The Man Who Ate Everything

The Man

Who Ate

Everything

And Other Gastronomic Feats, Disputes, and Pleasurable Pursuits

JEFFREY STEINGARTEN

Vintage Books

A Division of Random House, Inc. New York

FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, NOVEMBER 1998

Copyright © 1997 by Jeffrey Steingarten Illustrations copyright
© 1997
by Karin Koetschmann

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American

Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by

Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York,

and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited,

Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by

Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1997.

Most of the pieces in this collection have appeared,
in somewhat different form, in
Vogue.
Several others first appeared in
HG,
and one appeared in
Slate.

Owing to limitations of space, acknowledgments for permission to reprint previously published material may be found on page 515.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:

Steingarten, Jeffrey.

The man who ate everything : and other gastronomic feats, disputes,

and pleasurable pursuits / by Jeffrey Steingarten.—

1st ed.

p. cm.

Includes Index.

ISBN 0-679-43088-1

1. Gastronomy—humor. 2. Food—humor. I. Title.

TX631.S74 1997

641’.01‘30207—dc21 97-2815

CIP

Vintage ISBN: 0-375-70202-4

Book design by Iris Weinstein

Author photograph
©
Hiro
Random House Web address: www.randomhouse.com

Printed in the United States of America 10 987654321

Contents

Introduction: The Man Who Ate Everything

PART ONE
Nothing but the Truth

Primal Bread

Staying Alive

Why Aren’t the French Dropping Like Flies?

Totally Mashed

Water

Ripeness Is All

Hot Dog

Playing Ketchup

PART TWO
Help Yourself

Le Regime Montignac

The Waiting Game

Vegging Out

High Satiety

Sweet Smell of Sex

Going for the Burn

PART THREE
Stirring Things Up

Salad the Silent Killer

Just Say Yes

Salt

Pain Without Gain

Murder, My Sweet

A Fat of No Consequence

PART FOUR
Journey of a Thousand Meals

True Choucroute

Hail Cesare!

Where’s the Wagyu?

Kyoto Cuisine

Creatures from the Blue Lagoon

Rosemary and Moon Beans

Going Whole Hog

Ingredients in Search of a Cuisine

Out of North Africa

Variations on a Theme

The Mother of All Ice Cream

Hauts Bistros

PART FIVE
Proof of the Pudding

The Smith Family Fruitcake

Fries

Fish Without Fire

Back of the Box

Repairman

Big Bird

Pies from Paradise

3. Foods I might eat if I were starving on a desert island but only if the refrigerator were filled with nothing but chutney, sea urchins, and falafel:

Greek food.
I have always considered “Greek cuisine” an oxymoron. Nations are like people. Some are good at cooking while others have a talent for music or baseball or manufacturing memory chips. The Greeks are really good at both pre-Socratic philosophy and white statues. They have not been good cooks since the fifth century
b.c.,
when Siracusa on Sicily was the gastronomic capital of the world. Typical of modern-day Greek cuisine are feta cheese and retsina wine. Any country that pickles its national cheese in brine and adulterates its national wine with pine pitch should order dinner at the local Chinese place and save its energies for other things. The British go to Greece just for the food, which says volumes to me. You would probably think twice before buying an Algerian or Russian television set. I thought for ten years before buying my last Greek meal.

Clams.
I feel a mild horror about what goes on in the wet darkness between the shells of all bivalves, but clams are the only ones I dislike. Is it their rubbery consistency or their rank subterranean taste, or is the horror deeper than I know?

Blue food (not counting plums and berries).
This may be a rational aversion, because I am fairly sure that God meant the color blue mainly for food that has gone bad.

Also:
cranberries, kidneys, okra, millet, coffee ice cream, re
f
ried beans, and many forms of yogurt.

This had to stop.

STEP TWO
was to immerse myself in the scientific literature on human food selection.

By design and by destiny, humans are omnivores. Our teeth and digestive systems are all-purpose and ready for anything. Our genes do not dictate what foods we should find tasty or repulsive. We come into the world with a yen for sweets (new-borns can even distinguish among glucose, fructose, lactose, and sucrose) and a weak aversion to bitterness, and after four months develop a fondness for salt. Some people are born particularly sensitive to one taste or odor; others have trouble digesting milk sugar or wheat gluten. A tiny fraction of adults, between 1 and 2 percent, have true (and truly dangerous) food allergies. All human cultures consider fur, paper, and hair inappropriate as food.

And that’s about it. Everything else is
learned.
Newborns are not repelled even by the sight and smell of putrefied meat crawling with maggots.

