it. It just feels wrong. I have an emotional reaction to it. That was one of the big lessons about this research. People do have emotional reactions to things. And you can’t think your way out of all of them.
Luis Jaramillo is the Co-Editor-in-Chief of The Inquisitive Eater and the Interim Director of the School of Writing at The New School. His is the author of The Doctor’s Wife, a book of short stories.
The Inquisitive Eater fed you three randomly chosen food related words; couscous, dough, and peas. One of our best responses was the science-fiction short by Eli Nunes.
Migration
Dr. Salma Azoulay leaned lightly against a small, circular window. Beyond it lay the dark void speckled with promises and possibilities. One sphere loomed larger than the rest. Home. When she saw it, she wanted to feel memories of her family smiling and laughing over a glass of wine and a bowl of couscous with butternut squash. She wanted to see the sun rise over Earth and to appreciate how few have held this miraculous view of their planet. She could not.
All Salma could see when she looked up were melting ice caps, receding forests, plagues, and starvation.
Climate change, deforestation, genetic homogenization of agriculture; there were eight billion people on Earth and with less food and space than ever before. Already, the average family fought to find enough wheat to make dough.
She turned her gaze downwards. Humanity’s resignation lay before her and it manifested in a final collaboration to build hope for the future. The International Agricultural Moon Base stretched out on either side of the window with its gray tunnels like fingers to the dozens of greenhouses it connected and served.
“Soon, Earth will not be able support our people,” Salma remembered the UN Secretary General’s address to her crew not a full week prior. “You and your team are our only hope. If there’s no life for us out there,” the Secretary pointed to the stars, “there’s no life for us anywhere.”
Salma turned away and left the window to tour the IAMB’s greenhouses for the umpteenth time that day. Since they had arrived on the moon and sown their first seeds, Salma had barely slept a wink. She was too anxious. Earth was a lost cause. Humanity’s future depended on her team proving they could farm on their moon base. If humanity had a future, it lay among the stars.
Greenhouse Alpha appeared as she had left it. Dozens of rows of three by ten foot soil planters lined the floor. Salma loathed the blank brown stuff. She used to love soil for all it magically produced. But after less than a week, she couldn’t stand its sight. Every granule of the artificially nutrient rich dirt was a testament that nothing had yet grown. She feared the unpunctuated brown was as barren as the planet it had come from. Limply, she placed her hands in her pockets and paced around the greenhouse, searching for any sign of hope. She thought of Earth as she ambled, glad the rest of her species lived blissfully unaware that the moon-crops were not yielding.
Salma stopped in her tracks. She almost couldn’t believe what she saw. A break in the brown. She collapsed to the floor and knelt by the infantile flora, caressing it with a finger.
“Peas!” Salma laughed with relief as tear rolled down her cheek.
Eli Nunes is a lover of science fiction in all forms and is excited to begin a journey of contributing to the science fiction community with his first publication “Migration”. He graduated magna cum laude from the University of Massachusetts Amherst with a degree in Political Science in 2011 and now works as a Sales Engineer for a small software company in Boston.
Days of 2003
That year he, too, finds himself
out of work, but the smell of oysters and garlic
lunging toward his open window
from Mulberry Street at night is unmistakable and good.
And the several dollars a day he makes peddling paperbacks
in the street are enough, at least,
to buy the bowl of broth he likes to drink on the steps
in the evening, watching the news building’s digital crawl
wreathe the city in rumors of disorder and a falling dollar,
the mercuric bay rosed over at sundown.
Though that isn’t why he’s knotting a tie
for the mirror now, his polyester pants,
several inches too long, pooling over his shoes.
If the greased fingers he sends through his hair almost smell of balsam,
if he again adjusts the handkerchief in his left breast pocket
to show more splendidly, it is for no one in particular.
These gestures are a tribute to talk he’s heard
of what is needed to amend a year’s disfavor,
of a random kindness in the streets—
the sort that comes to a young man
whose father’s high school ring jangles
against the dime in his pocket—
the soapy sheen of his fingernails,
a notion of better things to come.
Gianmarc Manzione received his MFA in creative writing at The New School in 2004. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Paris Review, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. This Brevity, his debut collection of poetry, was published in paperback in 2006. Pin Action: Small-time Gangsters, High-stakes Gambling, and the Teenage Hustler who Became a Bowling Champion, is forthcoming from Pegasus Books in 2014.
Each month TIE highlights a contemporary poet who presents three poems and one personal essay in which food is consumed, passed over, or reckoned with. Gianmarc is our poet for December, 2013.