Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Waste not...

     The Travel Channel has a new show called, Man Versus Food Nation. It’s a spin off of Man Versus Food in which a fellow named Adam Richman would tour the country taking on “food challenges.” Richman’s challenges included eating gargantuan plates of food or dishes so spicy they cause tears, profuse sweating, a seared palate, and the delayed vengeance of “what goes in must come out”, proving beyond all doubt that foolish behavior carries its own rewards.
      In the original, Richman took on the challenges himself. In the new version he recruits his fans to….well, I simply couldn’t do justice to the show by describing it myself, so from the program’s website; After 3 years of eating his way across America, Adam’s heard the Man v. Food Nation …they want a piece of the action. Now, Adam is recruiting local talent to take on their beloved hometown challenges. As Adam samples the local flavor of every location he visits, he'll look for fans to walk in his shoes. Richman has apparently retired his fork and hung up the bib to become coach, mentor and cheerleader.  So the basic premise of the show is that Coach Richman travels the country to instruct other culinary jocks in the nuances of eating anything from a 5 pound Stromboli to a 12 pound hamburger. This is truly bringing sport to the masses; something akin to Tom Brady teaching a Southie to throw a tight spiral or Tim Lincecum schooling a bleacher bum on the finer points of the cut fastball. 
     And why would someone want to try to eat a pizza the size of a dining table? The Man Versus Food Nation website poses just that kind of insightful question;Is it for the glory? Is it for the honor?  It’s for neither, the website says; Adam and his Man v. Food Nation are doing it for the love of the game, as they work together to defeat these edible "beasts" and celebrate the community that created them.”  I suppose this is proof that alcohol, vanity and the hunger (no pun intended) for that 15 minutes of fame have absolutely nothing to do with it. This is not only a celebration of sport and community; it’s democracy in action showing the world that in this great land of opportunity, just as anyone can be President of the United States, even the little guy can achieve gluttonous greatness. Why this is enough to stir the soul, bring a tear to the eye and make you want to salute the flag. It’s as American as baseball and mom’s apple pie (a 10 pound pie that you have to finish it in 45 minutes and you can’t get up from the table during the challenge).
     In a recent episode this guru of gorging visited Albuquerque, New Mexico to mentor three “warriors” named Travis in the fine art of eating a dish called Travis on a Silver Platter; an 8 pound burrito hidden under a mountain of French fries. No, no, no; they didn’t team up to eat one Travis. Each Travis got a Travis of his own, which he had to finish in an hour or less.  The Travises battle bravely but in the end they sat before their platters of leftover beans, tortilla, fixins and fries in stuffed, subdued defeat. One Travis finished about three pounds of burrito, another about 4 pounds and the third Travis had barely scratched the surface of fries. All told about 15 pounds of spuds and burrito looked to be destined for the dumpster.
     Of course gastronomic excess has always been available to the masses. Mere mortals have only to go to the local strip mall and visit the all you can eat buffet, where for the price of a double sawbuck you can take multiple trips to the warming table and load your plate with heaps of soggy fried chicken, leathery beef, squishy fish sticks, Salisbury steak in brown goo and various kinds of mass produced starches. Posted signs admonish patrons to take only what they can eat but invariably the eyes become bigger than the stomach and those five buttermilk biscuits in sausage gravy that looked so manageable and yummy at the warming station suddenly start to look a bit overwhelming after the half dozen chicken legs and the mound of grayish, green bean casserole have settled into the belly. A sigh of satisfaction, lay down the napkin, lean back and let the busboy scrape a plate of barely touched food into the trash.
     And so because every story, good or bad deserves a moral, equally good or bad, we come to one here. It’s a moral that has nothing to do with clogged arteries, adipose tissue or consuming calories that reach into the 5 digit range. Hey if you can eat that 48 ounce porterhouse with a stuffed potato, order up. Back in the day, when my metabolism raged out of control many was the Friday evening when I sat in front of an extra-large pizza and a pitcher of beer, shared nary a solitary slice or a single drop and left a clean platter and an empty vessel.  And it isn’t a moral about badly cooked food or food so drenched in hot sauce that it’s just this side of toxic. Not everyone is impressed by cassoulet or a Michelin star. That’s why Papa John sells lots of pies and Applebee’s has lines out the door.
     This moral is about a patent disrespect for a basic necessity of life; food.  And it isn’t just disrespect for that necessity but disrespect for those who lack that necessity.
