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Posts from the “Food History and Comestible Narratives” Category

Secret Handshake

Posted on May 17th, 2013

I’ve spent no small amount of time feeling that I needed to be more rooted to the here and now.  That my life was something that I was constantly sliding off of. Life as greased pig. I’d fling myself on top of it, only to have it run squealing for the fences again. Half of the time I’d feel the sharp loss, and the other half of the time I’d want to sit back on my haunches in the mud, light up a cigarette, and say ‘fuck you too, mister.’   Farming, in my mind, had always seemed a sure-bet way to anchor oneself to the present. There’s nothing more immediate, after all, than dirt, than weather, bare and uncaring. The last time I…

Categories: 16, Food History and Comestible Narratives, Issues

Protect the Freshness is Over

Posted on May 17th, 2013

If you’re living in China and just barely working out an income from freelance projects, you might take a job doing voiceovers for propaganda films. A string of hours in a Beijing recording booth can earn you fifty, maybe sixty dollars. You can take breaks and they’ll give you lunch. There will be bottled tea. Afterward, you will walk out into the spring air with a new sense of wealth and possibility, financially settled for another week and able to forget what you had just done. I spent a year doing the odd English voiceover for Chinese Communist Party films. In 2006 I worked on a crushing celebration of Tibetan agricultural practices. “The women do all the cooking and cleaning, which is their pleasure,”…

Categories: 16, Food History and Comestible Narratives, Issues

Asparagus officinalis

Posted on May 17th, 2013

Asparagus is a pretty funny thing, when you really think about it. I’ve heard it’s some sort of grass, which makes sense when you see the way it grows. Individual stalks poke up from beneath the dirt, sometimes clumped together with others but mainly striking out on their own, a single minaret growing to seemingly impossible heights. There’s no foliage between the stalks, as one might expect with other plants, just dirt and these towering green fingers. With each day, each hour, practically each minute you can see the stalks reach further toward the sky, making it look appear more like some sort of subterranean being poking up probes to test a new and alien aboveground environment. In a home garden, asparagus is really…

Categories: 16, Food History and Comestible Narratives, Issues

Potatoes, Comrade

Posted on May 17th, 2013

Like a dog who thinks he’s people, I was a child who thought he was an adult. This presented a conflict, growing up in a working class Moscow neighborhood where most of the children spent their free time beating each other up in schoolyards and in a large field, seeded with broken glass and dog excrement, an enormous heating plant looming over the proceedings. This hell continued until we left Russia when I was nine years old. (Growing up the rest of the way in a lower middle class neighborhood in Brooklyn presented a whole other kind of hell, at least until I hit high school age.) School was my least favorite place to be; I preferred spending time alone with my encyclopedias and…

Categories: 16, Food History and Comestible Narratives, Issues

Taproot

Posted on May 17th, 2013

I’ve roamed and rambled and I followed my footsteps To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts; And all around me a voice was sounding: This land was made for you and me. – Woody Guthrie   I grew up in a small New England town, in the same house all my life, so I always thought I had a good sense of what makes a place a home. Apart from the relative seasonal changes of spring to winter, the scenery didn’t change much and there was a comfort in that. Until one day, in the farmhouse bathroom of a woman I hardly knew, I went to wash my hands and I spotted her soap. It was large and yellow and covered in dirt.…

Categories: 16, Food History and Comestible Narratives, Issues

Worm Castings and Cat Pee: Journal of a Newbie Gardener

Posted on May 17th, 2013

My one adult experience with gardening occurred about 8 years ago. We were living in an apartment complex a few miles away from where I went to college. Each unit had a small plot of dirt in front of it which most of our neighbors filled with cheery aster mums or hyacinth bulbs. For ours, I decided on a row of fun (and functional) pumpkin plants.   Unemployed and in need of a project, I nurtured the pumpkins from seed to plant with loving care. Eventually they flowered and, the very next morning, the complex’s maintenance crew came by and mowed them down with a weedwacker. We left the plot barren for the remainder of the time we lived there and never returned to…

Categories: 16, Food History and Comestible Narratives, Issues

Family Common Eats

Posted on March 18th, 2013

In the winter of 2005, I took a job as a research reporter for the New York Times Beijing bureau. The capital was blustery and bitter cold, coming off another long haul winter. A fresh round of yellow dust kicked up across the city.  Each month the Times paid me 5000 yuan, or roughly $620 at the time. Rent was 2000 yuan. 3000 yuan left. One yuan would get me around on the buses. Three yuan bought a ride on the subway. Taxis were in the double digits, plus tip.  Walking was free. But walking makes you hungry. So five yuan was enough to buy a full breakfast with soymilk. Twenty yuan, by contrast, was not enough to get a small latte. You plot…

Categories: 14, Food History and Comestible Narratives, Issues

Oh Canada!

Posted on March 18th, 2013

When I was young, my best friend and I were inseparable. From the age of 5 we spent almost every day together, and as we grew older I was invited to practically every family vacation or event.  Seders, visiting the cousins in the woods in Virginia, grandma’s house in Indiana, Christmas parties, and then, when we were maybe 11 or 12, Canada! We had spent many hours together in the way back of her parents’ station wagon- you remember those rear-facing seats? watching the miles fly by, reading or gossiping or napping, on to the next stop. But Canada!  We were going to leave the country! This was a big deal! We would start out in Montreal and spend a few days there, and…

Categories: 14, Food History and Comestible Narratives, Issues

Cherimoya

Posted on March 18th, 2013

Listen to the lady at the produce stand.   It’s 8am on a Saturday morning. You arrived in Maui the night before on a flight too late to be believed, drove the length of the island from north to south under a starry sky brighter than you could have imagined. Your boyfriend put the radio on reggae and rolled the windows down, because that’s what you do when you’re driving a long, straight road in the dark through fields of sugar cane that cast long, moon-lit shadows on the road and you want to be absolutely sure that this place with the palm trees is Hawaii and not some Inception-substrate dream that you’ll soon wake from to find you’re actually still in Alaska, shivering…

Categories: 14, Food History and Comestible Narratives, Issues

Blood, Guts, And All The Rest

Posted on March 18th, 2013

“Saturday is gringo day,” our hostel owner told us. “Prices too high, too many tourists. Don’t go Saturday.” We were headed to Otavalo, Ecuador, for its famous Saturday market day. People mainly go there for that, hundreds of tourists streaming in to buy hand-knit caps shaped like cartoon characters, Technicolor alpaca sweaters, and “hand-carved” wooden replicas of Machu Picchu (yes, the one in Peru) to put on their mantles or to give to coworkers and pet-sitters. Over the years enough tourists showed up that now every day of the week the central plaza is clogged with souvenirs and mass-produced Andean tchotchkes, but Saturdays are still the big show. On Saturdays the entire town turns into a market, stalls and street vendors snaking through the streets…

Categories: 14, Food History and Comestible Narratives, Issues