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“I know what you ate last summer…And the summer before that, And the summer before that…”

Posted on August 19th, 2013

Grapes that gush – with cotton candy? Melons that melt – into lemonade? This universe is more diverse For cousins bred and heirlooms saved.       For school, I took a big red apple. Delicious? Once, but now no more. And then Pink Lady turned my head; The doctor’s advice again is sure.       Get thee to a local garden – Plant a seed, and watch it grow – Then savor the flavor of all your efforts! (The monocrop’s a dinosaur.)

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A Job Well Done

Posted on August 19th, 2013

The sun is hot, but not heavy. I can feel my skin heating up, first warm to the touch, but then hot. Every bit of exposed skin is tingling, tightening. Soon I will burn. My face starts to sweat. I can feel it running down my neck, leaving trails in the dirt like an old map. My hands are working furiously. Gently, each branch needs to be lifted, pinching between the thorns. The ripe berries hang, weighing down the branches. They stain my fingers. I pick as quickly as I can, it seems like they are ripening faster than I can pick. Soon the bucket is full. Heavy. Rich with possibility. By the time I get home my heart is pounding. My hands are…

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Brief History

Posted on August 19th, 2013

I. The fish is not large enough. It is black and nearly round, and then other colors when it lands, spines out, in my palm, and we have killed it anyway. It drifts cockeyed beneath the cement that makes up this small bridge. The road is dusty. I lie down on my stomach, and stretch a still pale arm, a burning back, down to catch the body as it makes its way into the tunnel. It slips against my fingers. Don’t tell anyone, you say, laughing, and I say that I won’t, only now, I have. The beer smell won’t leave my water bottle for a month. The sunburn goes, after two days. The bruised plum that I eat in the hot car on…

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Howard

Posted on August 19th, 2013

[The Fourth of July.  A suburban backyard, two hours before sundown.  Mismatched Sedans and SUVs line the ring of the Cul-De-Sac in front of the house.  About two dozen adults sip canned beer from cozies and participate in conversations of as many as six and as few as one other adult.  Roughly the same number of children run zig-zag patterns and yell wordlessly throughout the yard, portions of the adjacent yards, and the Cul-De-Sac.  Two plastic washtubs, one filled with beercans floating in water that was ice not long ago, the other likewise but with soda, sit in the sun next to a worn wooden deck, slowly growing warmer.  An arm’s length away sits a slightly rusted charcoal grill, the white-grey ash collected in…

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Portland, Oregon: Creation Myth of a Culinary Darling

Posted on July 19th, 2013

  (Adapted from the upcoming Portland: A Food Biography [Fall 2014])   The infant city called The Clearing was a bald patch amid a stuttering wood. The Clearing was no booming metropolis, no destination for gastrotourists, no career-changer for ardent chefs — just awkward, palsied steps toward Victorian gentility. In the decades before the remaining trees were scraped from the landscape, however, Portland’s wood was still a verdant breadbasket, overflowing with huckleberries and chanterelles, venison leaping on cloven hoof.   “The surroundings of the city were … still wild, and the shattered forests seemed excessively rude, having no more the grace and stateliness of nature, and having not yet given away altogether to the reign of art,” recalled newspaperman and historian Harvey Whitefield Scott…

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In The Beginning

Posted on July 19th, 2013

* Dog goes down to the water in the blank  heat of the middle part of the day and sits. The air is open-palmed and slow across the back of her neck, and the grass chews itself down into the sand at the top of the bank. Dog is not her real name, but it is the one that she has been given at camp. Camp waits on the other side of the meadow, and it is all tanned, tall, smooth-limbed counselors. It is clipboards that trail long comets of embroidery floss, woven into bracelets for people that are not her. When the sun reached its whitest eye, Dog had taken her plastic bag of warming carrots and the smooth sweat of her one…

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Roll of Mustard, Hear My Cry

Posted on July 19th, 2013

I am in a major first romance. I am 36 years old: a stock-taking point in life. A point at which you begin to understand the broad contours of the things you will and will not have: the career as it has taken shape, the dreams as they have fallen away, the places you have visited but will probably never see again. I have time, I know this. But I don’t have all of the time. I don’t have the forever time of childhood, or the joking—when will she grow up?—time of teenage years. I don’t even have the experimental stretch that is so much the residue and the requirement of being in your twenties, or even the early thirties.   No—36 is something…

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The Unfinished History of You and How You Ate

Posted on July 17th, 2013

In the beginning, you drank milk. It came from your mother or maybe from a powder. You drank it and you burped and you spit it up. You learned to breathe and eat at the same time, and your parents were overwhelmed with love. There was love, and you drank it. In time, you learned to eat soft, bland things, and you developed tastes. You liked sweet potatoes and bananas. You reached for things your parents ate, and you tried to put food into your mouth with your own hands, which sometimes worked. For the next long while, things progressed in a rather straight-forward way. You started eating like a full-grown human, small bites and then large ones,and the vast majority of the time…

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Eating Like a Narcissist: An Introduction

Posted on July 17th, 2013

Stetson’s 17 Branson Ave. Boise, Idaho 83705 (555) 555-7869 Price Range: $$$ REVIEWS: Jenna M. Chicago, IL * * – – – “Should have known it would be a bad sign when we walked in at eight on a Tuesday and they told us it would be a 45 minute wait (I could see empty tables). Never mind that it was their opening night. Hubby gets grouchy when his blood sugar is low, so night got started off on a bad foot. We FINALLY got seated and had to wait ANOTHER five minutes for our waiter to finally show up. He was some kind of foreign and it was very hard to understand him (which he did NOTHING to alleviate). They only had a…

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An Account of the First Annual Estero, Florida Billybon Festival, and What Occurred There

Posted on July 17th, 2013

FRIDAY 7am: Representatives from the Estero Chamber of Commerce and The Estero Billybon Society (formed two years prior by a group of older-aged Estero ladies enthusiastic about preserving the recipe for Billybons, an orb-shaped dessert item, roughly the size of a golf ball, comprised mainly of brown sugar and orange juice- a traditional (i.e. invented sometime in the late 1960’s by a woman named Eva St. Clair) Estero dish, though largely forgotten within the town and virtually unheard of outside) arrive at the Lee County Fairgrounds to begin setup. The aim of the event is to promote the idea that Estero is the site of a rich and historic culture, meriting tourism and emblemized by, of course, the Billybon. The main tent stretches from…

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