What If This Were Enough? Read online

  Soon after she left, her condescending ex-husband would go to the kitchen to make us margaritas. He made them with pure tequila and lime juice and triple sec, but the balance was never right. His drinks tasted like limes and rubbing alcohol, filled to the brim of martini glasses, always spilling over the sides. We would sit on the porch, in chairs selected for audience impact rather than comfort. We would sip our too-strong drinks and I would try to start a lively discussion, just weighty enough, just intense enough to get us going. But this man sitting next to me was just someone else’s condescending ex-husband, so he rarely took the bait. He got up to fix the balance on the stereo; it was too loud, now it was too soft. He got up to move his chair; the sun was shining in his eyes. He got up to get his lumbar pillow; his back was hurting again. He got up to get another drink; he’d already finished his first one. He got up to go to the bathroom. He got up to check his messages. He got up to grab a book he wanted to tell me about, something that was beneath him and beneath me, something new age, something with God in the title, something self-helpy. I started to notice that everything he said came out of a book he’d read. I started to see that he couldn’t improvise. He needed his script. He was angry all the time. He was furious at his ex. He couldn’t believe she’d left him for that schlubby guy. I was a bystander in this drama. The script demeaned both of us.

  I didn’t allow myself to acknowledge this. Instead I focused on fixing things, cleaning things up. I would be more patient. I would buy more plants. I would hide the next time, instead of answering the door. I would heal all wounds with my superior love for this man, who was slowly revealing himself to be very difficult to love, a plant getting way too much sunlight, a plant that would rather just wither up and die.

  “Remind me to do this more often,” he’d say, after lighting a joint. Then he’d laugh a tight laugh. He’d throw his head back—everything he did was theatrical—but it was still tight, still angry. He was obsessed with relaxing, but he never seemed relaxed. I didn’t let myself notice this. I didn’t let myself take in how dissatisfied he always was, how distracted, how he could never just look me in the eyes—that thing he did the night we met, which I remembered so well, that thing I got fixated on, how he met my gaze and didn’t look away. He had lost the ability to look me in the eyes. He could only do it when he was mad. He was mad a lot. I looked away. I washed the floors again.

  There was a propulsive energy to that time. I worked hard to make things better. It took a lot of work; everything took work. I was unemployed, so I had time and energy to pour into this terrible doomed project. But all of the thoughts I kept myself from thinking would settle in at night. I would climb into my side of the bed and turn my back to him and I would think, “I have to leave. I have to get out of here. This is torture. I have to dump him.” He would get up to tuck the blankets in more tightly at the bottom of the bed, so it felt like I was being pinned down by a net. I would kick the blanket up at the bottom until I was free.

  In the morning, I told myself, “This is how you feel when you’re making a real commitment. This is how it is when you’re in love and you’re not going anywhere. Love takes hard work.” I could fix this. I could make his ex regret leaving, and make him glad she left. I could make Bingo the dog love me more. I could make the plants thrive, even the ones turning brown, even the ones covered in aphids, scary horror-show bugs I’d never seen before. I had so many challenges ahead of me. That felt good. I would work even harder.

  * * *

  —

  One day, my boyfriend called his ex and asked her to bring back a shelf she’d taken away. It was his shelf and he needed it, he said. When she brought the shelf back, he and I were sitting at the kitchen table. He decided he wouldn’t hide this time, since we were mostly out of sight. She brought the shelf into the living room and left the front door open, so we could see her through the kitchen window. She took out some wood cleaner and cleaned the shelf right there, so that she didn’t leave it dusty for us.

  Watching her clean the shelf, I saw: She took care of him in ways I would never manage. There we were, each of us preparing for an audience, but really she was the star, even now, even long gone. This was a woman who could work with what she had. She brought the magic to that house. When she left, the magic left with her.

  He laughed at her for cleaning the shelf. He tried to say that it was annoying, he could see that now, how annoying she was about everything, such a control freak. I tried to join in but my heart wasn’t in it. When she got into her car and drove away, the sunshine dimmed a little. I wanted to follow her to her new house in the Valley, to sit with her new boyfriend and bear witness to their life, which was real. They weren’t just playing house like we were, waiting for more. They had everything they needed. How did that feel?

