The Gift of Food

I just got an email from an old friend of mine in NYC. This gentleman is a serious restaurant professional and has worked at the best restaurants in New York. I haven't seen him in years but it was good to hear from him. It made me remember how much I owe him. Through him and his restaurant friends, I was introduced to a world of food I would never have had access to. I don't exaggerate when I say that it changed my life.

When it comes right down to it, my tastes are relatively simple. Nothing in the world makes me happier than a real Hawaiian Bar-B-Q with all the different kinds of foods from various ethnicities. If I were to pick a single food, it would be something simple. Maybe a Shanghai Soup Dumpling or a piece of Southern Fried Chicken. I spent the early years of my adult life traveling the world but never really partaking of all the culinary delights that were offered me. Mostly, I didn't get it. I didn't get why someone would spend so much time preparing a meal or how they could charge so much. My first trip to France was a disaster. There I was, in the Western culinary capital, and I found most of the food distasteful. I realize now that it wasn't the food but my own preconceptions that prevented me from enjoying my experience.

Allow me to digress. I was lucky enough to make friends with Professor Kirk Varnedoe during my tenure in NYC. Professor Varnedoe was an amazing man. He served a term as curator of NYC's MoMA and taught at both Columbia and Princeton. He was one of two men who taught me about art. (The other being Thierry Dreyfus) Not so much the details of it (I still cannot name most of the major artists) but how to look at art and why it is important. Like Thierry, both men were unquestionably men. They were not like the effete art groupies you see using art to find their own identities. Professor Varnedoe was a manly man who happened to know a lot about art. I asked him one day how this happened, especially because he came from the South. He said that his art history professor in college was also his football coach. Because of that, he never felt any hesitation at pursuing his interest in art. He never associated it with the emaciated, chain-smoking, pasty, androgynous male who crossed his legs at the knees.

I think my friend did this for me with food. I used to think that thinking so much about food was a frivolous thing. That that type of self-absorption was essentially feminine in nature. Disregarding the fact that civilization itself is inherently feminine, I looked at eating as an exercise in refueling, nothing else. But then, my friend invited me to a special dinner at Ducasse along with some other restaurant friends. I'd never experienced anything like it. I'm not talking just about the appointments which were justifiably opulent. Nor was it the service which was simply flawless. No, it was the food. Food, unlike anything I had ever put in my mouth. At Ducasse, when you are seated at your table, it's yours for the evening. They only do one turn. Dinner turned out to be a 3 hour experience that changed the way I looked at food and more importantly, the world. Sure dinner was expensive. 500 a head even with the industry discount. Pricey but I can comfortably say that it was more than worth the price. I remember the oxtail gelee clearly even now. It was a beautiful orange color and I could taste every constituent part of the dish clearly. Yet, they all blended together into this flavor I had never tasted before and a mouthfeel that was far more luxurious than the jello I was used to. It felt like running my tongue on the smooth skin of a beautiful woman. The meal was magical, no doubt about that. But, like I said, it was more than just food. It shook my preconceived notions at their very foundation and made me question everything I thought I knew about food and by association, myself. It was identity-shifting.

It also opened a world to me in a whole new way. I believe that food tells you more about a culture than any single thing can. More importantly, a culture cannot lie to you about itself in its food. Contained in its food are its values, its methods, its history. You see what a people value and what they dismiss by what they eat and how they cook it. Previously, I looked at different cultures through a sterile mass of data; through an Aristotlean filter. Now there's nothing wrong with that and it's important to be able to do but now I can draw a richer picture. Whereas before, my view of a culture was prose. Now, it's a beautiful painting. Food can be a vehicle to self-awareness and to reaching out to the world. I'm grateful for having had the experience.