A Finger in Every Pie

Resistance

    "I believe our technologies, Elizabeth, these machines we now live with, are evolving, to use your word, faster than our emotions can accomodate."
    He headed for bed, but I was curious.
    "Do you mean, in the face of it all, in the face of everything changing, a whole way of life gone in a generation, that we have become numb?"
    "I mean that the speeding bus goes flying off the mountain road." 
      - from "The Walls At Yogpar" in Resistance, by Barry Lopez

On Saturday I went shopping for food three different times, in three different places -- using three different modes of transportation.  I know that I am lucky to be able to go  shopping at three different places, to get exactly what I want.  I have the luxury of time (at least on the weekend), I have transportation, I have someone else to go shopping with me, I have money -- at least money enough to be choosy, if not always to get exactly what I would like.  And yet the other morning, despite my good fortune, something rankled within me.   It may not have helped that I was reading Resistance on my bus ride to my Nia dance class (as well as the middle one of the three marketing excursions), and came across the quote above. 

It wasn't about going to all the different places.  I've lived and travelled in places where I've shopped like that before.  I lived in Aix-en-Provence one summer, and I went to many different places for provisions.  I had a little apartment shared with another student.  Whoever was awake first would grab a fistful of change and run down four flights to the boulangerie for a fresh hot baguette to have with butter so good it was a whole new category of food, as far as I was concerned.  I made friends with the butcher down the street and practiced my French as I asked for chicken or tried to find out just how spicy the merguez sausage really was.  I found that if I ran out of class just at noon, when we finished, I could catch the last hour or so of the daily market for salad greens, and raspberries and apricots, and looking at things that were new or strange to me, trying to ask what they were. 

And Aix, for all its villagey adorableness, wasn't exactly provincial.  It was and is filled with a very fancy selection of shops -- and if I'd chosen, I could have gotten all my supplies at the big Monoprix supermarket.  It's just that even though I was shopping at lots of different stores, they were all close by.  Everything was in walking distance.  Storekeepers knew each other, and they knew their clients.  Even in the short time I was there I came to know people, just by the act of shopping.  In other cultures, in other places, going to many places to find food is a way of life.  We don't do it by custom here -- at least not any more -- and not quite yet again, although I think many among us hope that our society may be devolving back to some more villagey ways of life -- perhaps this kind of shopping among them.

Saturday's odyssey looked like this:  I went from an early trip to the farmers' market (subway) for all my lovely, local, seasonal fruits and vegetables, home to drop off the first load, then to dance class and my favorite specialty market for organic dairy products as well as a few other things that only they carry (bus), and then later in the day to a big, noxious market out of the city that (despite or perhaps because of its predilection for employees posing as dancing cows and chickens) has excellent meat at a fraction of city prices (car).  The last shopping leg was combined with a trip up to see my father, and bring him some groceries too.  But considering all that different shopping just for our own household, I felt a little ashamed of myself.  What an overprivileged little snit I am, being so finicky about having everything just so.  And then I began to think about my shame. 

Is it wrong to want to support the small family farmers who truck their goods in so early in the morning?  That one I know the answer to.  Of course not.  But I spend more there than I would for supermarket produce, so I end up compensating by trying to buy meat at a cheaper venue.  Much as I would love to, I cannot afford the $17 a pound that beautiful, locally-raised lamb chops would cost me at the farmers' market  -- at least not on a regular basis.  The protein needs of our household, particularly my own, dictate that we eat pretty high on the food chain.  So I spend on the produce, and spend down on the meat.  In between, I go to another store to buy things I can find neither at the farmers' market, nor at the dancing cow palace of meat.  And because the shopping in my neighborhood is, not to put too fine a point on it, pretty awful, I try to get a week's food shopping done most Saturdays.  Most times I don't actually go to three places, but in the summer, when the market is flourishing, I often go to two. 