     When you face off against the 12 egg omelet and three pounds of hash browns challenge the odds are that a half a dozen of those eggs and a fair amount of taters will end up in the trash while you find yourself huddled in a corner of the bathroom vanquished by breakfast, hurling your meal and dreaming of that photo on the tavern wall that could have been. I wonder how much food winds up in the dumpster or down the toilet all to satisfy some misguided quest for entertainment. Oh I know, there are those who’ll dredge up that wise guy response we all made to our mothers at one time or another when she told us of the “starving kids in India.” “Well box it up and send it to them COD.” But doesn’t this go beyond just the wasted food?
     There was a time when overeating was something people did at a wedding reception or in a moment of weakness to “cure” a bout of depression. Gluttony has somehow managed to become not only an entertainment fad but a distorted sporting event. Don’t believe me? Just tune in ESPN on July 4th to catch the Coney Island Hot Dog Eating Contest. That’s right, ESPN the self-proclaimed worldwide leader in sports will feature Joey Chestnut going down on a bunch of wieners (and to think I once considered log rolling contests on Wide World of Sports to be phony sport). Through the medium of television, binging has gained popularity, acceptance and a sort of whacked out culinary cult following which undoubtedly has encouraged restaurant owners everywhere to invent their own contests; challenging all comers to eat some gut busting or tongue scorching meal. And why not? Someone has to be a bit of a fool to choke down a dozen nuclear wings and we all know the old saying about what happens to a fool and his money. And the fool usually brings along an entourage of fellow fools to watch. And so, while Mr. Restaurateur might be on the hook for a free meal on those rare occasions when someone actually beats the challenge, he’s already made a bank roll on the posse’s bar bill. When it comes down to a choice between the morality of wasting food or having a few more bucks in the till at the end of the night, money, to  borrow from Bob Dylan, “doesn’t talk, it swears.”
     Sure some of you are taking me to task right now, for being a spoilsport, a stodgy old fogy, pooping the eating party. Why should I get my moral back up you ask? Well because this is my blog and I can, but the more important reason is because of the way I was raised. I’m one generation removed from folks who at some time in their lives found food hard to come by. My father lived through the Great Depression and while his family managed to put food on the table it was a valuable commodity, its scarcity was frightening and it wasn’t wasted. My mother lived in Italy during World War II, a place and time in which bread was worth its weight in gold. My parents never forgot how precious food could be and so when I was a child at the dinner table what we put on our plates ended up in our bellies. The “clean your plate” lecture I got didn’t come with a story of some faceless hungry waif in a land I'd never heard of. It came with real life stories from parents who lived with the real possibility of going hungry. And so I dutifully cleaned my plate every night. Leftovers were served the next day for lunch or combined to make a stew. That little fistful of pasta at the bottom of the bowl became part of a delicious frittata the next morning. I recall a visit to my family in Italy. We had just finished a steak dinner and as I pushed away my plate I was scolded for wasting food. For the life of me I couldn’t figure out what was waste until I noticed a few scraps of meat on the bone. Chastened, I retrieved my plate and cleaned the bone. Extreme? Maybe, but these were people who had learned the value of food the hard way. The lessons have remained with me. You know that heel at the end of a loaf of bread that usually ends up in the trash or as food for the pigeons? It’s perfectly good toasted and served with a layer of Nutella. I'm not too proud to pick up that chop bone and gnaw off the last threads of meat. When I have to throw away food that’s gone bad I do so with a measure of shame.
     America truly is a country of plenty and we plenty take it all for granted. We are a nation of shameless wasters. In 2008, The New York Times reported that Americans threw away 27 percent of the food available for consumption. That waste amounted to 30 million tons per year or 12 percent of the total waste stream. It’s only gotten worse as the total waste in 2011 as reported by the EPA was 34 million tons, or 14 percent of the total waste stream.
     The question is often asked, “Why do they hate us?” When we say they; “they” usually refers to folks from other, often impoverished, countries. The jingoistic, often angry and defensive response to the question is that they are jealous.  Maybe they aren’t jealous but angry and insulted that we take our riches for granted; because they have to work many hard, back breaking, spirit crushing hours to put scraps on the family table. They live with the sword of hunger dangling over their heads. Often what they have for a pantry is a dumpster or the local landfill which we cavalierly fill with mountains of wasted food. What they live in constant, nagging fear of not having enough of, we use as an entertainment prop or as equipment for a phony sport.
     My maternal grandmother who lived through two world wars and knew intimately the want of food used to always say, “It’s a sin to waste God’s food.” I’m not sure if the greater sin is actually wasting the food or having such a cavalier attitude towards something that people die, even in our own country, for the want of.

