What If This Were Enough? Read online

  This is the ugly class subtext of our earnest adoration of that Humboldt Fog chevre wheel with a layer of “edible vegetable ash.” Our hard-won locavore connoisseurship satisfies our senses and bestows upon us, via its $25-a-pound price tag, the feeling that we’ve paid tithes to the church of gourmet eating. But more than that, it separates us from the less sainted, the less antioxidized, and, meaningfully, the less wealthy among us.

  This separation is savored privately, like a slice of eighteen-month-aged Manchego unloosed from a stainless steel double-wide fridge at midnight. But it’s also distinctly social. As William Deresiewicz wrote in The New York Times in 2012, foodie culture

  is a badge of membership in the higher classes, an ideal example of what Thorstein Veblen, the great social critic of the Gilded Age, called conspicuous consumption. It is a vehicle of status aspiration and competition, an ever-present occasion for snobbery, one-upmanship and social aggression. (My farmers’ market has bigger, better, fresher tomatoes than yours.) Nobody cares if you know about Mozart or Leonardo anymore, but you had better be able to discuss the difference between ganache and couverture.

  The so-called food revolution may include many Earth-friendly initiatives—the emphasis on organic, pesticide-free products; the local farm-to-table efforts; the transition to vegetarian, vegan, or just mostly plant-based diets; the crop rotation and sustainable, environmentally friendly practices of small farms; the efforts to reduce food waste, etc. But the broad impact of elevating food to a rarefied luxury good has wide-reaching negative consequences for the planet. Because for every local organic farm churning out hormone-free basil butters and heirloom beets, there are countless other elite consumers feasting on foods flown in from around the globe. As Dan Barber points out in The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food (2014), the second that those locally sourced lamb chops run out at the foodie farm-to-table restaurant of the aspirational classes’ fever dreams, the obliging restaurateur must secure a backup source that’s perhaps less local and less blessed by the purist foodie gods.

  For the food revolution to save the Earth (or at least not hasten its demise), Barber argues, our whole way of thinking about food needs to shift. Instead of chasing fickle consumer tastes and allowing the gods of supply and demand to rape the Earth and dredge the seas until all of our ecosystems are utterly destroyed, we have to learn to appreciate foods that can be grown or raised sustainably, foods that support and enrich the environment. The next food preferences (those that might eventually graduate to trends) need to be carefully selected by chefs who forgo the sorts of “luxury” foods that are leaving their habitats denuded and unbalanced for more pragmatic choices—eco-friendly farmed fish, say, or plants that filter toxins from the soil or replete the soil’s much-needed nitrogen. As easy as it is to be cynical about politically correct, pretentious menus that read more like essays, the choices we make now as consumers will affect how we’re able to eat—not to mention survive—in the future.

  Because if foodie culture wants to take credit for the rise of organic, sustainable, cruelty-free farming, it’s also going to have to take the blame for making us crave tasty slices of grass-fed venison and baby corn (a plate of food requiring an obscene and wanton waste of natural resources), or sushi rolls packed with four varieties of endangered fish, flown in from three different oceans. Devoted foodies may choose to believe that shoving pickled shishito peppers and chicken livers and herbed goat cheese into their gullets represents a divine embrace of earthbound pleasures. But like most other bourgeois hobbies, this one carries considerable costs. Not only has the elevation of food to luxury created absurd expectations around a dimension of survival that might otherwise involve as few exotic elements as possible, but it’s also warped our understanding of how we exist on the Earth and how we coexist with our fellow earthlings, the cuddliest and cutest of which also tend to taste really good the younger and lazier and the more stuffed with organic hazelnuts they are.

  Take a deep dive into those giant, ever-prevalent Blue Apron boxes, filled with tiny plastic bags of purple basil and frozen slabs of minced lamb, and you’ll see that even mere commoners now feast like kings and queens. It’s time to acknowledge that our enthusiasms have taken us too far. We can’t continue eating most of the animals we’ve overbred and forced into short, filthy, miserable lives.