The nifty thing about being omnivores is that we can take nourishment from an endless variety of flora and fauna and easily adapt to a changing world—crop failures, droughts, herd migrations, restaurant closings, and the like. Lions and tigers will starve in a salad bar, as will cows in a steak house, but not us. Unlike cows, who remain well nourished eating only grass, humans
need
a great diversity of foods to stay healthy.

Yet by the age of twelve, we all suffer from a haphazard collection of food aversions ranging from revulsion to indifference. The tricky part about being omnivores is that we are always in danger of poisoning ourselves. Catfish have taste buds on their whiskers, but we are not so lucky. Instead, we are born with a cautious ambivalence toward novel foods, a precarious balance between neophilia and neophobia. Just one bad stomach ache or attack of nausea after dinner is enough to form a potent aversion—even if the food we ate did not actually cause the problem and even if we know it didn’t. Hives or rashes may lead us rationally to avoid the food that caused them, but only an upset stomach and nausea will result in a lasting, irrational, lifelong sense of disgust. Otherwise, psychologists know very little about the host of powerful likes and dislikes—let us lump them all
under the term “food phobias”—that children carry into adulthood.

By closing ourselves off from the bounties of nature, we become failed omnivores. We let down the omnivore team. God tells us in the Book of Genesis, right after Noah’s flood, to eat everything under the sun. Those who ignore his instructions are no better than godless heathens.

The more I contemplated food phobias, the more I became convinced that people who habitually avoid certifiably delicious foods are at least as troubled as people who avoid sex, or take no pleasure from it, except that the latter will probably seek psychiatric help, while food phobics rationalize their problem in the name of genetic inheritance, allergy, vegetarianism, matters of taste, nutrition, food safety, obesity, or a sensitive nature. The varieties of neurotic food avoidance would fill several volumes, but milk is a good place to start.

Overnight, everybody you meet has become lactose intolerant. It is the chic food fear of the moment. But the truth is that very, very few of us are so seriously afflicted that we cannot drink even a whole glass of milk a day without ill effects. I know several people who have given up cheese to avoid lactose. But fermented cheeses contain no lactose! Lactose is the sugar found in milk; 98 percent of it is drained off with the whey (cheese is made from the curds), and the other 2 percent is quickly consumed by lactic-acid bacteria in the act of fermentation.

Three more examples: People rid their diet of salt (and their food of flavor) to avoid high blood pressure and countless imagined ills. But no more than 8 percent of the population is sensitive to salt. Only
saturated
fat, mainly from animals, has ever been shown to cause heart disease or cancer, yet nutrition writers and Nabisco get rich pandering to the fear of eating any fat at all. The hyperactivity syndrome supposedly caused by white sugar has never, ever, been verified—and not for lack of trying. In the famous New Haven study, it was the presence of the parents, not the presence of white sugar, that was causing the problem; most of the kids calmed down when their parents left the room.*

*
But not me.

I cannot figure out why, but the atmosphere in America today rewards this sort of self-deception. Fear and suspicion of food have become the norm. Convivial dinners have nearly disappeared and with them the sense of festivity and exchange, of community and sacrament. People should be deeply ashamed of the irrational food phobias that keep them from sharing food with each other. Instead, they have become proud and isolated, arrogant and aggressively misinformed.

STEP THREE
was to choose my weapon. Food phobias can be extinguished in five ways. Which one would work best for me?

Brain
surgery. Bilateral lesions made in the basolateral region of the amygdala seem to do the trick in rats and, I think, monkeys—eliminating old aversions, preventing the formation of new ones, and increasing the animals’ acceptance of novel foods. But the literature does not report whether having a brain operation also diminishes their ability to, say, follow a recipe. If these experimental animals could talk, would they still be able to? Any volunteers?

Starvation.
As Aristotle claimed and modern science has confirmed, any food tastes better the hungrier you are. But as I recently confessed to my doctor, who warned me to take some pill only on an empty stomach, the last time I had an empty stomach was in 1978. He scribbled “hyperphagia” on my chart, your doctor’s name for making a spectacle of yourself at the table. He is a jogger.

*For the details, be sure to read the chapters “Salt,” “Pain Without Gain,”
and “Murder, My Sweet,” in Part Three.

Bonbons.
Why not reward myself with a delectable little chocolate every time I successfully polish off an anchovy, a dish of kimchi, or a bowl of miso soup? Parents have used rewards ever since spinach was discovered. Offering children more playtime for eating dark leafy greens may temporarily work. But offering children an extra Milky Way bar in return for eating more spinach has perverse results: the spinach grows more repellent and the Milky Way more desired.

Drug dependence.
Finicky laboratory animals find new foods more palatable after a dose of chlordiazepoxide. According to an old
Physicians’ Desk Reference,
this is nothing but Librium, the once-popular tranquilizer, also bottled as Reposans and Screen. The label warns you about nausea, depression, and operating heavy machinery. I just said no.

