Foraging
Grocery shopping, as mundane as it is, is one of the last vestiges of foraging behaviors we still engage in. (Garage sales might be a similar activity, but with fewer fruits and vegetables.) It gives us a regular opportunity to consider what to eat, select it and then bring it home. We are extremely well-adapted to these activities because it is the first job humans ever had: we’ve always foraged for food.
Ten thousand years ago we would have learned from our parents and extended family where to find and how to select good root vegetables by carefully examining the leaves and stems. It’s a little different now, of course. In addition to trying to figure out if a mango is too ripe or which bunch of cilantro is better, we might also read labels: searching for information about nutrition or additives; or if there’s a free prize inside; or if these tostadas are the right kind because the ones without any damn salt don’t taste nearly as good.
And while we don’t have to cover nearly as much terrain, we do have to walk up and down the aisles. If it’s a relatively small list, the baskets give us the chance to actually carry our selections around the store instead of pushing them about in carts. And we have to heave the bags into our trunks or schlep them with us onto the bus. Depending on where you live, you may have four flights of stairs to carry them up. Grocery shopping can be pretty physical, despite some modern advances.
In this case, the things “we’ve always done” aren’t just tradition—they’re more important than that. They represent successful evolutionary adaptations; critical to the survival of the species. They connect us with our bodies and our environment. They give us opportunities to become more like ourselves. Besides, who doesn’t love the thrill of finding a great deal on fresh pineapples?
Meals, Stories and Recipes
A meal can tell a story. A meal has a beginning, a middle and an end. An appetizer: something to capture the interest and develop the appetite. The main course: to satisfy that hunger, to explore the setting and characters further. Dessert: to cleanse the palate, to resolve the tension introduced earlier. A play in three acts. And sometimes it’s just one big act: a single setting with everything rising and falling in a continuous sequence of action all over the stage.
(Which doesn’t take into account the epilogue: the putting away of left-overs, the washing of dishes, the last cup of coffee or tea or whiskey or wine while we talk some more and dry the dishes with a tea towel.)
And there are stories about other times those dishes were made: the people it was shared with, the weather that night, the little (or big) things that went wrong or miraculously right, the last-minute trips to the store. There are stories behind recipes about where they came from and how they’ve been modified over the years. There are stories behind other dinners, like the time pizza dough shot across the kitchen because it got tossed up into the ceiling fan. Some of the best stories told over dinner are about other dinners.
A recipe is a story we are told—a story we tell ourselves—about how something is made and what the result should be. But if a meal can tell a story, then cooking is the writing of it and a recipe is merely the setting. The players provide the action and the dialog. The real story plays out in the hours before, during and after dinner.
Out to Eat
I think you could do worse than to learn a foreign language by spending nearly all of your time on food, drink and cooking. After all, you’ll need to eat if you visit a foreign country, and you may as well figure out how to ask for things you like or want to try. There are plenty of opportunities, too: you’ll get 2-3 chances a day to practice in that context; not counting afternoon coffee and tea, of course.
If you can ask for directions to good places to eat, make reservations and pay for a meal, you’ve actually covered a lot of ground, linguistically speaking. And if you can talk a little bit about or at least understand the preparations of various foods—kitchen tools and techniques—you’ll have even more verbs and prepositional phrases at your disposal.
Stories and food go together like peanut butter & jelly; everybody has fun and meaningful stories about food. You can learn how to tell one or two of yours in your target language, so that you have something you’ve rehearsed that you can use in conversation. People that you meet will have their own fun stories about food—you can listen to them and laugh over dinner and drinks. You can also just chat with your server or bartender and pick up new bits and pieces of the language, as well as recommendations for the next place to eat.
There’s a case to be made that human language only developed because we were able to grow big enough brains—brains which were a result of increased nutrition from learning how to cook food. If the very first language was developed as a result of food and cooking, then it only seems right to learn new languages with them.
Questionable Tastes
I don’t think that orange-flavored yogurt should be a thing but it is. It just seems so… unlikely. It seems like it just shouldn’t work and yet, there it is on store shelves. People must be buying it. (Maybe they’re somehow not eating it. Or maybe it’s a once-in-a-lifetime purchase, or they forget that they don’t like it and they mistakenly buy it again?)
I’m reluctant to try it, but I’m a little curious now.
I mean, yogurt is slightly acidic due to the culture used to make it and oranges are acidic, so it’s not like it’s combining two completely different flavor elements. Besides, other citrus-flavored yogurts, like lemon and lime seem like they would taste good. And orange crème brûlée is extremely tasty, so it’s not that orange flavors can’t be paired with dairy. Perhaps I’m just skeptical because the fruit flavorings that get used in foods are usually grotesque caricatures of real fruit flavors, e.g. grape or orange-flavored soda or watermelon-flavored anything. There is skill in selecting the right ingredients and approach to combining flavors in food.
Some things truly require too much effort to combine. Chocolate and bacon don’t really go together, for example, even though I wish they did. (Vosges makes the only bacon chocolate bar that works.) The salty/sweet combination works in many other combinations: salted caramels, chocolate-covered pretzels or even chocolate-covered potato chips. The saltiness of bacon combines brilliantly with the sweetness of maple syrup. (Hello, bacon waffles!) But chocolate is more complicated than syrup. In my opinion, it’s that the particular kind of savoriness (“umami”, if we’re being precise) of bacon is hard to blend with the rich and complex cocoa flavor of chocolate.
Just think of what might have been: chocolate-covered, bacon-wrapped espresso beans! The world came within a hair’s breadth of having the ultimate on-the-go breakfast snack.
