The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [140]
In his chapter Brillat-Savarin draws a sharp distinction between the pleasures of eating—“the actual and direct sensation of a need being satisfied,” a sensation we share with the animals—and the uniquely human “pleasures of the table.” These consist of “considered sensations born of the various circumstances of fact, things, and persons accompanying the meal”—and comprise for him one of the brightest fruits of civilization. Every meal we share at a table recapitulates this evolution from nature to culture, as we pass from satisfying our animal appetites in semisilence to the lofting of conversational balloons. The pleasures of the table begin with eating (and specifically with eating meat, in Brillat-Savarin’s view, since it was the need to cook and apportion meat that first brought us together to eat), but they can end up anywhere human talk cares to go. In the same way that the raw becomes cooked, eating becomes dining.
All such transformations were very much on my mind that evening, coming at the end of a week of farmwork that had put me in much closer touch with the biology of eating than the art. The line from composting chicken guts to gastronomy is almost unimaginably long, but there is a line. While we talked and waited for the soufflé to complete its magic rise, the smell of baking chocolate seeped out of the kitchen and filled the house. When at last I told Willie the time had come to open the oven, cross your fingers, I saw his smile blossom first, then the great crown of soufflé puffing out from the cinched white waist of its dish. Triumph!
Here was the most improbable transformation of all. There’s something wondrous about any soufflé, how a half dozen eggs flavored by nothing more than sugar and chocolate can turn into something so ethereally Other. Soufflé, “to blow,” comes from the Latin word for breath, of course, in recognition of the air that a soufflé mostly is. But soufflé has a spiritual sense, too, as in the breath of life (in English the word “spirit” comes from breath), which seems fitting, for isn’t the soufflé as close as cookery ever comes to elevating matter into spirit?
This particular soufflé was good, not great; its texture was slightly grainier than it should be, which makes me think I may have beaten the eggs a little too long. But it tasted wonderful, everyone agreed, and as I rolled the rich yet weightless confection on my tongue, I closed my eyes and suddenly there they were: Joel’s hens, marching down the gangplank from out of their Eggmobile, fanning out across the early morning pasture, there in the grass where this sublime bite began.
III
PERSONAL
THE FOREST
FIFTEEN
THE FORAGER
1. SERIOUS PLAY
There was one more meal I wanted to make, and that was the meal at the end of the shortest food chain of all. What I had in mind was a dinner prepared entirely from ingredients I had hunted, gathered, and grown myself. Now, there are some people (though not all that many of them anymore) for whom such a radically self-made meal exists firmly in the realm of possibility. I am not one of them. The growing part was the only part I knew I could handle. I’ve been a gardener most of my life, and have made countless meals from my garden. These included no animal protein, however, and I had decided that this meal should feature representatives of all three edible kingdoms: animal, vegetable, and fungi. I was about as ill prepared to hunt the former and gather the latter as an eater could possibly be.
I had never hunted in my life. Indeed, I had never fired a gun loaded with anything more lethal than caps. Being a somewhat accident-prone