What this Foodie is up to now

Here's a snippet of my fiction, which is quite focused on food. 20-year-old Leah and her older sister Sarah have been recently orphaned when their celebrity chef parents died in a crash. Sarah got the loyalty genes and Leah got the other ones.



She has always cared about this stuff, Leah recalls. She remembers going to the grocery store on her bike and asking the lady at the produce section about fresh basil for pesto, which she'd read about in the Silver Palate cookbook. Someone had told her dried herbs would work just as well as fresh in the pesto. "Just use a little less than the recipe calls for," they said, trying to be helpful. Leah remained unconvinced even at the tender age of eight; she would not have accepted that answer any more today. Only twelve years later and you can no doubt buy fresh basil leaves at midnight on Christmas Eve in Aspen, Leah thought.

Just yesterday Leah had said to her sister, "I think my days of eating meat might be numbered. It's so unsustainable." Now, over her slice of toasted and buttered monolithic American wheat (at least there was a decent sourdough yeast involved here, Leah admitted, satisfied with something at last), she wonders whether she will have to do something more radical with her life than she realizes.

With the dropping of these veils of food awareness she shares the disillusionment of some of her friends, whom she is surprised to find have been shocked, shocked to find sexism and harassment and all variations of violence against women being perpetrated out in the real world, despite all the long-ago landmarks: all the civil rights and equality legislation last passed in the 1970s. Maybe growing up with moms who grew up in the Title IX era gave us kids who could play any sport they wanted and moms who could coach soccer teams now but also rendered said moms a little oblivious to the realities of sexual politics from the playground to the penthouses and power suites of America.

It was tough, going out there thinking that the feminists of the previous generation had already eradicated those old-school obstacles and then finding out that all most guys wanted was this thing, it wasn't more than that; it was just a thing like a bracelet charm or a rabbit's foot, proof that they too could have that thing they all thought everyone else had: "friends with benefits."
Doesn't friendship normally imply benefits? Leah asked herself. And if you have to say the "with benefits" part, she figured, wasn't there something spooky about the whole exchange? So far she has tended to avoid the sex question for herself. Frankly, she's squeamish about all that; she hasn't met many men who she feels might change her center of gravity in a good way instead of knocking her out of her physical and romantic equilibrium, a delicate construction at best under the most ordinary of circumstances.

Leah shifts her attention back to her interest in food and farming and wonders what she will have to do to elevate her concerns properly, to give the issues the proper airing. She wanted to think up something radical to step up her work, to help her get her message out. Because all this being jealous of people who have a pulpit for some message is just silliness. Leah knows she just needs get up and find her own durned niche. Then she thought about her friends again, noting that she and her peers weren't exactly demonstrating on behalf of women's rights lately, the way her mother did in college twenty years ago to demand equal wages for work, even though they all knew that most women's wages still haven't closed the gap.

Leah realizes her passion is educating people about the magic of food and wine -- she has quickly come to see how sustainability and organic farming add another dimension to food, yielding something far richer and and unique to place and time. Now only was it a delicious world, but you entered into a land where you could fully nourish instead of ravaging cycles of life.
But what was the key? Wheat? Sugar? Meat?

Unlike Ms. Ask-A-Genius in the Sunday lifestyle magazine, Leah feels her government, in its adherence to another set of values and guidelines, has completely lost its perspective on this magical equation. For them, it's all about the money and political favors that can be extracted from each of the transactions involved in growing, harvesting, processing, and distributing wheat to the masses.



Leah’s food-obsessive cycles are like manias: she’s noticed she becomes obsessed with food-related notions and fads more and more of the time, more intensely each time, and she rotates through each one more quickly: the Atkins diet, xylitol, food safety, and now she’s on a personal quest to learn about the hazards of gluten. She feels weird; to herself she says she’s “a little Joan of Arky today” but doesn’t particularly want to plant that suggestion in anyone else’s mind. When she’s with other people, she thinks a lot about how to say anything without proselytizing. She figures she can’t really say anything unless asked.

She’d felt a jolt of recognition when she read a few stories someone pointed her to on a website called Beyond Vegetarianism. People who had become obsessed with eating specific things, even healthy foods, wrote about their travels to the brink of sanity and back. Leah sees how such obsessiveness could parallel anorexia in providing that pretext for controlling all input. She understands her friends who are true athletes and why they spend all their time on their diet and on fine-tuning the health of the body they use for their dramatic feats of derring-do; she can even see how she and her band and her music could benefit from some of that tuning, if they ever did hit that elusive Big Time. A personal trainer and my own chef? Sign me up, she thought.

The question that still nags at Leah, though, is why so many people seem sickly to her, so disconnected from their physical selves. She knows she’s gone through similar phases herself. And most of the people she sees in a day seem utterly unable to invest more time and care in the bodies that they carry around to represent them in the world.
She doesn’t even know what it is. Laziness, she wonders? No, plenty of people are active and overweight; plenty of people are fit and overweight. And reports of their deaths are greatly exaggerated, Leah has been learning, in her recent researches. Turns out you stand an even worse chance if you’re on a very low-cholesterol diet; you’re more prone to a bunch of ailments, and more likely to commit suicide to boot.

She keeps turning the problem over in her mind. Are people afraid if they start working out or even simply doing something that involves movement for an hour a day, “that would make me gay” or something? Surely, Leah thinks, there must be a way to help people find a comfortable equilibrium that best supports their health.

Leah then makes two of the best decisions of her life: Leah decides there must be a better way, and she decides to let her mind work on it in the background, to sleep on what that better way might be.



Leah had laughed out loud the first time she heard the aphorism that “human beings are just devices made for carrying water from one place to another.” And even a few times after that, too; the phrase tickled her so. But now she’s plugged food into that equation, and it’s helped her zero in on what felt to her like a new dimension in food, something she had not fully seen or recognized before. Suddenly she was able to see not only food’s essential ability to keep your engine running – its caloric value – and in addition, its ability to bestow health. She’d always seen food as a necessity, but what if it could be more than that? What if food could elevate you to your highest potential? Nourish you and detoxify you all at once?

Did looking at food through this lens differ at all from counting caloric units? She thought so, yes. It gave her something constructive, something positive to look for instead of something whose impact needed to be resisted.

On Weight Watchers for three weeks, Leah remember how adept she’d become at calculating how costly her food was in the scheme of alloted “points” for the day. But she had lost something in learning that translation, in the way that sometimes learning the name of a bird or tree removes you from the direct experience of that bird or tree. Food had flattened out for her in that time and for a while after. She hadn’t appreciated food much; she’d just gone through the motions of eating and sometimes cooking, but with that acute knowledge of each item’s nutritive density.

Now she was seeing food with an inner glow. Yes, she had changed her mind about the value of a lot of the foods she grew up eating. But she also had acquired a certainty and a clarity she had never shown before when she talked about it.

And she was sticking to her rule about not bringing it up, to avoid evangelizing, yet people were asking her about it every day and she was loving the discussions, the awakening in people’s eyes.

Later they’d look a little sheepish when she saw them at the store with their loaves of bread and hamburger buns and the like. “I’m still doing some research on that. Seeing if I could eat that way,” they’d say.

-rk