Hi, friends.
It’s been busy around here in the best possible ways, but I’ve been missing you guys, and I wanted to stop by.
On Tuesday afternoon, I drove up to Portsmouth with friends. We ate dinner at Evan Mallett’s restaurant, Black Trumpet, and I’ve been thinking about that meal all week. I met Evan back in December at Pecha Kucha night, where we were both presenters. The house was packed, and I was nervous, and the thing that I felt inching its way up into my esophagus was most definitely my stomach, but Evan was up before me, and when he started talking, I forgot about all that. He spoke about his life in food: the people and places and the winding path that led him to cook what he cooks in the way that he does. For a few minutes, I wasn’t nervous, just hungry.
There’s a lot that I could say about the meal that Evan cooked for us on Tuesday night, about the velvet yolk of the duck egg and the semolina dumplings I dragged through it, the pickled papaya, and the house-made mustard I licked from my knife. But I read an essay by Wendell Berry this morning over breakfast, and I’d like to share a few lines from it, instead.
We still (sometimes) remember that we cannot be free if our minds and voices are controlled by someone else. But we have neglected to understand that we cannot be free if our food and its sources are controlled by someone else. The condition of the passive consumer of food is not a democratic condition. One reason to eat responsibly is to live free.
Wendell Berry wrote these words in 1989, in an essay called The Pleasures of Eating. He’s talking here about a politics of the plate, a decade, at least, before it was trendy or commonplace to do so. The subject of the essay is eating responsibly, what it means, how to do it, and why. It’s about cultivating an awareness of farming and agriculture, and guarding for ourselves the task of thinking about what we put into our bodies, instead of letting an industry decide for us. Responsibility, though, is just one piece of it.
The Pleasures of Eating is the title of the essay and its true subject: pleasures heightened by our own involvement in the acts of producing, of creating. Wendell Berry is referring to food production writ large, farm to table, seed to supper, urging us to participate however we can, but – it seems to me – he means not only that. When we set our tables and pull up chairs, when we drop dough onto parchment, words onto the page, whenever we make something according to our talents and tastes and launch it into the world, we get a bite of that pleasure, I think. To be free is to generate and to build, to make something delicious, and gobble it up. “Eating with the fullest pleasure … is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world,” Berry says. From what I know of Evan’s work inside and outside of the kitchen – with food, with farmers, with people of all ages who eat and who cook – it matches up with all of this.
After dinner, my friends and I went to hear Joan Didion talk about her newest book, Blue Night. Toward the end of the evening, she answered questions from the audience, and someone asked about how she spends her days. I scribbled down her response on the back of my ticket stub: “Today, I spent my day on the train. That was useful, in that I got here.” That was an important thing for me to hear. I’m going to try to remember it.
Happy weekend, all. Back soon, with rhubarb.
p.s. -- I've titled this post after the book in which The Pleasures of Eating appears.