A Cook's Tour_ In Search of the Perfect Meal - Anthony Bourdain [125]
‘No. Never,’ replied every single one of them. ‘I’ve never felt so healthy in my life.’
It was difficult for me to be polite (though I was outnumbered). I’d recently returned from Cambodia, where a chicken can be the difference between life and death. These people in their comfortable suburban digs were carping about cruelty to animals but suggesting that everyone in the world, from suburban Yuppie to starving Cambodian cyclo driver, start buying organic vegetables and expensive soy substitutes. To look down on entire cultures that’ve based everything on the gathering of fish and rice seemed arrogant in the extreme. (I’ve heard of vegans feeding their dogs vegetarian meals. Now that’s cruelty to animals.) And the hypocrisy of it all pissed me off. Just being able to talk about this issue in reasonably grammatical language is a privilege, subsidized in a yin/yang sort of a way, somewhere, by somebody taking it in the neck. Being able to read these words, no matter how stupid, offensive, or wrongheaded, is a privilege, your reading skills the end product of a level of education most of the world will never enjoy. Our whole lives – our homes, the shoes we wear, the cars we drive, the food we eat – are all built on a mountain of skulls. Meat, say the PETA folks, is ‘murder.’ And yes, the wide world of meat eating can seem like a panorama of cruelty at times. But is meat ‘murder’? Fuck no.
Murder, as one of my Khmer pals might tell you, is what his next-door neighbor did to his whole family back in the seventies. Murder is what happens in Cambodia, in parts of Africa, Central and South America, and in former Soviet republics when the police chief’s idiot son decides he wants to turn your daughter into a whore and you don’t like the idea. Murder is what Hutus do to Tutsis, Serbs to Croats, Russians to Uzbeks, Crips to Bloods. And vice versa. It’s black Chevy Suburbans (which, more than likely, US taxpayers paid for) pulling up outside your house at three in the morning and dragging away your suspiciously unpatriotic and overopinionated son. Murder is what that man sitting across from you in Phnom Penh does for a living – so he can afford a satellite dish for his roof, so he can watch our Airwolf reruns, MTV Asia, and Pam Anderson running in slow motion down a Southern California beach.
Hide in your fine homes and eat vegetables, I was thinking. Put a Greenpeace or NAACP bumper sticker on your Beemer if it makes you feel better (so you can drive your kids to their all-white schools). Save the rainforest – by all means – so maybe you can visit it someday, on an ecotour, wearing comfortable shoes made by twelve-year-olds in forced labor. Save a whale while millions are still sold into slavery, starved, fucked to death, shot, tortured, forgotten. When you see cute little kids crying in rubble next to Sally Struthers somewhere, be sure to send a few dollars.
Damn! I was going to try and be nice.
But then, I wasn’t in San Francisco to be nice. I wasn’t there to investigate, experience, or explain the full sweep of NoCal culture and cuisine, to bring enlightenment or illumination or a new perspective to a complex and interesting subject. I was in the region for one reason and one reason alone: to eat at the French Laundry.
I was worried about this part of the jaunt. Even getting a reservation at the Laundry can be a lengthy and difficult process, and the prospect of chef/owner Thomas Keller allowing me, Mr Obnoxious Don’t Eat Fish on Monday, to eat in his dining room at short notice – while a camera crew shot the kitchen and dining room during service – seemed doubtful. Keller, very likely America’s greatest homegrown chef, had, as I pointed out in an E-mail to him, absolutely nothing to gain by allowing my spiteful presence through his doors. A journeyman knucklehead like me was hardly going to dazzle or impress. Instead, I threw myself cravenly at his mercy, pleaded for any consideration I could get: Professional courtesy? Curiosity? Pity?