  I might’ve imagined I would land somewhere like that eventually. Or maybe I suspected that I would never be worthy of that kind of a life. Either way, I probably should have cultivated more empathy for that man, who was so clearly in a lot of pain. But I still remember how good it felt to smash the handset of my phone into pieces. I hadn’t even moved in yet and I was already furious. I was in love and I already hated the guy. I knew I shouldn’t move in with him. But it almost felt satisfying to hate him. My disappointment had a clear source. I would try to make things perfect and I would fail, over and over again. I couldn’t just love someone and be loved back. That was too easy. That didn’t feel right. I was more familiar with dissatisfaction. I was more at home with longing. As I moved my things into that dusty, tiny, haunted house, I looked around and thought, “This will never be enough.” It was exactly what I wanted.

  delusion at the gastropub

  If anything marks our arrival on the dystopian shores of gross overconsumption, it’s the foodie movement. Because it takes a lot of late-capitalist pixie dust to turn the basics of subsistence into coveted luxuries. The brazen marketing of designer water at $5 per bottle, flown in from Fiji or the Alps—or better yet, filled from a local municipal tap—may have been the first red flag, signaling the modern public’s staggering ability to suspend its disbelief or simply to miss the basic thrust of manufactured demand.

  But if one trait characterizes upper-middle-class citizens with lots of disposable income, it’s their tireless compulsion to dispose of that income in fresh new ways. The more pedestrian the product in question, the greater its seeming potential to evoke untold volumes of feeling and meaning. A few centuries into the future, inhabitants of a ravaged globe may look back on this time as the crucial moment at which delusional fervor around unremarkable, overpriced things reached its apex.

  The glorification of food seems understandable enough, at first glance. Everybody’s got to eat. And as with any other animal urge or act of survival—masticate, copulate, procreate, repeat—it’s not exactly an achievement to move this activity to the center of one’s value system. What upper-middle-class college student doesn’t emerge from six months abroad in Barcelona swearing fealty to the crown of jamón ibérico? What leisurely plutocrat isn’t tempted to throw his energies into a hobby with immediate built-in payoffs, like becoming an overnight expert on the expensive aged cheeses of the world? What better pastime for a wealthy faux-hippie housewife than raising egg-laying hens (they’re adorable!) or learning to pickle the organic vegetables her child is growing at his pricey progressive preschool? Like so many other consumer hobbies, such extracurricular foodie activities are easy to engage in, relatively cheap, and come with their own built-in gustatory and social rewards.

  Those who require that their hobbies also have a heroic sheen can turn to the lovingly itemized ideological bases of the so-called food revolution. A long train of exposés and manifestos detail the myriad ways our foodstuffs have been too long tainted by chemical manipulations, resource-intensive factory farming, overprocessing, and general tastelessness. The solution, from the consumer’s standpoint, is to repair all this syst
emic damage with better informed, more locally minded shopping. To combat the epidemic of fast food (and the kindred American plague of obesity), we’ve been schooled in the virtues of “slow food,” aka “locavore” cuisine, aka organic and regional produce, meats, and dairy products. All of which is worthy enough, as far as our individual consumption goes. We’re all likelier to lead healthy, slim, fulfilling, and flavorful lives when we nourish ourselves on farmers’ market fare, aren’t we? Not to mention that we feel better about ourselves as agents of ethical change.

  Yet there’s not much evidence that this trend for artisanal cuisine has produced anything close to a more just, affordable, and robust food economy. If anything, it has driven our already class-segmented food system into still greater polarities, with privileged access to rabbit larb and Japanese uni at one end of the spectrum, and a wasteland of overprocessed, cheap, and empty grub at the other.

