Seasons

Food for thought.

Hunt Breakfast (1956) by Leonora Carrington

Potato chips are in season so I’ve been eating a lot of them. The season only lasts from late January to mid February so you really need to get in there and enjoy it as much as possible.

On the first Tuesday after the Super Bowl, I opened up an absolutely glorious bag of Ruffles that I’ll never forget. Each chip was so fresh, so round, so unbroken. There’s a real respect for the potato chip here in the South that they didn’t share in the West, which I have to assume is tied to some more authentic relationship with salt and air and wholeness itself.

Just talking about it makes me want to stand in the potato chip aisle of the local Food Lion and fondle a few fully puffed-up bags of Ruffles, recalling the sad days I spent buying deflated bags of broken chips from my neighborhood Vons in the suburbs of Los Angeles. When the bag feels taut and ready to burst, almost like a balloon, you know those delicate babies inside haven’t been crushed under the weight of too many careless, disrespectful hands.

But people who disrespect food are everywhere these days. Just the other night, my chef friend pulled a small cabbage out of her fridge and started slicing it up with a huge knife that looked like it was forged sometime during the Han Dynasty.

“I’m not sure I approve of the callous way you’re handling our little buddy,” I told her.

“What?” she replied, and sprinkled little slices of cold cabbage on the cutting board next to the salami and the Mennonite-grown celery, which she explained had been cruelly raised under burlap sacks, in the dark, in order for it to attain its peculiar flavor and paleness.

“I only eat cruelty-free celery,” I told her, primly. “And why is this cabbage so cold and a teensy bit wet?”

“It just came out of the fridge and I rinsed it off.”

“My god you’re vicious. As a chef you should know that food feels more comfortable when it travels straight from the factory to the truck and then onto your shelf, where it knows it could live forever if it wanted to.”

Of course all of you will recognize these sentiments from my latest book, “Food Has Feelings,” which came out in the early summer of last year, just as Cadbury Crème Egg season was drawing to a close. But my chef friend runs a restaurant, so she has no time to read about the artisans at Lays who hone their craft day and night in order to bring us a potato chip superior to all of its peers.

“I get most of my produce directly from local organic farmers, or from the farmer’s market,” my friend casually replied, like it was no big deal at all.

“You mean that absolute carnival of misery where those savages make food lie around naked, out in the open air? Food hates that!”

“But that’s where food belongs, outside. That’s where it’s born, in the ground.”

“In the dirt? That’s filthy! Food likes to be whisked away from such filth as swiftly as possible, and scrubbed and rinsed and boiled and diced, preferably by enormous stainless steel mechanisms and not nasty meddling human hands, and then ideally it’s fried or bathed in preservatives and sealed up in a bottle or bag or can or something with a laminated top.”

“What?” my chef friend said, repeating herself. See how disrespecting food’s real wishes makes you stupider?

“It’s okay,” I told her. “Not everyone has the time and energy to honor food the way that food wishes to be honored.”

“Huh?”

“Forget it. I like these pickles, anyway.”

***

Yesterday my mom brought us donuts for Valentine’s Day. They were shaped like hearts and filled with Bavarian crème, which is what donuts mostly prefer to be filled with. When I got home from therapy, I found them in a bag hanging from the doorknob of my front door, inside Tupperware containers.

Each daughter had her own Tupperware with two heart-shaped donuts in it, one covered in chocolate frosting and another in strawberry frosting. There was a homemade card from my mom for each daughter with a cut-out, heart-shaped photo of them as babies glued onto it. The largest Tupperware had four donuts, presumably for me and Bill, without a card.

I went inside the house and opened the large Tupperware and immediately ate the two strawberry-frosted heart-shaped donuts. I could’ve waited for my kids to come home a half an hour later, and then we could’ve had a donut together. But that’s not what the donuts wanted and it’s not what I wanted, either. Eating them immediately was a win for me and a win for the donuts. That’s what you call a win-win situation in the food world, and when you encounter one, you have to act fast.

Later, when my older daughter went out with her boyfriend for Valentine’s Day, I suggested we get hamburgers from Cook Out, since the resident vegetarian would not be joining us for dinner. But by the time I got halfway through my hamburger, I was pretty stuffed.

The hamburger kept staring forlornly up at me. I averted my eyes but I knew that it would feel hugely rejected if I just threw it away or worse, fed it to some disrespectful canine. So I ate the rest.

This morning I woke up feeling terrible. I guess some of that food had been a little sad. Maybe some of it had spent too many years in the filthy ground, or maybe it had taken an unnecessarily degrading amount of time on some table at some market somewhere, naked for all the world to see. It could’ve been a slice of lettuce that was humiliated and traumatized. That’s all it takes for you to catch the sadness.

You can’t taste the sadness, which is unfortunate. Sometimes the saddest food is the tastiest food of all. Foie gras is very sad. Lamb is both sad and enraged.

Anyway, I have to go now because I have a doctor’s appointment today. I hope all of that sadness doesn’t show up on my cholesterol test.

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