The Raw and the Cooked

I'm fairly new to Anthony Bourdain's show on the Travel channel, No Reservations, but I'm already a fan. I was a bit taken aback last night, though, when he went off on Charlie Trotter's book, Raw, at the end of the segment on New Zealand. Having spent a couple of years in Chicago, where Trotter is spoken of in soft, reverent tones, and having watched his own jazz-infused television show (The Kitchen Sessions) enthusiastically, I'm also something of a Charlie Trotter fan. Although the contrast between Bourdain and Trotter couldn't be more evident, I was still surprised because Bourdain strikes me as being a sort of food-libertarian, allowing for almost any perspective in the quest of really good things to put in one's mouth.

I must confess that I haven't read Raw (co-authored by Roxanne Klein), so I don't know much about it except its premise, which involves the idea that raw food can be exquisitely prepared and every bit as tasty as cooked, and is thus consistent with the apparently growing Raw Food movement. Bourdain, on the other hand, is an aficionado of most things edible, however they're prepared, as long as the results please the palate. His point on the New Zealand show had to do with enjoying ethnic cuisines without culinary prejudice. Part of his agitation may have resulted from an on-camera near-death experience, but Bourdain insisted that eschewing certain foods for whatever reason indicates profound disrespect for the culture that produces it.

Over the past forty years, I have come to embrace culinary anarchy myself, after a long journey through the history and philosophy of food. I grew up primarily in Asia, where, as the typical picky-eating ugly American child, I ate little of what was prepared for me by excellent cooks. People were always having to boil eggs for me. I do have some fond memories: soba in broth in both Japan and Taiwan; Mongolian barbecue (now available in this very town, albeit in a somewhat homogenized, tamed version); steamed rice buns, sour plums, and other "fast food" one could buy from street-vendors in Taipei; tempura and sukiyaki in rural Japan, along with sweet milk-candies that I can now buy in the local World Market. What I loved best were fresh leechee nuts, carambolas, and pumelos that grew on trees in our yard on Yan Ming Shan near Taipei, or on the slopes of Seven Star Mountain, where I wandered at will under the collective eyes of our cook-houseboy and villagers along the mountain trails. We had two different cooks named "Lee" whose wives and children were my closest companions when I wasn't in school. Both Lees were superb cooks, and tried continuously to find ways for me to enjoy Chinese food. Oddly enough, the person who finally succeeded in awakening my culinary instincts was an Italian friend of my mother's, so that I learned to cook northern Italian food in Taiwan. My favorite restaurant was the Marco Polo in Taipei, where my thirteenth birthday was held (to the embarrassment of my parents when my classmates made rude jokes about the salamis in the kitchen).

Back in the States, my major influence was my grandmother, who had been a vegetarian since the age of fourteen, when she came home from school to a meal that featured (she found out later) the calf she had been raising. All of her children were omnivores, and she dutifully roasted chickens, turkeys, and all sorts of meat, but never touched it herself. I spent most of my holidays with her, and although she'd supply me with meat if I asked for it, she was always clearly pleased when I didn't seem to miss it. Her rejection of meat was so strong that even when she began to slip into dementia at the age of 99, she continued to insist on meatless meals until she died five years later.

In college I had had two culinary muses: the Greek wife of the Classics department chair, and later the Greek wife of an archaeology professor (she was also my Modern Greek instructor). Both of these women not only taught me how to cure olives and make spanakopita; they also embodied the connection between food and family, and drove home the importance of culinary traditions in the preservation of cultural meaning.

As I became more thoughtful, I also became more selective in my food choices, and eventually became a vegetarian myself--not because I thought it was wrong to eat meat, but because I reasoned that if I couldn't take the responsibility for killing an animal, I didn't deserve to eat it. This went on for about fourteen years until I buckled under pressure from my own children. During most of this time, I also kept a Kosher home--which may have prolonged the vegetarianism, since it made the whole process of kashrut much easier to accomplish. Both of these experiences certainly fortified a notion of the power and importance of food in human culture. Further studies in anthropology and the history of technology made it clear that we are, in fact, what we eat (books like Mary Douglas's The Raw and the Cooked and Margaret Visser's Much Depends on Dinner). In addition to anthropological treatises, I read everything M. F. K. Fisher ever wrote, along with myriad books about artists and writers and food (The Joyce Cookbook, Monet's Table, etc.), and even more about the history of food and regional traditions. But it wasn't until I had a family of my own that all of these strands came together to make me think seriously about what it means to eat.