  Nonetheless, foodies have learned to transform the self-indulgent habit of spending more than $200 on a single meal into an intellectual and cultural badge of honor—a chance to loudly advertise their great taste in public, as they remark on the bright or redolent or flavorful undertones of whatever anxiously plated concoction they’ve just savored. Those with money to burn will always find creative ways to paint even their most decadent indulgences as enlightened, discriminating, and honorable. And those who provide such indulgences are probably wise to collude in this fantasy.

  Of course, the fantasy itself grows more baroque and involuted as the foodie cult nets an ever-greater number of well-heeled recruits. In spite of the self-congratulatory earthiness that foodie culture tends to favor (“I just really love food,” earnest foodies will confess, seemingly unaware that most of humankind shares their passion), its overwrought quasi-religiosity picks up right where the rise of designer bottled water left off. “Food is everything!” foodies declare, or “Live to eat, not eat to live!”—battle cries apparently aimed at shaking the rest of the populace out of its imagined hunger strike. But purchasing a meal at Chez Panisse or Momofuku or Trois Mec is not enough. One must dine at all of Eater’s “essential” restaurants, murmur reverently of Michelin stars, and speak in an authoritative, Top Chef–tutored tongue on the importance of balancing sourness and sweetness and umami in every single bite. The solemnly important task of delivering “thoughtful” and “inventive” food to every semi-hip town in America has been accomplished, and food culture mavens have officially overshot their mark: Eating out now means being served sweetmeats on a slab of brick while listening to the neighboring table grouse about the inadequate “acidity” of their last plate in the self-serious tones of film critics rolling their eyes at Terrence Malick’s latest clumsy offerings.

  And don’t forget the importance of chronicling the eating experience. If eating is a deeply private and emotional activity, laced with personal meaning and nostalgia, then the Yelp restaurant review corpus is our communal diary, in which each diarist struggles mightily to mimic the hauteur of the establishment food critic. Take this review of a hot Italian restaurant in a fashionable neighborhood of Los Angeles:

  We ordered the chicken liver crostone, the octopus, and the chopped salad “amigliorata” to start. The chicken liver was ludicrous—airy and creamy in texture, and absolutely rich with flavor. It came with thick crusty hunks of grilled bread and a tart black plum mostarda, a thoughtful accompaniment to the decadent liver. The octopus was tender and toothsome, served over a bed of black barley, roasted carrots, and red onion—a nice, earthy dish with some balancing brightness.

  Or how about this one, for a ramen joint nearby:

  Everything in the Ozu pork ramen was on point, except for the broth. The pork was tender and flavorful, the ajitsuke egg was cooked to perfection, and I liked the tangy flavor added by the mizuna on top. The broth was on the lighter side—not to my liking (I like the fattier broths of Santouka Ramen)—but what made it fail for me was the lack of depth. Even lighter broths need that umami flavor to be good, and Ozu’s broth fell flat on its face on this dimension….I will not come back to Ozu East Kitchen until they add a richer, fattier pork broth.

  Both reviews brandish the standard terms of food critics and blogs—ludicrous, decadent, earthy, brightness, umami—all mixed and matched in an invocation of devotion resembling an old Latin Mass.

  And that’s not to mention the self-righteousness, which elevates a mundane consumer choice to the level of a heroic stand against…a ramen joint whose broth was insufficiently fatty? The Yelp reviewing customer emerges not as an audience member, bystander, or faceless nobody holding a wallet, but as someone central to the entire production, the star of the show, even. This incoherence of self goes straight to the heart of what makes foodie culture such a vibrant manifestation of consumerist bewilderment. Lured into a world of luxe commodities by their taste buds, their nostalgia, and a growing sense of their own insignificance, high-end consumers do much more than simply misjudge a basic exchange of lucre for product. They come to identify intimately with the embrace or rejection of said product (I like the fattier broths of Santouka Ramen). They do so as if the world turns on their appraisals, awaits their Yelp verdicts like an anxious crowd in Rome waiting for the cardinals to elect a new Pope.

