Civility and Food

I remember it like it was yesterday: my grandmother plunked a Meissen platter of her special, matzo meal-dredged fried chicken in front of me and implored me to eat. I did, slicing into a golden, crispy, kosher breast with a dinner knife.

“What the hell are you doing?” she asked, scowling.

“Eating my chicken,” I answered, confused.

“Pick it up and eat it. You know, like you mean it!” She grabbed a leg from the platter and tore off the entire thigh portion with her teeth, gnawing and snarfing and chomping vigorously.

“This is the way you eat fried chicken,” she mumbled, wiping her face with a napkin before repairing to the bathroom to re-glue her uppers, which she’d always manage to loosen when she ate with her hands.

Months later, at sleepaway camp, my English counselor, Kate Findlay, gawked at me while I tore into a wing.

“What on earth are you doing?” she said, putting her chip butty down on her plastic plate. Kate was allergic to chicken, and was always eating special meals that the camp chef prepared for her.

“Eating–” I started to say.

“Like a bloody cavewoman? Use a fork, for God’s sake. Have you no civility, young lady?”  she cried, glaring at me. Then put she put down her French fry sandwich and wiped the Cool Whip off her chin.

I looked at the semi-masticated chicken on my plate, and I thought about it for a bit while my friends noisily ate around me: at what point is it important to act like you’re an evolved creature who walks upright, and when is it okay to behave like a beast who has just clubbed dinner over the head and dragged it back to the cave?

The question here isn’t really one of culinary style; it’s really a matter of knowing what’s appropriate, and when. For the last fifteen years or so, we’ve been culinarily neck-deep in barbecue bliss, which seems to draw large numbers of men who like to chew on slow-roasted, smoked bones mopped with incendiary hot sauces powerful enough to fire a small nuclear facility, all while making very loud and delightful smacking noises. But we also seem to have traveled, culturally, down a path involving dishes of meat the size of your head, and restaurants that serve not inexpensive meals wrapped up in butcher paper, instead of on a plate. You place your order at a counter, are handed a brown paper package on a cafeteria tray, you take it to a communal table like a starving, drooling, grunting troglodyte, unwrap it, and have at it in a totally libidinous manner next to complete strangers who are doing the exact same thing, just like the earliest members of Genus Homo (and by them I don’t mean clean cut gentlemen who can match pocket square to silk knot cufflinks).

Don’t get me wrong: if you put a slab of smoked meat of any kind in front of me, it’ll be gone in an instant. I can go on ad nauseum about the quality of my local artisanal tofu and how nice and pretty my bright lights chard stems are, but hand me a rack of ribs and I spontaneously turn into Raquel Welch in One Million Years BC, minus the fur bikini.

But sometimes, things change: there’s something very weird that happens when you’re standing in the toilet paper aisle at Target on a Saturday morning, and the CNN crawl on your iPhone informs you that there’s been a shooting at a suburban shopping center. You suddenly stop and look around at the sea of humanity surrounding you, mindlessly pushing shopping carts and loading up—glaze-eyed—on cheap plastic chachkas, designer outfits for dogs, camo snugglies, and stacks of discounted Hungry He-Man frozen food dinners manufactured in the same plant as household bleach. You look around at this stuff—at the miles, and piles, and yards of stuff—artfully arranged under the buzzing, soul-killing din of fluorescent lights and the watchful gaze of a teenage floor manager who hasn’t quite started shaving yet, and who goes home to his parents who may or may not ignore him, may or may not feed him, and who may or may not tell him they love him, and you start thinking a little bit differently about how you live, and maybe even about what, and how you eat. At least that’s what happened to me two Saturdays ago, after I heard that a wildly disturbed young man showed up at a peaceful event in Arizona celebrating democracy, and opened fire.

Susan and I went home that morning, and sat down in the living room with some tea. After we blamed those we thought were the obvious root culprits, we agreed: in a country this big, this ungrounded, this deeply angry, what messages are bound to be sent to those who are in need of the greatest stability? That we don’t care? That they’re alone, and that everyone is in it for themselves? That everyone in this country is so viscerally angst-ridden and furious that it’s just part of who we are as Americans, accepting as normal everything from violent road rage to the schools that feed our children dreck, anger at our neighbors-of-a-different-religion-next door and at the Progressives and the Constitutionalists and everyone in between and the guy who cut you off this morning in the apartment-sized SUV? Any shrink would tell you: that’s a lot of fury for one country of 312 million to stand. And its message of righteous indignation is very, very loud.

But what about the food? Can there be a connection between the way many of us eat and the fact that it now seems to be our God-given right to check our civility at the door and instead act like knuckle-dragging cavemen? Honestly, I don’t know (and I’m being serious when I say that, so any of you who are planning on putting words in my mouth or massaging the message can stop it right now). All I do know is that for the last fortnight, I haven’t been able to shake off this feeling that maybe it’s time for all of us to live, eat, and feed our friends and families in a more peaceful, civil manner. Maybe food needs to be smaller, slower, and more thoughtful, and served a little less brutishly.

Because the manner in which we eat, I think, will trickle down more generally to the manner in which we live.

Tagged as: anger, cavemen, Civility, Slow Food