eat, pray, love, an alternative

EAT: I read a cookbook review on Good Reads some months ago by a reader who complained about how the “foodie douchebags” had hijacked cooking. I thought that was a funny, wonderful expression, mostly for the /ooo/ of it. Yesterday I bought some “caffe latte almonds,” and while I was walking back to the office eating those fat beauties the expression came to me and I had the urge to say it out loud. I did, exactly at the moment someone I knew came up behind me. Should I act as if I’d said nothing, or explain I’d said something else? "Loopy duped hags?" "Pooperscoop fangs?"

PRAY: I’m no foodie, and caffe latte almonds will ever do much to shape my perception of place, but no one’s immune to flavor memories, which often begin when you’re away from home eating something you wouldn’t usually eat. My favorite comes from the town of Shanhaiguan in China, which I visited with my friend Sandy. We found a clean restaurant, where I ordered a fish soup that was little more than a fish flank floating in a bowl of broth with a few leaves of cilantro. In Chinese, cilantro is called “fragrant grass” and it’s sold in lovely bundles. In Chinese, you drink soup, you don’t eat it. In Chinese lore, cilantro was associated with immortality. In Shanhaiguan, there’s the ocean and the Great Wall and I’m surprised that also this soup is still going on.

LOVE: My step-father was always one of those people who remembered his vacations by what he’d eaten. My mother would say, ‘remember the year we stayed at the Watergate in DC,’ and he’d say, ‘oh yeah, that was where I ate the butter-crumb stuffed wild mushrooms in marsala sauce.’ There were those of us who thought he’d missed the point of the trip completely, and others who felt he’d hit the nail on the head. My step-father turns 86 next week. He was a good father to me. Although his short-term memory is shot and his overall awareness is ebbing I do hope he will again experience much deliciousness.