  The foodie identity can be so completely constructed by its various deeply felt products (the broths of Santouka! the roasted chickens of Waxman’s!) that it transforms itself from a statement of allegiance—like the sports teams you follow or the bands you like—and enters into the realm of the political. Being a foodie means taking a vow to save the Earth, to save small organic farms, and to save poor, overweight, undernourished people from themselves. But then, empty self-righteousness has always paired nicely with a rich sense of entitlement. That earthy taste of stone soup, drizzled in an unctuous snake oil.

  For an elevated sampling of these flavor profiles, look no further than the pages of A Taste of Generation Yum by Eve Turow (2015). Turow explains, from a conveniently ahistorical perch, that the food revolution began when millennials surveyed their parents’ very bad food choices and demanded something better. Yes, millennial foodies, whom Turow and others refer to as “Yummers,” are single-handedly driving the foodie movement with their hard-earned dollars. Or not so hard-earned, since, as Turow herself alleges, 38 percent of young adults were unemployed in 2013. These valiant Yummers are spending their boomer parents’ dough.

  And even though so many of the millennials Turow describes don’t have jobs and are living off their parents’ money, they’re special because their “tastes are limitless.” They’re not just spending most of their money on fussily plated calf tongue; they’re eschewing straight jobs so they can pursue their dreams of “harvesting clams or milking goats or tilling the land.”

  All of which can only suggest that millennials care more deeply about food than anyone else ever has. “Young people are actively, purposefully integrating food into their lives and giving it daily attention—and value—in a different proportion than any previous generation,” Turow writes. Members of certain agrarian societies—not to mention a boomer army of Julia Child and Joy of Cooking fanatics—would surely beg to differ. But then, millennials aren’t the first generation to declare themselves the driving force behind a movement that started fifty years before they were born, and they won’t be the last.

  Yet as David Kamp suggests in The United States of Arugula: The Sun-Dried, Cold-Pressed, Extra Virgin Story of the American Food Revolution (2006), the developments that characterize today’s foodscape began with the rise of fine dining and French cuisine in the States after World War II, helped along by James Beard, Julia Child, and Craig Claiborne, who popularized fresh-baked bread and the art of fine home cooking at a time when women’s magazines encouraged housewives to embed canned mandarin oranges in lime Jell-O. What some view as a sudden food revolution is in fact the product of a long, slow evolution of tastes that’s taken place over th
e course of seventy-odd years, with new restaurant and food trends arising like clockwork every few years to replace the previous batch. Or as Nora Ephron succinctly put it in her 2006 New Yorker essay, “Serial Monogamy,” “This was right around the time that arugula was discovered, which was followed by endive, which was followed by radicchio, which was followed by frisée, which was followed by the three M’s—mesclun, mâche, and microgreens—and that, in a nutshell, is the history of the past forty years from the point of view of lettuce.”

  Reducing what might otherwise be viewed as a “revolution” to a shift in trends of taste is not to understate the enormous quantity of cash in play today, though. No wonder the preferred view—advanced by those with a stake in food’s “revolutionary” status—is far more portentous than either Kamp’s or Ephron’s. But then, if your dinner isn’t revolutionary, how can you possibly justify spending a week’s salary on it?

  * * *

  —

  Here’s where any argument about the fatuousness of the foodie necessarily teeters: When you actually taste that coffee, or those prosciutto-wrapped figs. A few minutes in a pricey cheese shop, speaking to a smart person who spends all her time thinking and talking about cheese, has a way of convincing you that high-quality fromage is one of the primary pleasures of life, worthy of its price, particularly if those dollars go into the hands of smart enthusiasts and the gorgeous, enlightened, loving dairy farmers of your vivid imaginations. (This seduction is a big piece of foodie culture’s appeal: We aren’t just shoving tasty stuff into our faces, we’re embracing and supporting some down-to-earth farmer who might count as a kind of a neighbor.) It’s all so sexy and sensual and honorable-seeming: We care about our bodies and we care about the Earth and its products, we tell ourselves. Not like those corn-syrup-swilling slobs sitting next to us on the train, gorging themselves on the products of unsustainable industrial monoculture.