  Once the world’s population sneaks up toward eleven billion, many have argued that we will require the supersized yields of industrial farming—which means that even though we might prefer small-batch brie from a darling mom-and-pop dairy farm in Vermont, we still have to vehemently support curbing the environmental recklessness of our industrial farms while we’re at it. As nice as it is to have organic free-range everything on your plate, imbuing that choice with deeper meaning and a larger sense of righteousness without addressing the bigger picture of how humanity feeds itself is like boarding a private jet and then congratulating yourself for not giving the highly polluting commercial airline industry any of your hard-earned dollars.

  But beyond the fantastical idealism of foodie culture, there’s the simple fact that cooking a decent meal or dining at the right restaurant is an act of leisure-class consumption rather than a heroic or courageous feat to build your entire identity around. As former food critic John Lanchester asserts in The New Yorker, our choices about food are nowhere near the most important political choices we make. “If these tiny acts of consumer choice are the most meaningful actions in our lives,” Lanchester writes, “perhaps we aren’t thinking and acting on a sufficiently big scale.” He takes it a step further. “Imagine that you die and go to Heaven and stand in front of a jury made up of Thomas Jefferson, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Your task would be to compose yourself, look them in the eye, and say, ‘I was all about fresh, local, and seasonal.’ ”

  Food is personal. It’s sensual, it’s nostalgic, it’s political. But contrary to the slogans of our officious foodie overlords, food is not everything. Wearing our foodie status as a badge of honor makes sense only if we’re prioritizing food advocacy—from promoting sustainable farming practices to reducing food waste to embracing and popularizing more sustainable crops to making healthy food more affordable to the poor—over our indulgence in wildly expensive plates of exotic fare. Before we dive into another dish of bluefin or veal brains or carrots with a 15.2 Brix reading, we should consider how we’ll look fifty years from now to the inhabitants of an overfished, polluted planet: decadent, callous, delusional, and above all, deeply unsavory.

  adults only

  Adults are not always so fun. Sometimes I go to parties filled with mature people who know things and act their age and I’m quickly filled with despair. I walk in the door and greet the host and mill about, but in the pit of my stomach I know that leaving home was a huge mistake. I will not be surprised and delighted. I will not learn something new. I will not even enjoy the sound of my own voice. I will be lulled into a state of excruciating paralysis and self-hatred and other-people hatred.

  Let’s be honest, some days, sensible middle-aged urban liberal adult professionals are the most tedious people in the world. I know that I should feel grateful that these people, my peers, are enlightened, that they listen to NPR and read The Atlantic, that they join book clubs and send their kids to the progressive preschool and the Italian immersion magnet. I should feel cheered by the fact that I know human beings who hold national grants to improve government policy on something or other, or who work with troubled teenagers. These people are informed and intelligent. These are the people I should want to know.

  But I am an ingrate. My lack of gratitude might be a product of despair, which pairs badly with my lukewarm Hawaiian-surfer-themed microbrew. I should feel thankful that almost everyone at this party skimmed The New York Times this morning. I should feel glad that they read the latest book by Donna Tartt so they can tell me that they didn’t think it was all that good, in t
he vaguest terms possible. I should see this as an opportunity to hear myself say words out loud about the latest book by Donna Tartt, throwing in specific arguments about what qualifies as good writing and what makes a book worthwhile—but without insulting anyone or swearing for no reason or making spit fly out of my mouth in the process. But I might get long-winded and say too much. There is a palpable pressure to never say too much here. There is an imaginary egg timer for every comment. The sand runs out, the eyes go dead.

  I should be glad just to be here, to be invited out of the house so I can stand beside a table of food I didn’t personally prepare, all of those bad salads with the quinoa and the mushy bits of avocado and the overcooked pasta and the giant lumps of bland feta and the little bits of green stuff that has no discernible flavor. I should feel thankful to be slowing down in sync with this diverse and informed tribe, to be aging gracefully among these mild-mannered international humans in their denim shirts, in their linens, in their comfortable shoes, in their terrible newsboy caps, holding their beers until they sweat and grow warm, sipping their glasses of Pinot Grigio but never having a second glass, helping themselves to an intolerably weak margarita that needs a sign that says ADULTS ONLY on the side because it is served in small blue Dixie cups and it looks and tastes exactly like lemonade. After one cup I quickly calculate that I will need to drink the whole pitcher of Adults Only Lemonade to catch a buzz. For a while I try to do this.