Would it make me a better person to shop more often at the stores in my neighborhood?  The freshness of the food is often questionable, and sadly the cleanliness of the establishments leave a lot to be desired.   I can think about this in a number of ways.  Either I'm the overprivileged, gentrifying little snit who lives in my neighborhood for the cheap rent but turns up my nose at shopping there (I'm not, really.  Honest.  I speak Spanish, talk to my neighbors, and bring muffins and other goodies to a sick man in the next building on a regular basis).  Or I'm engaged in an act of resistance, a personal boycott against big supermarket chains that are dirtier and uglier in my neighborhood than elsewhere in the city, where food is allowed to spoil on the shelves and no-one seems to care or bother, since the corporate entities involved in the "big food" system still make their profit.  I'm staging a personal protest against a system that has allowed us to get so far away from our food -- and from everything and everyone else as well.  Do I think I'm challenging the status quo of the fast-food nation?  Certainly I believe that since we never eat fast food, and only use takeout as an occasional option/treat when we're very tired, I must be bucking the system merely by making high quality homemade food for us every day.   What a saint I am.  But that's the quandary -- I can only see it from these two vantage points, sinner or saint. 

I suppose I think (to use the quote from "The Walls At Yogpar" out of context) that parts of our food system (the large conglomerate parts, obviously) are like a bus that's flying off the mountain road.  I'm living in a neighborhood where I see village life all the time, in tiny increments:  the man who peels oranges on a spiral machine and sells them on the street corner;  the woman who sells peeled mangos on a stick, the "taco ladies" on 105th Street who have their little stand; the woman selling oatmeal and tamales out of big containers on the street in the early morning when I'm on my way to work.  It's not that I don't recognize my own contradictions.  I constantly romanticize the notion of wanting a simpler way of life, but then again, you will take my iBook from me when you pry it from my cold dead hands -- or when you replace it with a new one.  And a simpler way of life would imply shopping in my own neighborhood rather than running to hell and gone just for food, for goodness' sake. 

And that's the crux of it, right there. For goodness' sake.  In order to have a little goodness in our lives, something good that's within my control.  That much I can do.  I can control how we eat, and where our food comes from.  And I recognize that not everyone has even that small luxury anymore. 

I don't have a neat way to tie up this post and put a little ribbon on the top, since I'm still struggling with my feelings about food, access, privilege, neighborhoods and all the other multiply-layered questions that these issues raise, once we allow them out for an airing.  Please feel free to weigh in here.  I'd really love to know what you're thinking. 

An Interlude with Officer Bumbleberry

We've had our car back from repair for a while now, although it was in the repair shop for almost five weeks -- and then had to go back, THREE TIMES, for minor glitches that we discovered little by little.  But since we've had it back for good, it's really been running quite well -- despite the dire predictions of everyone we knew who had ever been in a major accident and then had their car repaired.  "It'll never be the same," we were told.  "There's always a hum, a vibration when you try to put on any real speed."  Or "It'll shake during highway driving.  The chassis will wobble -- they can never really straighten it out properly." 

Maybe our friends who repaired their cars didn't have Subarus, or maybe we were just lucky, and there was no real sustained damage other than the rear bumper (which, in our accident, sheared off almost completely) and the back windows (which shattered entirely).  In any case, we took off this weekend for our first real road trip since the repairs were completed.  Off to Vermont we went to enjoy the spring, and escape the madness that is El Barrio during the Puerto Rican Day Parade.   I love the fact that everyone in New York has their day, but trust me, you don't want to live on Mulberry Street during the Feast of San Gennaro, nor in our neighborhood on this particular weekend.   We hit the open road, and our silvery little Subaru performed beautifully on the journeys up and back, even in the rainstorm that we hit on our way to Randolph after a family party in upstate NY. 

The next day, we hit our usual pantry-stocking spots and laid in a few things for ourselves and some friends and loved ones.  We bought good cheese and maple syrup, as well as a few baking necessities.  By the time we started to head toward home, it was the middle of the day.  "Do you think we can make it to the Benn before it closing?"  G asked me.  "I don't know," I said.  "They shut down before 4:00 on Sundays, and you know how the waitresses hate it when people show up 10 minutes before closing."  But we decided to take a chance, and so we headed south in order to cut over west to Bennington. 

