Animal, Vegetable, Miracle_ A Year of Food Life - Barbara Kingsolver [17]
A handful of creative chefs have been working for years to establish this incipient notion of a positive American food culture—a cuisine based on our own ingredients. Notable pioneers are Alice Waters of Chez Panisse in San Francisco, and Rick Bayless of Chicago’s Frontera Grill, along with cookbook maven Deborah Madison. However, to the extent that it’s even understood, this cuisine is widely assumed to be the property of the elite. Granted, in restaurants it can sometimes be pricey, but the do-it-yourself version is not. I am not sure how so many Americans came to believe only our wealthy are capable of honoring a food aesthetic. Anyone who thinks so should have a gander at the kitchens of working-class immigrants from India, Mexico, anywhere really. Cooking at home is cheaper than buying packaged foods or restaurant meals of comparable quality. Cooking good food is mostly a matter of having the palate and the skill.
The main barrier standing between ourselves and a local-food culture is not price, but attitude. The most difficult requirements are patience and a pinch of restraint—virtues that are hardly the property of the wealthy. These virtues seem to find precious little shelter, in fact, in any modern quarter of this nation founded by Puritans. Furthermore, we apply them selectively: browbeating our teenagers with the message that they should wait for sex, for example. Only if they wait to experience intercourse under the ideal circumstances (the story goes), will they know its true value. “Blah blah blah,” hears the teenager: words issuing from a mouth that can’t even wait for the right time to eat tomatoes, but instead consumes tasteless ones all winter to satisfy a craving for everything now. We’re raising our children on the definition of promiscuity if we feed them a casual, indiscriminate mingling of foods from every season plucked from the supermarket, ignoring how our sustenance is cheapened by wholesale desires.
Waiting for the quality experience seems to be the constitutional article that has slipped from American food custom. If we mean to reclaim it, asparagus seems like a place to start. And if the object of our delayed gratification is a suspected aphrodisiac? That’s the sublime paradox of a food culture: restraint equals indulgence.
On a Sunday in early April we sat at the kitchen table putting together our grocery list for the coming week. The mood was uncharacteristically grave. Normally we all just penciled our necessities onto a notepad stuck onto the fridge. Before shopping, we’d consolidate our foraging plan. The problem now was that we wanted to be a different kind of animal—one that doesn’t jump the fence for every little thing. We kept postponing our start date until the garden looked more hospitable, but if we meant to do this for a whole year, we would have to eat in April sooner or later. We had harvested and eaten asparagus now, twice. That was our starting gun: ready, set…ready?
Like so many big ideas, this one was easier to present to the board of directors than the stockholders. Our family now convened around the oak table in our kitchen; the milk-glass farmhouse light above us cast a dramatic glow. The grandfather clock ticked audibly in the next room. We’d fixed up our old house in the architectural style known as recycling: we’d gleaned old light fixtures, hardware, even sinks and a bathtub from torn-down buildings; our refrigerator is a spruced-up little 1932 Kelvinator. It all gives our kitchen a comfortable lived-in charm, but at the moment it felt to me like a set where I was auditioning for a part in either Little House on the