Best Food Writing 2014 (12 page)

Besides the taste, which my Uncle Dave said was “so good you had to pat your foot to eat it,” there was the added bonus of brandishing the knife and sawing off my own piece, proving I was not a little boy anymore. I was an eleven-year-old eater of pickled baloney.

Pickled baloney was a delicacy in the rural stores of Appalachia, showcased right on the counter, where no one could miss it. Most people headed straight for that jar when they were sitting for a spell at Dot's. Others eyed the jar with desire, knowing they couldn't afford to add it to their bill. Dot's thrived in that last period of the jottemdown store, a small community grocery where local folks could buy on credit. The name referred to the fact that such stores kept a spiral-bound notebook on the counter to “jot down” purchases. Each customer had their own page and each month Dot totaled up what they owed. They came in on payday and paid off their debts. Dot seldom turned anyone down for more credit, even if they owed her for months on end. After all, she had opened the store as a single mother supporting her two daughters.

Many people I know now scoff at the very idea of eating baloney, much less
pickled
baloney. They do not understand that the purchase of such a thing was an extravagance, an indulgence. This was a different time. A different world. I knew no one who went to the movies or shopped on a whim. These luxuries required a long period of saving. They had to be planned far in advance.

We were the progeny of people who had been very, very poor.
And although I've painted the hamlet of Fariston as a romantic, bucolic place where people had the live-long day to gather around a woodstove in a little store to tell stories, the truth is much more complex than that. This was a place where poverty existed alongside great wealth.

A few yards from Dot's Grocery was a sprawling trailer park occupied by people who worked minimum-wage jobs in fast-food restaurants or at the Dollar General. Dogs meandered about the dirt yards, and children played on the porches while their fathers slept after working third shift or their mothers hung out lines of clothes that flapped in the wind.

Just past the trailer park loomed the mansion owned by a coal baron, built to resemble Southfork from TV's
Dallas
. Its opulence proclaimed, “We made it. You did not.” The house was a few miles from the massive strip mine that destroyed that part of the county. The riches pulled from that mine by my people built the manor, but no matter: The baron had a three-car garage. And twelve-foot pillars flanked the front porch.

I am sure that the people in the South Fork mansion didn't serve pickled baloney hors d'oeuvres at their parties. But for people raised like my parents, pickled baloney was a symbol of attainment.

When she bought one of the gallon jars, my mother would return from the grocery with giddy excitement. As children, she and my father had never been allowed such indulgences. Both grew up in the sort of poverty people always associate with Appalachia. Still, they were quick to tell you they had never been hungry. Country people were good at providing food for themselves, whether by growing it, bartering for it, or making it stretch. Snacks were rare and sniffed of affluence.

By the time I was a child my parents had worked so long and so hard they had firmly rooted us in the middle class. We did not have a house that looked like J.R. and Sue Ellen's, but we had recently left the trailer park and moved into a small five-room house with a grassy yard dotted by pink-blossomed dogwood trees. Buying pickled baloney, which might be considered the lowest of foods, meant something to my family and our community.

Every once in a while, I still get a terrific craving for pickled baloney. I eat it with a strange mixture of guilt, because I know what's
in it, and delicious nostalgia for a place and time that is gone forever. Food is more than merely taste or nourishment. In Appalachia, food is memory and heritage.

Today, when I cut a hunk of meat off that corkscrew, when I draw in the sharp fragrance of vinegar as I peel off the casing and take a bite, I remember the customers in Dot's Grocery. Their joys and sorrows, always on full display. I recall afternoons spent with my father after he woke up, before he left to work the third shift. I remember my Aunt Dot, gone now, and the way she cared for the whole community, provided a place for them, jotted down their purchases, and sometimes wadded up a whole sheet of debt when she realized a family was doing all they could to support themselves. That way of life is gone now, and I miss it so badly, in all of its awfulness and beauty.

T
he marshmallow was the best thing I'd eaten in days, a soft, white, silky hit of pure sugar that went straight to all the pleasure centers in my brain. Four days earlier, I wouldn't have believed that a puff of corn syrup could bring me so much happiness.

I was participating in the Hunger Challenge, an initiative put on by the San Francisco and Marin Food Bank to raise awareness about poverty and food insecurity in the Bay Area. For five days, 150 participants and I—chefs, journalists, and regular people who signed up on the Food Bank's website—were to live on a $4.50-per-day food allowance, about the amount provided by SNAP (the government's Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps). The meager budget was supplemented by pantry supplies from the Food Bank, a weekly allotment of produce, protein, and dry goods that more than 150,000 individuals in San Francisco and Marin counties depend on to survive.

Going in, I was aware that this was an imperfect simulation. Choosing to live on a limited food budget for five days is nothing like doing it out of necessity, and in my more uncomfortable moments I wondered if I were any better than the people who take tours of the
Mumbai slums and then return to their luxury hotels, congratulating themselves on having a character-building experience. I knew that if I forgot my lunch or got stranded somewhere, a sandwich was just a swipe of my debit card away. And I knew that at the end of the week I would return to a life of overabundance. Which maybe made it that much more important: I thought about food all day, but I didn't think about what it meant to live without it.