As we drove along, traffic was light.  We sang a paean to the loveliness of Vermont's open highways as we sped  -- quite literally -- down Interstate 91.  Suddenly we caught sight of a state trooper right in the ditch by the side of the road.  G slowed down, and we tooled on by.  "Didn't even see him as we were coming up.  That's not where they're usually hiding," he commented.  "Mostly they're in those little access roads between the two sides of the highway."  A moment later, the car was filled with more forceful expletives, and our rear-view mirror was filled with the flashing lights of our friend the state trooper, signaling us to pull over. 

"How're you folks today?" he asked with a smile as we rolled down the window.  He was young, freckly-pale and rawboned.  As he removed his big trooper hat, he revealed close-cropped reddish hair.   "Where you been?  Where you headed?"  We smiled back pleasantly and filled him on our itinerary, hoping against hope that mentioning our family up in Randolph would outweigh our NY license plates.  We tried letting him know that we'd just been trying to get to the Blue Benn before closing time.  "Well, folks, I don't want to hold you up, but I had you clocked going at 84," he said, with another kindly grin.  "Do you think that's about right?"  We sheepishly agreed that indeed we had been speeding.  We watched other cars flying past us at 90, now that they saw the officer occupied with writing our outlandishly expensive speeding ticket.   "I knew I should keep one of those phony pregnancy pillows in the glove compartment," I said as the officer walked back to his state troopermobile. 

"Officer Goddamn Opie," G muttered as we pulled away, slowly and carefully.  "Dammit, where are those launch codes?"  But even knowing that our lunch at the Blue Benn had cost us dearly before we'd had a single bite, we were undeterred, and our lovely driving day unspoiled.  We went, we ate, and took a slice of homemade pie and some doughnuts for the next day's breakfast with us when we left.  For a while as we tooled in a somewhat more leisurely way toward home, we referred to our new trooper friend as "Officer Opie,"since the nicknames we bestow to intimates and strangers alike are a vital ingredient in our secret language. 

Later, after  I'd taken a car-lulled nap, I opened our slice of pie.  "What flavor did you get?" G asked.  "Bumbleberry," said I.  "What's a bumbleberry?"  After I'd explained about the mix of berries and sometimes apples that goes into this pie, we ate it, alternating bites.   Then we played with the word "bumbleberry" for a while, naming various things bumbleberries, until we hit upon the very home for this moniker.  "Officer Bumbleberry!" we both cried, thinking of our recent encounter.  "He hid himself in the Bumbleberry Patch, and then came after us!"   

I'd like to think we learned a lesson, but I'm not sure.  The lure of the open road and the ability of our little car to gain speed smoothly and almost effortlessly will undoubtedly tempt us again, once the sting of this ticket fades.  But in the meantime, I'm looking up recipes for Bumbleberry Pie and looking forward to the moment when enough different kinds of berries are in season all at once for us to give this lovely dessert a try.  So here's to you, dear sweet friendly moneysucking Officer Bumbleberry.  I think I'll name my next pie after you. 

Is It Any Wonder They're Going Bankrupt?

Never fly Delta.  I spent eight hours of my life in the Delta terminal at JFK airport on Friday -- eight hours in order NOT to fly to San Antonio.  Eight hours of my life I'm never getting back.  So this post is not going to be food-related, not even peripherally -- except perhaps for the fact that the best restaurant that Terminal 3 has to offer is Burger King.

I had planned such a lovely post for you all.  It was going to be a sweet, clever little essay about how the Rose of Spanish Harlem was temporarily transplanted into the Yellow Rose of Texas or some such hooey.  And I still might get there, eventually, but for now I ask your kind forbearance as I use the best public forum available to me to express my displeasure. 