Once I became interested in Morris, I began to ruminate on what it would mean to eat well in his terms. In News From Nowhere, food is an emblem of community: carefully grown, cheerfully prepared, and gratefully enjoyed. Mindfulness about what we eat precludes wastefulness, overindulgence, greed, and many of the ills that have produced the "fast-food nation." One of the best remedies for problems like obesity, disrupted families, stress, and other modern dilemmas lies in the way we eat: if we were to eat mindfully, we could begin to reverse most of these symptoms. Movements like Slow Food could lead us in the right direction, but this particular effort seems to have taken hold more quickly in countries where people have traditionally taken food more seriously than they do in the U. S.: Italy and France. (I must mention, however, that like many such efforts, mindfulness involves choices that not everyone has the means to make. Those of us who can, however, should.) Every time I order pizza, I enjoy it less because I see it as a cop-out: acquiescence to the status quo, and an inability to consistently follow principles that I know are necessary for change.

Which brings me back to Anthony Bourdain and Charlie Trotter. Both of these men practice culinary mindfulness, albeit in significantly different ways. Trotter is a culinary priest; his kitchen, while encouraging improvisation, is grounded in the rituals of the trained chef. Watching Charlie Trotter cook is like participating in a discussion of the Talmud, following the Rabbi along as he leads us through the knotty texts of both Torah and commentary, until we emerge slightly wiser than we were before, and with a new perspective. Traveling along with Bourdain is a much different experience. His is the serendipitous exploration of variety and diversity, but grounded in a fundamental realization that different cultures' cuisines can tell us more about who they are than any amount of museum-going or any number of visits to "culturally important" sites. I probably couldn't ever gut a wild boar (no matter how much a scourge it is on the New Zealand landscape; I have enough trouble cutting up a chicken), but I still admire those who can kill and butcher what they eat. Seeing Bourdain tuck into slow-roasted pork and native root vegetables with a group of Maoris who clearly appreciate his enthusiasm provides a different model for how to accomplish a broader culinary perspective.

My uneasy compromise between being a vegetarian and being an omnivore has been made simpler lately by the increasing availability of humanely raised and killed animals. Michael Pollan's new book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, is also helpful, because it explores the difficulties involved in becoming mindful in the modern world. As a result, although bits of the picky-eater child still remain (along with remnants of my Kosher training, so that creatures like shellfish and crustaceans still seem largely inedible), I have become rather more adventurous. I will always love Mediterranean cuisine more than Asian, but I am slowly trying to "educate my desire" by including more foods I should have taken advantage of as a child. And while I admire Charlie Trotter's expertise, and understand, to some extent, the attraction of raw foods, Anthony Bourdain is my master now.


A note: The image included at the beginning of this post is the work of one of my students, Chelsea Gilmore, in response to a design problem that focuses on the relationship between photography and art during the nineteenth-century. We recreated a Cezanne still life, photographed it, and then students manipulated the photographs back into "paintings" in the style of one of the movements we had studied. Chelsea's response was to create a new post-Impressionist version.

Fire and Water

Even though I live in north Texas, for some time I have regarded doing so as a form of exile. I followed a husband here, and raised my children here, and (partly from inertia) I stay. I will probably die here, but my ashes might ultimately be tucked into the family plot in a little town in eastern California, among those of my father's family.

Last week, the family plot itself was threatened by this season's biggest California wildfire--a 35,000-acre conjunction of lightning-caused fires among the sagey open spaces and canyons of the Owens River Valley, and on the slopes of the Sierra Nevada mountains. The fire, known as the Inyo Complex, is now under control, but at its height it closed U. S. Highway 395 and forced the evacuation of 200 residents in the county seat, Independence. Popular campgrounds west of Independence and northwest of Big Pine were closed, and one was burned over by the blaze. The Mt. Whitney Fish Hatchery and its surroundings were damaged while firefighters were trying to protect this historical site from being incinerated. The fire damage to the local environment led to severe damage to the hatchery and adjacent buildings when torrential rains caused a debris flow that killed all of the trout and buried the rearing ponds. As a result, the site no longer hatches fish, and the main building remains as a shadow of its historic past. I have photos of both my grand father and my father, and my father and my son sitting on the hatchery steps. 