  But catching a buzz is not the point at a gathering like this one. In fact, the point is to avoid catching a buzz. Sure, these professional adults once used to drink too much and say the wrong things, when they were much younger. But they’ve accumulated enough experience over the years to realize that the more appropriate thing is to resist such an impulse, to file down their more unsightly edges, to blend in. It’s not that they don’t still have unpopular opinions and bad urges. They’re just mature enough to know these things make people uncomfortable, end friendships, hijack careers. You can’t go to a party and act like you’re at a party. You’re too old for that. You might speak out of turn or contradict yourself or offend someone. That’s not how adults do it.

  Among adults, everything must exist within clearly defined boundaries and limits: No heels are uncomfortably high (and everyone leaves their shoes at the front door anyway), no music is too loud, no lipstick is too dark, no food is too spicy, no drink is too strong, no conversation lasts too long. No one yells or points or mocks, even just for fun. No one has any obvious personality disorders. No one is quiet or seems lonely. No one looks desperate or sweaty. No one is inappropriate or has lipstick on her teeth or is wearing overly large statement jewelry. No one is calling attention to himself for no reason. No one is anxious to cause a stir. No one feels trapped, not outwardly. Such feelings—the longing, the anger, the envy—all of that should have been lifted away decades ago, evaporated, whisked away by linen blends and decaf coffee drinks and probiotics. Everyone should appear calm and properly hydrated now. Everyone should claim to feel just right in their terrible shorts, their legs crossed like Europeans, their temples graying by the minute, their pleasant expressions saying, “I see your point, I understand, that is also true.” Everyone should be smiling with their eyes and talking with their hands.

  They’d like more pasta, but they could also live without it.

  I can’t do it. The quiet restraint, the lack of discernible needs or desires, the undifferentiated sea of dry-cleaned nothingness, the small sips, the half-smiles, the polite pauses, the autopilot nodding. It feels like we’re all voluntarily erasing ourselves, as if that’s the only appropriate thing to do.

  So I sit in the backyard, on the grass, alone, away from the adults. I think about what it means to blend into the scenery until you disappear. I wonder why that’s the point.

  A dog approaches with an oblong toy made of clear, melon-colored plastic. The dog gets up in my face. The dog has strong needs, strong preferences. The dog is an individual, demanding and unique. The dog’s breath smells like dead fish.

  I grab the slobbery stick it’s clutching, but the dog’s teeth are locked onto it. I hold tight to one end of the slippery thing, which looks like a translucent penis in a ribbed condom. The dog won’t let go. The dog is conflicted. The dog wants me to throw the toy, but it also wants to retain possession of the toy, forever and ever. It wants excitement, but it also wants to savor the thrill of ownership. The dog doesn’t mind contradicting itself. The dog is impolite. The dog’s eyes are bloodshot. The dog wants everything, all at once.

  The dog drops the toy, and I’m holding the slimy thing in my hands, and then the dog lunges for it again and almost bites my hand, because my having the toy seemed not okay for a second there. “DROP it,” I say, in a less-than-polite tone. “DROP IT DROP IT.” The dog looks me in the eye and chomps and doesn’t let go. “DROP. IT.” I growl in a low voice. The dog drops it.

  I toss a wet dick across the grass for hours. The grass is artificial. The dog is never quite satisfied. I feel good. This is much better.

  stuffed

  “It’s just stuff.” This is what my father told a reporter as he watched his condo burn down a year before his death. A faulty attic fan had sparked a fire during the day while he was at work. By the time he got home, half of his worldly possessions had been reduced to ash. The reporter referred to him as “stoical,” but his reaction made sense to me. How do you measure what your stuff means to you, in a moment like that?

