Perfect Food
I think the thing that really got me interested was how raw and simple it all sounded. We are literally talking about food being pulled from the earth in the morning and ending up in your shopping bag that afternoon. We talked about producers of food with the dirt still under their fingernails. What a different experience than that afforded by most retail outlets. And what a different experience for cooks in our city.
Later in the week, I was wandering the aisles of a huge grocery store and looking at the vast selection of fresh produce. It all made me think that our very prosperity has conspired against our cooking by stealing appetite – not out of our stomachs, perhaps, but out of our eyes and hands. How can we be hungry, even curious, when we are so easily satiated? What else do we know but perfect food? We pluck our broccoli, potatoes, apples, onions, spinach, lemons and so on from their bins, identical in their flawlessness, smooth, clean, fresh, entirely admirable. And the effect of so much perfection is to deaden. After a certain point, we might as well be fondling tennis balls or plastic sponges.
Among the elite in the cooking club, this prosthetic appetite is expressed in a subtler way by those who refuse to cook with anything less than absolutely perfect ingredients, foods so stripped of the rough nub of reality that they are already cuisine.
Watching these cooks hover indecisively over a pile of carrots, seeking the bunch a tiny bit more perfect than the rest, one can’t help feeling that there’s something truly disturbing about this, more than its obvious and silly snobbery, its fear of offending the Calphalon cookware by steaming grungy parsnips in it. It seems as if we have made a good attempt at transforming cooking into playing at cooking. Somewhere, offstage, is the rest of the world, made up of people who have no choice but to make do with what they can scrounge up. Among them are cooks who can coax out of old musty potatoes, flabby turnips, and sinewy bits of meat such performances that you or I would hardly imagine possible. It is a cooking that no one with constant, unlimited access to perfect ingredients will ever duplicate, because having the best means never needing to look, touch, or smell.
These lovers of perfect food will not, I know, have a vague sense of what I am talking about. They do pause to lift a flawless bunch of carrots to the nose or pose them, on their worktables. But the aroma that greets their nostrils, the perfection that caresses their eyes, because it asks for nothing and gives nothing, serves only as a mirror for its admirer. The cook who must carefully sniff the gamy shank of lamb or pick suspiciously through the pail of bruised berries is drawn to connection by necessity. Their scrutiny is genuine and the repayment is in kind: such stuff tells us things that perfection can never share.
This isn’t to say that real cooking requires the spur of dubious materials. What I imagine as the counter to this experience is what to the grower is a common experience. They glory in what is perfect in their crop, but they feel attached to all that they have planted, tended, protected, plucked. There are, after all, their children too.
And the hand that happily sorts these things, that rubs off scabs and flings small salvageable bits into the soup pot, is a hand once again an extension of the tongue. Our appetite should always be larger and more curious than our hunger. Perfection is as false an economy in food as it is in love, since with carrots or potatoes as with lovers, the perfectly beautiful are all the same, the imperfect, different in their beauty, everyone.