The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [200]
I would cook the meal myself.
As the rules suggest, the meal was a conceit—an ambitious, possibly foolhardy, and, I hoped, edible conceit. My aim in attempting it, as should be obvious, was not to propose hunting and gathering and growing one’s own food as an answer to any question larger than the modest ones I started out with: Would it be possible to prepare such a meal, and would I learn anything of value—about the nature or culture of human eating—by doing so? I certainly don’t mean to suggest that anyone else should try this at home, or that a return to finding and producing our own food is a practical solution to any of our culture’s dilemmas surrounding eating and agriculture. No, little if anything about this meal was what anyone would call “realistic.” And yet no meal I’ve ever prepared or eaten has been more real.
1. PLANNING THE MENU
I had better start by getting out of the way some of the exceptions to the foregoing rules and various compromises forced upon me by reality, personal limitation, and folly. This was a meal far richer in stories than calories, and some of those stories, like the one about the salt, did not end well.
Early in my menu planning I had learned that there are still a few salt ponds at the bottom of San Francisco Bay. You can see them flying into SFO, a sequence of arresting blocks of color—rust, yellow, orange, blood red—laid out below you as if in a Mondrian painting. The different colors, I learned, are created by different species of salt-tolerant algae and archaea; as the seawater evaporates from the ponds, the salinity rises, creating conditions suitable for one species of microorganism or another.
On the Saturday before my dinner an exceptionally game friend and I drove down to a desolate stretch of shoreline beneath the San Mateo Bridge. After an interminable trek through acrid and trash-strewn wetlands, we found the salt ponds: rectangular fields of shallow water outlined by grassy levees. The water was the color of strong tea and the levees were littered with garbage: soda cans and bottles, car parts and tires, and hundreds of tennis balls abandoned by dogs. Here, I realized, was the West Coast’s answer to the Jersey Meadowlands, a no-man’s-land where a visitor would not be wrong to worry about stumbling upon criminal activities or the washed-up corpse of a murder victim. This was definitely the sort of place where you could see too much…
…of anything, that is, except salt. This year the winter rains had persisted well into spring, making the ponds deeper and less saline than they would normally be in June. So instead of scraping snowy white crystals of sea salt off the rocks, as I’d anticipated, we ended up filling a couple of scavenged polyethylene soda bottles with the cloudy brown brine. That night I evaporated the liquid in a pan over a low flame; it filled the kitchen with a worrisome chemical steam, but after a few hours a promising layer of crystals the color of brown sugar formed in the bottom of the pan, and once it cooled I managed to scrape out a few tablespoons. Unfortunately this salt, which was a bit greasy to the touch, tasted so metallic and so much like chemicals that it actually made me gag, and required a chaser of mouthwash to clear from my tongue. I expect this was a case where the human disgust reflex probably saved lives. No doubt professional salt gatherers have sophisticated purification techniques, but I had no clue what these might be. So I abandoned plans to cook with and serve my own salt, and counted myself lucky not to have contracted hepatitis.
Perhaps the hardest rule to obey was the one about seasonality and freshness. Based on my experience, I would venture that the daily menus of real hunter-gatherers were limited to loads of whatever happens to be plentiful that day and very little of anything else. I had in mind a more varied and ambitious menu, but bringing to the table on a date certain freshly