I have often railed (and have witnesses to prove it) against the propensity of human beings to build homes in areas demonstrably prone to disasters of one form or another. It seems to me that we're asking for it when we build in flood plains, fire-climax vegetation areas (like many of those near Los Angeles), some types of forest (like the Pine Barrens of New Jersey and Long Island), and especially on the edge of the ocean in places subject to periodic (and inexorable) beach erosion and/or hurricanes. As much as I love the idea of New Orleans, the human engineering at the mouth of the Mississippi doomed the city, and it should never have grown up where it did, and certainly not as large as it has. Los Angeles is another example, not only because it was built on or near the conjunctions of several earthquake fault lines, but also because the region couldn't possibly sustain the population it has acquired without pulling water from the Colorado and Owens Rivers--both of which had other communities to support, thank you.

But the original inhabitants of the Owens River Valley (Payahuunadu, as it was called by the Numa, members of the Paiute and Shoshone tribes) and early white settlers must have thought that they had found an idyllic home. They may well have known about the earthquake hazard there--at least, they did by 1872--but there was abundant water to support a farming/ranching economy, and they probably didn't suspect that a behemoth of a city would grow up to the south or that one of capitalism's great heroes would arrange to carry away most of the river's water by the 1930s and cause the great Owens Lake to dry up.

Don't get me wrong. I love L. A. Not nearly as much as I love the Owens valley, but it does have its charms. I graduated from high school near there (Orange County) and began my academic career not far away (Riverside County). I always returned to Inyo County, however, in part because my family had inserted such a palpable sense of place into my genes that even when I lived in Texas for a while as a teenager, I would hop on a Greyhound bus every holiday break and take the two-day ride to L. A. and then to Lone Pine to stay with my grandmother (who was largely responsible for my developing a healthy curiosity about history and the natural world). Sometimes I'd spend 4.5 days on the road just to spend 3 days breathing the granite- and cottonwood-scented air that meant "home."

I'm also fully aware that if Mulholland hadn't arranged for the aqueduct that still pumps millions of gallons of water out of the valley daily, the towns for which I hold such affection would probably have grown into a massive metroplex of expensive homes and resorts, instead of making a living for themselves by providing backdrops for science fiction movies and SUV commercials, and acting as a gateway to the national parks and campgrounds of the eastern Sierras. But my grandparents' photographs of the early homesteads and Owens Lake when it was deep enough for steamboats, and even Ansel Adams's photos of the infamous Manzanar Relocation Camp during World War II, evoke a sense of open spaces, clear air, purple mountains' majesty--and all the nostalgia anybody could ever want (unless, of course, you were interned during the war; but I've met people who spent several years at the camp, and they remember the valley itself fondly).

A few years ago, on a trip home from Texas, we drove by Owens Lake, hoping to see the results of the new wetlands project. I noticed that an imposing new building of corrugated metal had sprung up just outside of Olancha, blocking the view of the lake. A somewhat ironic development had brought to the valley a new industry: bottled water from the Crystal Geyser people. So now the thirsty minions of L. A. can help themselves to even more water--from the mountains above the lake they had already drained.

The fact that people have built and continue to build homes in the valley indicates to me that there are many others who are still drawn to this very place. Infrequent wildfires are much less of a threat than inevitable hurricanes or--here in exile--tornadoes, so that living between two mountain ranges that frame the clearly visible Milky Way at night seems a far better choice. The valley is pretty arid (even though the city of Los Angeles has been forced to allow more water to flow into Owens Lake to eliminate the pollution it causes when it's dry)--but then so was north Texas until this spring. The impending climate crises will affect everyone, and the outcome of global warming is largely unpredictable. (I wasn't going to plant tomatoes here this year because we all expected the drought to continue--and then the rains came.) I can't even begin to imagine what will happen in the valley as the temperature rises.

