Animal, Vegetable, Miracle_ A Year of Food Life - Barbara Kingsolver [123]
“Sorry,” I said. I put the bulbs back in the box.
I confess to a ludicrous flair for last-minute projects before big events. I moved nine cubic yards of topsoil the day before going into labor with my first child. (She was overdue, so yes, I was trying.) On the evening of my once-in-a-lifetime dinner at the White House with President and Mrs. Clinton, my hands were stained slightly purple because I’d been canning olives the day before. I have hoed, planted, and even butchered poultry in the hours before stepping onstage for a fund-raising gala. Some divas get a manicure before a performance; I just try to make sure there’s nothing real scary under my fingernails. My mother raised children who feel we need to earn what this world means to give us. When I sat back and relaxed on the flight to Rome, I left behind a spit-shined kitchen, a year’s harvest put away, and some unplanted garlic. I’d live with it.
With the runway of the Leonardo da Vinci airport finally in sight and our hearts all set for andiamo, at the last possible moment the pilot aborted our landing. Wind shear, he announced succinctly. We circled Rome, flying low over ruddy September fields, tile-roofed farmhouses, and paddocks enclosed by low stone walls. The overnight flight had gone smoothly, but now I had ten extra minutes to examine my second thoughts. Would this trip be everything we’d waited for? Could I forget about work and the kids, indulging in the luxury of hotels and meals prepared by someone else?
Finally the nose cone tipped down and our 767 roared low over a plowed field next to the airport. Drifting in the interzone between waiting and beginning, suspended by modern aerodynamics over an ancient field of pebbled black soil, I found myself studying freshly turned furrows and then the farmer himself. A stone’s throw from the bustle of Rome’s international airport, this elderly farmer was plowing with harnessed draft horses. For reasons I didn’t really understand yet, I thought: I’ve come home.
I am Italian by marriage: both Steven’s maternal grandparents were born there, emigrating as young adults. His mother and aunts grew up in an Italian-speaking home, deeply identified with the foodways and all other ways of the mother country. Steven has ancestors from other parts of the world too, but we don’t know much about them. It’s my observation that when Italian genes are present, all others duck and cover. His daughter looks like the apple that fell not very far from the olive tree; when asked, Lily identifies herself as American and invariably adds, “but really I’m Italian.”
After arriving on the ancestral soil I figured out pretty quickly why that heritage swamps all competition. It’s a culture that sweeps you in, sits you down in the kitchen, and feeds you so well you really don’t want to leave. In the whole of Italy we could not find a bad meal. Not that we were looking. But a spontaneous traveler inevitably will end up with the tummy gauge suddenly on empty, in some place where cuisine is not really the point: a museum cafeteria, or late-night snack bar across from the concert hall.
Eating establishments where cuisine isn’t the point—is that a strange notion? Maybe, but in the United States we have them galore: fast-food joints where “fast” is the point; cafeterias where it’s all about efficient caloric load; sports bars where the purported agenda is “sports” and the real one is to close down the arteries to the diameter of a pin. In most airport restaurants the premise is “captive starving audience.” In our country it’s a reasonable presumption that unless you have gone out of your way to find good food, you’ll be settling for mediocre at best.
What we discovered in Italy was that if an