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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
On our frequent American road trips, my friend Guy de la Valdene has invariably said at lunch, "These French fries are filthy," but he always eats them anyway, and some of mine, too. Another friend, the painter Russell Chatham, likes to remind me that we pioneered the idea of ordering multiple entrees in restaurants back in the seventies--the theory being that if you order several entrees you can then avoid the terrible disappointment of having ordered the wrong thing while others at the table have inevitably ordered the right thing. The results can't have been all that bad, since both of us are still more or less alive, though neither of us owns any spandex.
Is there an interior logic to overeating, or does gluttony, like sex, wander around in a messy void, utterly resistant to our attempts to make sense of it? Not very deep within us, the hungry heart howls, "Supersize me." When I was a boy, in northern Michigan, feeding my grandfather's pigs, I was amazed at their capacity. Before I was caught in the act and chided by my elders, I had empirically determined that the appetite of pigs was limitless. As I dawdled in the barnyard, the animals gazed at me as fondly as many of us do at great chefs. Life is brutishly short and we wish to eat well, and for this we must generally travel to large cities, or, better yet, to France.
Never before have the American people had their noses so deeply in one another's business. If I announce that I and eleven other diners shared a thirty-seven-course lunch that likely cost as much as a new Volvo station wagon, those of a critical nature will let their minds run in tiny, aghast circles of condemnation. My response to them is that none of us twelve disciples of gourmandise wanted a new Volvo. We wanted only lunch, and since lunch lasted approximately eleven hours we saved money by not having to buy dinner. The defense rests.
Some would also think it excessive to travel all the way from Montana to Marc Meneau's L'Esperance, in Burgundy, for lunch, but I don't. Although there are signs of a culinary revolution in the United States, this much bandied renaissance is for people in cities such as New York, San Francisco, Seattle, and Chicago. When travelling across America over the past forty years, I've repeatedly sought extreme unction of a sort while in the midst of digestive death in the parking lots of restaurants. I've found it best, in these situations, to get some distance--to drive for a while, pull over, take a walk, fall to my knees, and pray for better food in the future.
I suspect that it's inappropriate to strand myself on a high horse when it comes to what people eat. We have proved ourselves inept fools on so many mortal fronts--from our utter disregard of the natural world to our notions of ethnic virtue to the hellish marriage of politics and war--that perhaps we should be allowed to pick at garbage like happy crows. When I was growing up in the Calvinist Midwest, the assumption that we eat to live, not live to eat, was part of the Gospels. (With the exception, of course, of holiday feasts. Certain women were famous for their pie-making abilities, while certain men, like my father, were admired for being able to barbecue two hundred chickens at once for a church picnic.) I recall that working in the fields for...
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