  After my dad’s death, the fire looked more like an omen. I was supposed to sort through the boxes of his remaining things stored at my mom’s house, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I would spend a few minutes sifting through photographs of girlfriends I’d never even met or shuffling through books about World War II mixed in with new age tomes about the flowering of self-love, but soon it felt invasive, like trying to unpack my dad’s conflicted soul from a tower of boxes. I felt sure that he wouldn’t have wanted to leave so many personal traces of himself behind.

  Two years after his death, a tree fell on my mother’s house and broke through the ceiling in the corner of a bedroom where the boxes of his things were stacked. A few years after that, half of his stuff was stolen from an upstairs closet when my mom’s house was robbed. It was as though my dad, from some remote perch, was helping us do what we couldn’t—get rid of his possessions once and for all.

  No such luck. Today there are still a few boxes of his stuff in my mom’s house. No one feels like deciding what to throw out and what to keep. It’s just stuff, as my dad said, some of it decades old. But somehow the stakes feel higher now than ever.

  * * *

  —

  We first-world humans have always had a conflicted relationship with our belongings. Decades ago, most people owned a lot less stuff. But with the rise of the mall in the 1970s and ’80s, shopping became a legitimate leisure activity for the middle class, and people started to accumulate a lot of unnecessary junk. By the 1990s, lower manufacturing costs meant that the struggle to avoid getting crushed under your mountains of cheap things was real. Creative storage solutions were all the rage; enter the Container Store (founded in 1978) and Hold Everything (founded in 1983), followed by the rise of the professional organizer. The early 2000s ushered in the decluttering movement: Your stuff wasn’t supposed to be stored in plain sight anymore. Closets became status pieces, the way kitchens are now. The rich hired closet designers, bought houses based on how many closets they had. The non-rich stuffed their gigantic CD towers into their closets with the rest of their unsightly possessions.

  By the late 2000s, reality shows about hoarders made clinging to our stuff look less like a quirk and more like a sickness. The arrival of cloud storage in the 2010s completed our journey to minimalism. Suddenly books and CDs and photo albums, our former tokens of self-expression, looked more like archaic clutter. From Pinterest to Instagram to the pages of Real Simple and Dwell,
the message rang clear: Your best life could only be lived against a backdrop as pristine and uncluttered as an art gallery.

  Thus was the shiny, empty stage set for a new tidying messiah. Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, published in October 2014, spoke to the heart of the modern human. Who doesn’t love the prim, already-quite-clean sound of “tidying up”? Who doesn’t crave life-changing magic in all its forms? But Kondo’s real message was far more revolutionary than that. “Life truly begins only after you have put your house in order,” she decreed in the preface of her 2016 follow-up book, Spark Joy. This was the dramatic language that helped her first book sell millions of copies worldwide. But you had to wonder: Wouldn’t adding another book to your shelf, alongside the first one, amount to accumulating more unnecessary junk?

  Because the heart and soul of Kondo-izing was never her road map to categorizing and storing. Kondo’s central, underlying message—her haunting subtext and the primary reason for her massive popularity—was that most of the stuff we own is not only pointless, unnecessary, and burdensome, but holds us back from growing into fully realized human beings. Our extra stuff is not a sign of our prosperity, it’s a sign of our impoverishment.

  Of course Kondo never would’ve become a global superstar if she used such negative language. Instead, she embraces poetic, almost ecstatic terms for letting go of excess: At one point the collector’s edition of her book was titled Experience the Pulsing Magic of Cleaning Up Every Day. And the experience of reading Kondo’s books does induce a kind of pulsing magic. Her optimistic but precise prose and her stubborn insistence that things have feelings (Your bunched-up stockings are insulted by their unjust treatment at your hands! Your coat appreciates a little thanks for keeping you warm every day!), combined with her lifelong passion for total control over her environment, have a unique way of inciting a truly life-changing bout of cathartic junk-purging. It’s not that things aren’t important, it’s that some things are incredibly important and other things are literal garbage, garbage that keeps you from appreciating your most treasured possessions. Kondo convinces us that we carry around these mountains of trash with us only because we’ve been tricked into feeling guilty about letting them go.