Many strategies exist to mitigate the problems brought on by climate change. We could, for example, learn from past mistakes that building huge, ungainly cities that drain natural resources of their value and require huge investments of technology and capital cannot provide a sustainable future. Small, self-sufficient communities based on appropriate technologies and minimal exploitation of local resources might help see us through another century. Siting these communities should also include risk-assessment so that we don't try to mold the environment to satisfy perceived human "needs" by abdicating common sense. We don't have to build houses on the beach in order to enjoy the ocean. We don't have to build expensive wooden cabins in areas prone to forest fires, just so we can get away from monotonous nine-to-five jobs. While it's certainly not possible to prevent natural disasters (the high desert does burn on occasion), we can certainly avoid the obvious locales (flood plains, hurricane-prone shorelines) or at least build houses designed to withstand the inevitable. And perhaps if we were to spend more time trying to develop meaningful work-lives, the need for "vacation homes" might be reduced.

The earliest examples of "civilization" (from the Latin civis, "city") were built along rivers: the Nile, the Tigris/Euphrates, the Hwang Ho, the Indus. Carefully tended (rather than ruthlessly exploited), rivers can provide many of life's necessities (food, water, plant materials, natural beauty) for as long as their sources exist. But they can also become polluted, over-fished, over-traveled, or generally over-used. Studying the various "collapses" of ancient civilizations (in Mesopotamia, Mesoamerica, North America) inevitably leads to the conclusion that misuse or abuse of an area's water-sources is always a major factor. Although human beings seem to be drawn to riverine environments (only to exploit them ruthlessly), imagine what would happen if we learned to use our rivers lightly and well. The Thames, for example, may not be the pristine stream Morris imagined in News From Nowhere--but it's far cleaner than it was in the nineteenth century. And New York's Hudson River has undergone significant improvement thanks to groups like the Hudson River Foundation and new efforts to clean up toxic dump sites. Hope abides.

So what does any of this have to do with utopia? In my thought experiments regarding "how we might live," I always conjure up a prelapsarian image of the Owens River Valley: pre-Mulholland, pre-aqueduct, even pre-mining days (although they didn't last long and didn't do all that much damage). This version of the valley is a bit like the New Zealand of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films: open valleys, impossibly tall mountains, rushing rivers, expansive landscapes. Morris imagined his utopia along a clean, unpolluted Thames, on which he traveled and re-imagined London after the "revolution." A free, unfettered (un-pilfered) Owens River offers similar opportunities. I'd build a mote house near Uhlmeyer Spring, overlooking the river and the valley (see the photo, above), and like-minded folk could discuss and practice sustainability, permaculture, social responsibility, and other "utopian" ideas to their hearts' content, while breathing clean, desert air.

That is, of course, as long as the whole place doesn't go up in smoke.

Simplify, Simplify

All the talk about "living simply" (or, as the Philistines would have it, "living simple") is starting to stick in my craw. Crabby person that I am, I find it at best disingenuous, and at worst self-serving and fundamentally dishonest.

What can be simple about spending a fortune on storage items for accumulated crap? Unless it is simply good for the economy (as the recent sale of The Container Store might indicate). Now, I have nothing against the Container Store itself; I owe what organization exists in my house in large part to the versatile Swedish bookcases I can only buy there. But the very existence of a store whose sole purpose is to help us stow away (fashionably) all of the excess detritus of our consumer-driven lives seems to be counterproductive if our aim is "simple living." Such simplicity seems to come easily to those who live in half-million dollar McMansions with pristine carpets, designer furniture, California Closets, and a plasma television set in each of its five bathrooms. A trip to the Whole Foods in a nearby neighborhood (a bedroom community for the telecom industry) one recent winter brought me into contact with a mink-cloaked woman whose grocery basket was packed with $40 wine, exotic cheeses, organic frozen dinners, and a copy of Real Simple. My inner communist was so offended that I didn't return to the store for over a year, and then only because it's located right down the street from my cardiologist (allowing me to combine trips, and save time and gas--major "simple living" goals). Some of the efforts to effect simple lives seem to have the right idea (the Simple Living Network, for example), but others seem to be missing the point.