Exposure, plain and simple.
Scientists tell us that aversions fade away when we eat moderate doses of the hated foods at moderate intervals, especially if the food is complex and new to us. (Don’t try this with allergies, but don’t cheat either: few of us have genuine food allergies.) Exposure works by overcoming our innate neophobia, the omnivore’s fear of new foods that balances the biological urge to explore for them. Did you know that babies who are breast-fed will later have less trouble with novel foods than those who are given formula? The variety of flavors that make their way into breast milk from the mother’s diet prepares the infant for the culinary surprises that lie ahead. Most parents give up trying novel foods on their weanlings after two or three attempts and then complain to the pediatrician; this may be the most common cause of fussy eaters and finicky adults—of omnivores manques.
Most babies will accept nearly anything after eight or ten tries.

Clearly, mere exposure was the only hope for me.

STEP FOUR
was to make eight or ten reservations at Korean restaurants, purchase eight or ten anchovies, search the Zagat guide for eight or ten places with the names Parthenon or Olympia (which I believe are required by statute for Greek restaurants), and bring a pot of water to the boil for cooking eight or ten chickpeas. My plan was simplicity itself: every day for the next six months I would eat at least one food that I detested.

Here are some of the results:

Kimchi.
After repeatedly sampling ten of the sixty varieties of kimchi, the national pickle of Korea, kimchi has become my national pickle, too.

Anchovies.
I began relating to anchovies a few months ago in northern Italy, where I ordered
bagna caoda
every day—a sauce of garlic, butter, olive oil, and minced anchovies served piping hot over sweet red and yellow peppers as an antipasto in Piemonte. My phobia crumpled when I understood that the anchovies living in American pizza parlors bear no relation to the sweet, tender anchovies of Spain and Italy, cured in dry sea salt and a bit of pepper. Soon I could tell a good
bagna caoda
from a terrific one. On my next trip to Italy I will seek out those fresh charcoal-grilled anchovies of the Adriatic you always hear about.

Clams.
My first assault on clams was at a diner called Lunch near the end of Long Island, where I consumed an order of fried bellies and an order of fried strips. My aversion increased sharply. Eight clams and a few weeks later it was
capellini
in white clam sauce at an excellent southern Italian restaurant around the corner from my house. As I would do so often in the future, even at the expense of my popularity, I urged my companions to cast off their food phobias by ordering at least one dish they expected to detest. If they would go along with my experiment, I would agree to order
nothing
I liked.

All but one agreed, a slim and lovely dancer who protested that her body tells her precisely what to eat and that I am the last person in the universe fit to interfere with those sacred messages. I replied that the innate wisdom of the body is a complete fiction when it comes to omnivores. Soon I had certain proof that my friend was a major closet food phobic when she spent five minutes painstakingly separating her appetizer into two piles. The pile composed of grilled peppers, fennel, and eggplant sat lonely on the plate until her mortified husband and I polished it off. She was so disoriented by either the meal or my unsparing advice that she ate a large handful of potpourri as we waited for our coats.

As for me, the evening was an unqualified success. The white clam sauce was fresh with herbs and lemon and fresh salt air, and my clam phobia was banished in the twinkling of an eye. There is a lot of banal pasta with clam sauce going around these days. If you have a clam phobia, here are two surefire solutions: Order eight to ten white clam pizzas at Frank Pepe’s in New Haven, Connecticut, perhaps the single best pizza in the United States and certainly the best thing of any kind in New Haven, Connecticut. Or try the wonderful recipe for linguine with clams and
gremolata
in the
Chez Panisse Pasta, Pizza & Calzone Cookbook
(Random House) once a week for eight consecutive weeks. It is guaranteed to work miracles.

Greek food.
My wife, who considers herself Greek-food-deprived, was on cloud nine when I invited her to our neighborhood Greek restaurant, widely reviewed as the best in the city. As we walked along the street, she hugged me tight like those women in the TV commercials who have just been given a large diamond “for just being you” and launched into a recitation of the only classical Greek she knows, something about the wrath of Achilles. My own mood brightened when I saw that only one retsina befouled the wine list: the other wines were made from aboriginal Greek grapes in Attica or Macedonia or Samos
but fer
mented in the manner of France or California. The dreaded egg-and-lemon soup was nowhere to be seen, and feta was kept mainly in the closet.

We ordered a multitude of appetizers and three main courses. Only the gluey squid, a tough grape leaf that lodged between my teeth, and the Liquid Smoke with which somebody had drenched the roasted eggplant threatened to arouse my slumbering phobia. The rest, most of it simply grilled with lemon and olive oil, was delicious, and as an added bonus I was launched on what still feels like an endless journey toward the acceptance of okra.