Chocolate and orange might also initially seem to clash in a similar way, but they actually pair quite nicely. And curiously—to return to the citrus theme—lemon does not seem at all correct as a compliment to chocolate. It just doesn’t really work the same way. Pineapple is only slightly better: meh…
But the way that flavor combinations sound can never quite capture the experience of how they taste: like strawberry and basil (quite good), or pineapple and mint (astonishingly good). There is, perhaps, simply too much complexity for my imagination to grasp at once. Some things need to be tried to be believed, or even just comprehended; after all, my tongue can taste much more than it can articulate.
Maybe I’ll try orange yogurt sometime, if only to understand why it doesn’t taste good to me. Maybe I’ll be surprised.
Some Assembly Required
Should I really have to pay the same amount or more for a deconstructed salad as a normal salad? In fact, it doesn’t seem like it should be called “salad”—it’s a tidy collection of separated ingredients. It’s like the mise en place for a salad skipped a couple of steps on the line and went straight to plating.
Don’t get me wrong: sometimes I’m in the the frame of mind to play with my food or build something from a kit, and there is something appealing about the high degree of organization. It just feels a tiny bit silly to get an almost-prepared dish; it feels a little like I’ve accidentally signed up for a foraging experience. Somehow a little more entropy feels appropriate for a salad.
Tickled
It’s hard to tickle yourself; you can’t, really. You can’t introduce enough unpredictability into your own movements to be surprised in the way that feels ticklish. You know exactly what you’re going to do before you even do it, and that ruins the feeling.
I think there is an analogy here with food, because it seems like it usually tastes better when someone else makes it for you than if you make it yourself. It could be that in the process of making even just a PB&J, you become a little desensitized to the smell of it, or the effort somehow dilutes the flavors. It could be that making the food yourself somehow partially satisfies your hunger.
And it could also be that making food for someone is simply a gift; a nice, little surprise. And who wouldn’t be tickled by that?
Dinner Conversations
Two areas in which humans have advanced far beyond any other species are food and communication. We prepare food like no other animal not only by cooking, but by using an elaborate set of tools and techniques. And, of course, our language abilities have developed to an almost inconceivable level when you consider the range of complex and abstract concepts we can efficiently discuss; like what to make for dinner tonight.
We are not unique in either eating communal meals or our ability to communicate. We do stand out, however, near the edge of a certain precipice with another trait: the danger we face by talking during dinner.
The anatomy of most animals’ throats are such that an extremely important flap of tissue—the epiglottis—is directly on top of the windpipe (larynx) and closes it off completely from the rest of the throat throughout the entire act of swallowing. We humans, however, have a longer-than-usual passage above the epiglottis and the air that we breathe can carry with it the food and drink that we’re swallowing. Where animals have a railroad-type switching apparatus to keep food moving along the right track, we have more of an on-ramp/merge/off-ramp highway traffic arrangement; there are chances for both collisions and missing an exit, so to speak. In other words, if we attempt to both inhale and swallow simultaneously we may actually succeed at both—and immediately choke on our food.
Humans develop this “low larynx” after we are born, which creates a physiological hazard but also enormous acoustic and linguistic advantages. Other primates and human babies simply cannot make the same kinds of robust vowel sounds that adult humans can; vowel sounds which are found in almost all languages and are thought to be important for being clearly understood: the /i/ in “heed”, /u/ in “mood” and the /a/ in “palm”. Despite the fact that even today in the United States, choking is the fourth leading cause of unintentional death, evolution has apparently gathered more than enough benefit from human speech to offset the losses.
The simple, yet profound pleasures of cooking and sharing a meal with friends and family—talking and laughing in the kitchen and around the table—are quintessentially human. And, uniquely, they encourage a certain discipline: the subtle refinement in behavior of making a separation between taking a bite and taking a breath to compensate for an anatomy that no longer does.
Jell-O and Marshmallows
I’m pretty sure that Jell-O and marshmallows are made from the same molecules; they’re just arranged a little differently. That’s why they go so well together.
New England Chowder
My wife and I try New England Chowder almost everywhere we go. If we see it on a menu somewhere—we aren’t “somewhere” so much lately as we are simply at home looking at a takeout menu online—we try it. Oftentimes it’s an accompaniment with Friday fish fry, sometimes it’s just a soup option with another entree.
It’s fun to note the variations across different restaurants: some add corn and some don’t, some use a little dill to season it and others use a lot. And, of course, some places offer a clam chowder and others a seafood chowder that might include fish, clams and perhaps even bits of lobster. Chowder is one of our very favorite items to have from a restaurant and we are rarely disappointed.
Except when we’re in New England. There, it seems, they don’t like a thick, hearty stew filled with the rich flavors of cream and potatoes and butter and bacon to go with the seafood. They seem to prefer a watery broth that might have a little flavor imparted by a wedge of lemon on the side to accompany the subtle notes of fresh ocean-caught fish. They require an inordinate amount of salt and pepper to be added at the table. And perhaps they believe that the cute little packet of oyster crackers will somehow transform the bowl of thin liquid into something with the proper consistency: a viscous phase of matter almost between a liquid and a solid, like ivory lava, flowing with fat and flavor.
We are looking forward to a day when we can safely travel to New England again and try all sorts of seafood dishes that are best consumed by the sea that produced them, but chowders may no longer be among them. I don’t know how New England Chowder got it’s name, because it’s only made properly in the Midwest.
Menus
A menu isn’t just a list of things you can get at a restaurant. The menu can be thought of as a highly favorable review; at once both comprehensive and succinct. It’s also a chance to tell the story of the restaurant, to give it a sense of time and place as well as taste.
Even before we set foot inside, the menu can tell us what to expect and why.