So here's the conundrum. How do we channel Thoreau in a modern world that constantly militates against anything that even vaguely resembles what happened at Walden Pond all those years ago? The situation reminds me of what Morris faced as an early Socialist who could only do what he did because he had inherited wealth (and wealth from mining interests at that). His dilemma arose because although he advocated well-designed, hand-crafted items of what we would now call (shudder) "home decor" for everyone, only the wealthy could afford them. The problem persists today, because many of us who still appreciate the Arts and Crafts aesthetic don't have the income to afford it. At best we can buy cheaply-made "Craftsman" or "Mission" style knockoffs because they resemble the real thing; but then we're stuck with piece-of-crap imitations that quickly show their true colors. The Craftsman ideal involved honesty, after all, and the imitations are anything but honest.

If we truly want to simplify our lives, it seems that what we really need to do is stay out of stores altogether: Educate our desire, as Morris would put it. Determine what we really need, versus what we only want. A bit of navel-gazing in that direction is usually instructive, as I have often found when I'm short of cash. I automatically switch into what I call "poverty mode" and what had seemed like a compelling need for a new (insert item) the day before is seen for what it truly was: a desire brought about by reading one too many bungalow shelter magazines (what somebody has appropriately termed "house porn" because they're so arousing). I don't leave the house except for work, don't shop for anything except bare necessities (usually coffee, milk, and/or wine--none of which are, in fact, necessary), and around pay day the mode subsides and I hit the bookstore--sometimes for more house porn. Because I teach in a design school, I regard my magazine fetish as an occupational hazard. But I'm cutting back, in an effort to simplify.

I wonder, however, if we have lost the ability to educate our own children's desire. When mine were young, I exercised certain power: no Cabbage Patch dolls, no Barbies, no GI Joes, no Izod--no clothes with logos (why should I pay some guy to advertise his name?). But we were awash with Star Wars toys, Strawberry Shortcake (smelly, but cute), Matchbox cars, and Happy Family dolls. We were the last family on the block with a color television (a little 13-inch job bought in 1980 solely so I could watch Cosmos in color), but bought a Commodore 64 as soon as they came out, even though we couldn't afford one. As a result, I think my children are somewhat more skeptical about advertising and somewhat more thoughtful about consumption than their peers--but neither of them lives particularly "simply." They are kind-hearted (rescuers of stray dogs and cats), and more ecologically-aware than most, but they live in lofts and condos, and spend far more money than I ever would on modern technology.

It's hard for most of my students (who are now somewhat younger than my thirty-something children; I've been teaching for twenty years or so, and there used to be much more overlap) to understand that all of this technology has become available in the last century or so. My great grandfather ran a stage-coach station in western Nevada, where my grandmother was born in 1897. The family moved to the Owens River Valley when she was about 11, traveling over the mountains on the narrow-gauge railway (The Slim Princess). By the time she died, at 104, she had seen just about every major technological innovation that had occurred since the Industrial Revolution--including electricity and standard indoor plumbing. She used to remind me, when I was feeling particularly picked-upon because I didn't have all the stuff my friends had, that they got on quite nicely without electric lights and air conditioning, and without cars. She did own up to rather liking flush-toilets, radio (she avidly listened to Night Owls, one of the original talk shows), and the souped-up '69 Nova she bought to replace her '57 Chevy. And she especially appreciated not having to boil up her own bathwater on a wood-burning stove.

The idea that imperialist types have to save the world from "poverty" by inflicting modern technology and consumer desires on unsuspecting folks dazzled by the glamor of iPods, cell phones, computers, televisions, and the like seems to indicate more about our own guilt than any true humanitarian impulse. We need to re-think the idea of "poverty" in the first place, because some aspects of it lie at the very heart of real simplicity. Not having electricity does not make someone "poor." Not having access to basic medical care, clean water, sufficient food, and reliable shelter does. Being able to educate one's children, foster community, take care of the land, and live thoughtfully are all possible with minimal technology. Yet, the West seems hell-bent on eradicating "poverty" among people who could sustain themselves if we just left them alone to live they way they have for millennia. Most of us couldn't last a week in the wilderness without at least a space blanket and a good sized bag of trail mix, but we think the way we live is "rich." It is certainly rich in stuff, but we seem to be having a great deal of trouble trying to understand what to do with it all.

Instead of buying fancy (expensive) new boxes and bins to house our clutter, perhaps we should think about not buying all the clutter in the first place. I guess it starts with leaving the magazine on the bookstore shelf, but I really do understand how difficult that can be. Especially when confronted with a beautifully-photographed essay on pared-down living in a Green and Green bungalow. Sigh.