I woke up Monday morning and ate a multigrain English muffin with peanut butter (both purchased on sale at Safeway the day before) before heading to the Food Bank on Potrero Hill for a tour and pantry-supply pickup. Executive Director Paul Ash walked us through the warehouse, stacked to the ceiling with pallets of canned beans, fruit juice, tomato sauce, cereal, applesauce, and other goods that the Food Bank provides to families, schools, and charitable organizations. After the tour, we lined up to get our pantry allotment. My two bags of groceries included a pound of rice, a half-dozen eggs, a small watermelon, a cantaloupe, two baskets of strawberries, three large carrots, two tomatoes, four potatoes, two onions, two oranges, two pears, and four plums. This isn't going to be so bad, I thought.

Two hours later, facing another English muffin with peanut butter, I gave in and went to McDonald's for a McChicken sandwich from the dollar menu. It was warm, tasted good, and filled me up with very little expended effort. I realized that if I were living on this budget permanently, McDonald's—a chain I hadn't patronized for years out of principle—would probably play a regular role in my diet.

The next few days were a blur of cranky, lightheaded hours punctuated by poorly cooked meals of beans, rice, potatoes, and eggs. A year of living off restaurant food had made me rusty in the kitchen, and when the chickpeas never softened and I over-peppered the black beans, I had to eat them anyway. Food usually doubles as entertainment in my life, but all these meals did was fill my stomach. Later in the week, I discovered that chefs participating in the challenge were facing the same thing. “Honestly, it's been tough trying to come up with food that is tasty, satisfying, and healthy on a SNAP budget,” wrote Lincoln Carson, corporate pastry chef for Michael Mina, on Instagram. The sentiment was echoed by Central Kitchen's Ryan Pollnow, who says he wasn't thinking of it as the “Hunger
Challenge” as much as the “Food Enjoyment Challenge.” None of us were starving, but we were far from satisfied.

On Wednesday, I went to St. Anthony's for a free lunch. The Tenderloin nonprofit gives out about 3,000 meals a day to anyone who shows up, and about half of its annual 2 million pounds of food comes from the Food Bank. The dining room was organized chaos. An emergency medical situation was partially obscured by a sheet in the corner. Lunch was a cafeteria tray of macaroni and cheese, a starchy salad, a banana, a slice of multigrain bread, a cup of juice, and four marshmallows. I ate with glee, grateful for the calories, grateful for a meal I didn't have to plan and prepare myself, grateful for the marshmallows I saved in a St. Anthony's-provided baggie and would savor slowly at my desk over the next few days.

Later that day, I caught up with Paul Ash of the Food Bank to talk about the bigger picture of hunger in San Francisco. One of the main causes, he says, is the high cost of living in the city. Because the qualifying amount for SNAP benefits is the same across the country, a person might make more dollars per hour here than someone in rural Pennsylvania, but have less buying power with that dollar.

I brought up my feelings of dilettantism; my trip to St. Anthony's had reminded me how far removed I was from poverty, even when I was pretending not to be. “If all we did is experience this and go back to our regular lives and didn't do anything differently, that would be kind of self-satisfying,” he says. He brought up the bill currently in the House of Representatives to cut the SNAP budget by $40 billion, and how he's hoping this challenge will encourage people to speak out. “Active citizenry approaches issues from a base of knowledge, a base of understanding. It's easy to see data, but this is about showing people how it feels, and how you act differently [when you're living with food insecurity].”

And the Hunger Challenge was definitely having an impact on my life. I felt isolated and alone. A visit to the supermarket was just a reminder of all the things I couldn't buy. An invitation from my friends was just a reminder of all the bars and restaurants I couldn't afford. I didn't have much time to go out, anyway, with all the planning and cooking I had to do just to make enough food to get me through the day. On Wednesday night I was feeling so low, physically and psychologically, that I knew I had to make a good dinner. I
spent half of my remaining budget on six chicken legs, a head of kale, and a lemon. That night I made the best meal I ate all week, with enough leftovers to last a few days. It was a kind of victory.

On Friday, I went back to the Food Bank and had lunch with the staff, who were all participating in the challenge together. The sense of camaraderie was palpable as they cooked their lunches in the kitchen, swapping recipe ideas and the names of stores where they'd found the best deals. We talked about our separate experiences and I was gratified to hear how similar theirs had been to mine. Those who'd been most successful on the challenge were the ones who'd had time—to comparison-shop or prepare food—or kitchen knowhow, and had livened up their week with homemade potato chips, pickled watermelon rind, and pizza. “It's not just about the food, it's about knowing what to do with it and having the time to do those things,” says Teri Olle, associate director of policy and advocacy.

You also need community, a lesson brought home by a phone conversation with Glenda Robinzine, a 65-year-old San Francisco resident who depends on the Food Bank every week. She said she'd just taken a pound cake out of the oven, made from butter and cake mix she'd received, and was planning to use her supplies to make peanut brittle, banana bread, pecan pralines, and other goodies for a Food Bank fundraiser she was holding at her church the next weekend. I asked if it was hard to plan ahead, not knowing what she'd receive every week. “I like to be surprised,” she says, adding that she usually calls a friend in Bayview, who receives her Food Bank delivery a day before, to find out what might be coming.

Robinzine now lives in an assisted living facility; before she moved there, before she was homeless, before she was diagnosed with cancer, she volunteered at her church, giving out food to people who needed it. “Now I'm the one who needs it. Now I'm the one who's dependent on it,” she says. “I never thought I would be, but I am.”