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from THE BOOK
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Don't Get Too Comfortable
by David Rakoff
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Humor - Essays •
Doubleday Canada •
Hardcover, 240 pages •
September 2005 •
$29.95 •
0-385-66185-1
One of the funniest and most insightful writers around, David Rakoff
mercilessly skewers our ridiculous
culture of overconsumption in his latest collection.
Our waiter is looking wistful, his eyes cast downward,
the merest hint of a smile playing gently upon his lips.
He is about to speak. We lean forward, expecting perhaps
a treasured but bittersweet memory: heedless young lovers
in Paris, the specter of war looming. Instead, he begins,
"There's a really lovely story about the calzone . . ."
This is a Temple of Food, a well-known restaurant in
northern California whose owner is world famous as an
advocate for humane and sustainable agribusiness, as
well as being a renowned chef in her own right. I have
three of her cookbooks myself. There is a sense of occasion
in just being here, an awestruck thrill on the diners'
faces, as if we have been chosen for something miraculous,
like the people massed in the desert at the end of Close
Encounters. Various members of the waitstaff beam
at me as I walk through the dining room on my way to
pee. They smile the way one might at a twelve-year-old
clutching his first copy of Catcher in the Rye,
their eyes shining with vicarious, anticipatory excitement
at the journey I am about to take.
The meal is an undeniable pleasure. The food is unfussy and simply
prepared, the impeccable ingredients each a Platonic example of
itself: the tender micro greens of my composed salad, the piece of
line-caught fish in its fragrant herbal bath. And for dessert, one
medjoul date and a just-picked local tangerine, both perfect. In the
same elegiac calzone tones, our waiter tells us, "We'd like to
encourage you to bruise the orange leaf between your fingers." We
nibble our delicious dates. As instructed, we crush the orange leaves
and the airborne oils create a lovely perfume that mingles with the
steam of our post-supper coffee.
Lenny Bruce described flamenco as being an art form
wherein a dancer applauds his own ass. There's a lot
of flamenco going around the room tonight. Smiles of
mutual congratulation beam from table to table. Glasses
are raised. We celebrate not only our small part in
this incremental triumph over factory farming that just
being here this evening represents but also our elevated
capacities. It takes an exceptionally fine tongue and
palate, you must admit, to appreciate a dessert of a
single date. One so very different from the cratered,
preservative-strafed mouths of the masses. I overhear
one bartender say to the other, "I think I'm going to
stay in this weekend and roast garlic." The man of a
departing couple leans in and says something to his
date. She listens, and gives an almost electric start.
Like Warren Beatty and Diane Keaton in Reds
who, caught up in the joyous throngs of the ten days
that shook the world, had no choice after witnessing
something so glorious and world-changing but to race
home and fuck each other silly, the man and woman share
a look of smoldering, unbridled lust. What did he whisper?
"I was just told that they hadn't served that vinegar
in twenty-four years!"
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Subtleties of flavor previously thought nonexistent
or at the very least nonsensical are now the subject
of earnest interrogation. It was easy enough to avoid
such conversations — once the sole province of
stultifying wine talk-by faking a coughing fit or simply
bleeding from the eyes whenever your oenophile friends
got going. Such discussions now cover just about anything
you put into your mouth. In the food section of The
New York Times (a newspaper which, in the interest
of full disclosure, I read every day and have worked
for extensively in the past), Amanda Hesser, a generally
very fine journalist, writing about fleur de sel,
had this to say about the sea salt that is harvested
in France and available in New York City for $36 a kilo:
"As I ate them, fine crystals of salt sprinkled on the
potatoes crackled under my teeth, releasing tiny bursts
that tasted of the sea and its minerals. There was no
sting at the back of the mouth, no bitterness, just
a silky, salty essence wrapping each bite of potato."
Sting at the back of the mouth? Bitterness? What has
poor Amanda Hesser been doing all these years to add
some savor to her food? Licking undeveloped Polaroids?
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The general New York Times reader enjoys
the privileges and plentitude of life in the world's
wealthiest country, so articles on rolling cigarettes
out of pocket lint or recipes on salvaging that last
bit of rotting pork would make no sense. But is it
completely naïve to think that a squib in the
same newspaper about ice cubes frozen from a river
in the Scottish Highlands and overnighted to your
doorstep — the perfect complement to your single
malt — necessarily demands, if for no other
reason than to preserve some vague notion of karmic
balance, either a great big "April Fool's!" scrawled
across the top, or a prefatory note of apology that
such a service even exists? Surely when we've reached
the point where we're fetishizing sodium chloride
and water, and subjecting both to the kind of scrutiny
we used to reserve for choosing an oncologist, it's
time to admit that the relentless questing for that
next undetectable gradation of perfection has stopped
being about the thing itself and crossed over into
a realm of narcissism so overwhelming as to make the
act of masturbation look selfless.
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It would be peevish and ungracious after being taken
to such a lovely supper in this Temple of Food, I
know, but I am desperate to ask the question that
begs to be posed: "Just how fucking good can olive
oil get?" I will stipulate to having both French sea
salt and a big bottle of extra virgin in my kitchen.
And while the presence of both might go some small
distance in pigeonholing me demographically, neither
one of them makes me a good person. They are mute
and useless indicators of the content of my character.
Or at least I used to think so. Since anyone with
taste buds will respond to the trans-fat bells and
whistles of a hot fudge sundae or super nachos, how
better then to show a nobility of spirit than by broadcasting
your capacity to discern the gustatory equivalent
of a hummingbird's cough as it beats its wings near
a blossom that grows by a glassy pond on the other
side of a distant mountain? No surer proof that one
is meant for better things than an easily bruised
delicacy. Such a perfectly tuned instrument can quickly
suss out the cheap and nasty. So, the bitterness at
the back of the throat; the polite refusal of the
glass of whiskey marred by those (shudder)
domestic ice cubes; the physical and psychic insult
that are sheets of anything short of isotopic density.
What is the thread count, Kenneth? We have become
an army of multiply chemically sensitive, high-maintenance
princesses trying to make our way through a world
full of irksome peas.
There are those who might argue that the materials
focused on — cotton, salt, oil, water —
are themselves so basic, almost beneath notice, so
much the opposite of a ski chalet in Gstaad, for example,
that such epicurean monasticism is itself an act of
humility by association. The temporal and vulgar rejected
in favor of what really matters most in life. And
what is it that matters most in life? Here's a hint:
it's a pronoun that can be effectively conveyed without
any words at all. Just take your index finger and
point it to the center of your chest, an inch and
a half from your precious, precious heart.
Click
here to watch an animated excerpt from Don't
Get Too Comfortable.
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