Sunday, June 26, 2011

Welcome

This blog is this baby boomer’s view of America; its culture, politics, society, as an American Dream, as a concept and an ideal. It is life in America; the lives of others and of course, my own experience during my nearly six decades and the myriad changes I’ve witnessed and been a part of.  It is news, commentary, interviews, a lot of vignettes, my own personal discoveries and changes and well, whatever else I might come up with.

This has been my land for going on 58 years. At some point, probably around the 10th year I cajoled my parents into buying a Time-Life History of the United States. I don’t think that I actually read more than 50 pages in all of those volumes but I was captivated by the pictures, drawings, political cartoons, maps and photographs chronicling our history. Those books, unread, stimulated a fascination with American History and lead to many books read and finally a degree in History from Santa Clara University.
                The goal at the time was to teach history but shortly after graduating I got myself sidetracked. Thirty seven years later I’m a purchasing agent. Get a history degree, be a purchasing agent; the logical career path, right? My interest in history never waned and so I’ve continued to read, study on my own and take the occasional college course with the notion of getting a masters.
                Some years back I took a short plunge into living history, joined the National Civil War Association and became a Civil War reenactor; Company A, 2nd Massachusetts Cavalry, also known as the California 100. During my “service” with the cavalry I never once got on a horse. While I think they’re beautiful animals I’m deathly afraid of them after having, years before, taken a fall at the end of an uncontrolled gallop. I joined the cavalry because I thought the uniforms looked cool and that alone is probably the most realistic aspect of my living history stint. How many young men in the vast histories of every nation, tribe or group joined some form of the military because the uniforms looked cool? During that period I was actually able to try my hand at teaching history both in the field, to visitors at the reenactments and in schools where I went in full gear to give talks about the Civil War. It was a time in which I immersed myself in the Civil War, some of it often splashing on my family who after a very short time got sick and tired of it all. After a few years I “retired” from the cavalry but like many old “soldiers” I still have my uniform which I occasionally trot out to regale (bore) some unfortunate visitor.
                Upon my return to civilian life my interest turned to other aspects of America (I mean how many books can you actually read about Pickett’s Charge before you’ve exhausted all the possibilities).  And so in the last few years I’ve taken on religion in America, politics, some economics (although I’m flummoxed by it), culture, society and the mystique called the American Dream.
                I continue to be engaged by the story of America, its history, people, culture, society, as a concept, and as a place that people yearn to immigrate to as my mother did when she was an Italian war bride and my wife and her family who came from the Philippines.  But make no mistake, this boomer’s view is not a jingoist view.  I don’t subscribe to “my country right or wrong” because while my country has often been right, it’s also too often been wrong.
                So I guess the next logical step is a blog. It’s been in the works for over a year now, has gone through various versions in my head and in the computer, been stalled and put on the back burner. Maybe fate intervened when I broke my leg and grounded me with a choice of writing or watching endless hours of cooking shows on television. Since I can only stomach about 5 minutes of Guy Fieri here I sit at the computer.
                I was raised in San Mateo, California, just south of San Francisco and have lived all my life in the Bay Area. I live with my wife of thirty years in the East Bay. We raised a son and daughter; got them through college and now they have families of their own. My son a marketing analyst and his wife a nurse live with their daughter in the shadow of my and my son’s alma mater. My daughter, married to a fire fighter lives a short 15 minutes away and takes care of her two babies while preparing to be a teacher.
                This post serves merely as an introduction to me and to this project.  I invite comments, the stories of others and discussion.  America is, in theory at least, the land of free speech. To that end I invite opposing points of view. I do ask that those with opposing views keep them clean and polite. As the gate keeper, so to speak, I do reserve the right to delete any posts or comments that are objectionable or simply hate filled bile. I hope all readers will enjoy.
   And by the way, I still have that set of Time-Life books. Maybe it will inspire my grandchildren.