Now, I know that the weather is not anyone's fault (other than big business' responsibility for having created global warming).  At least Delta is not controlling the weather, as far as I know.  But their handling of a situation in which the airport was fogged in and nothing was flying in or out for several hours was, shall we say, less than optimal.  I arrived at the airport at about 8 a.m., in plenty of time for my 9:20 flight.  As  I sat in the waiting area of Gate 16, I noticed that it was getting nearer and nearer flight time, and the flight wasn't being announced.  It was still listed at 9:20 on the monitor.  Finally, I joined the line at the desk and asked the same question everyone else was asking.  "The flight's been pushed back to 12:30 because of the fog," we were told.  "The plane is coming from Ohio, and hasn't been permitted to leave the airport because nothing can land at JFK right now."   Finally, at some point, they changed the monitor to a 12:30 departure time.  But 12:00 loomed, and no flight was announced.  I finally spoke to someone who was supposedly a Delta manager.  "That flight's been pushed back to 1:30," he said.  "The guy will announce it in a minute."  As time moved forward and I tried to alleviate my mingled ennui and rage, it suddenly occurred to me that I had my computer.  I ran up to a Delta employee who was putting on a sweater.  "I'm leaving, I'm off duty," she snarled at me before I could say anything.  Sometimes a good offense is the best defense, I guess.  "I just wanted to find out if there's an Internet hub in this terminal," I said meekly.  "Honey, this building was built in 1961, and it's never been updated,"  said she with a smirk. 

1:30 came and went.  Engrossed in alternating between my current fiction obssession (Chang Rae Lee's remarkable  Native Speaker) and  Mike Rose's wonderful  The Mind at Work,  I suddenly looked up and realized that there were fewer people sitting around Gate 16.  There was, however, a long line by the desk.  I asked another Delta employee who just happened to be passing by if there were any information about my flight.  "Oh, that flight was cancelled," she told me, like a schoolmarm telling me facts I should have long ago mastered.  "Go back to check-in, they'll help you out."  "Where?"  Check-in was back behind security -- why would I go there?  Finally I just got on line with everyone else.  I was offered a flight to Austin that was leaving in less than an hour.  "Will Delta arrange my transportation from Austin to San Antonio?"  "No ma'am.  Cancellation due to weather.  We're not responsible."  But wait -- the Austin flight hasn't been cancelled, and it's the same weather for that plane as it is for mine.  "Or you could take a series of flights that would get you in to San Antonio at midnight."  No thanks.  Since I would still have to travel at least 40 minutes by shuttle to my destination, that didn't seem like a good option.  Finally I re-booked my flight for the following morning. 

I called G, my knight in shining armor, and although he was out in Orient Point planning to work with his business partner and spend the night out in Long Island, he changed his plans and drove 2 1/2 hours in traffic to come get me and take me home so I could at least have a decent night's sleep before doing the airport dance all over again. 

And it didn't matter that I had to wait so long for him, since they couldn't find the bags from the cancelled San Antonio flight for hours anyway.  Good thing I didn't try to take the Austin flight or some other flights out of LaGuardia that I was offered.  Everyone from our cancelled plane who booked those flights missed them anyway, because they couldn't collect and re-check their luggage.  There was no joy at Delta that day. 

They did finally get me here, 24 hours later.  I'm now in Boerne, Texas, where I was invited to come to a posh resort and spend three days (two in my case, as it turned out) working on a piece of writing for publication -- not food writing, since I do that just for love.  I'm writing a piece about teaching and standard English for an esoteric education journal that none of you will ever read except for my brother, since I'll proudly send him a copy.  Sadly I don't have much food info to report, other than having eaten several mammoth pieces of Texas beef (including an absolutely melting hunk of prime rib last night at the Limestone Grill).  Otherwise, the food here at the resort is neither the worst of its kind nor the best, but certainly encourages one to overeat with its brimming buffets and Texas-sized portions. 

I chose an airline poised on the brink of bankruptcy not because I was hoping to get a good deal, but because it was literally the only direct flight offered from NYC to San Antonio.  Let's just hope they get me home safely tomorrow -- 'cause after that, I hope never to fly Delta again.  Even if they don't go into bankruptcy.