A Really Big Lunch: Meditations on Food and Life From the Roving Gourmand

by Jim Harrison

  While driving through France with Peter Lewis and Guy de la Valdène I sensed a number of times from the backseat that I was driving them crazy with some of my peculiar wine questions but they willingly answered because the option was to have me start singing songs like “Shrimp Boats Are Coming” or my Wilson Pickett or Sons of the Pioneers medleys. Peter, who is expert in both wine and literature, made the point that it would be helpful if there was a way to contextualize the judgments of wine critics. Good literary critics like Edmund Wilson, George Steiner, or F. K. Lewis clearly establish where they stand. It would be useful indeed to have a specific idea of the tastes of wine reviewers and critics. You would then know what particular direction they were coming from in their virtually thousands of judgments.

  Science does offer us a detailed consolation in the matter of taste, but it won’t fit into any ballpark. In January there was an item in the New York Times Science section that at the same time clarified and clouded the issue. The fact is that taste buds in the human mouth can be quantified. “About 25 percent of the population are supertasters, blessed or cursed with a heightened sensitivity because the concentration of their taste buds can be a hundred times as great as the concentration in nontasters, who also make up about 25 percent of the world. Regular tasters, about half of all people, fall somewhere in between.”

  These facts raised some troubling considerations. Should all of those who judge wine be forced to troop off to Mayo Clinic in Minnesota to have their taste buds counted? Minnesota is a good idea as a California clinic couldn’t very well be trusted in this matter. Literary reviewers could be given a simple diagnostic test of world literature and many would flunk outright. Imagine giving members of Congress a test on American or world history! But in the arena of wine this is explicit evidence that there are a large number of possible supertasters. In our population at large that means there are about seventy million people with this potential.

  Last night I awoke at four a.m. brooding about these matters. The old saying “You shouldn’t lose sleep over it” came immediately to mind as I stared at the waning moon, the same moon on which one of our astronauts had swung a blasphemous golf club. We Americans are extraordinarily proud of our pragmatism though this xenophobic pride often borders on the fungoid. I said in my memoirs that we seem better at everything than the French except how to live life, which includes food and wine. I have met French oenophiles who are scornfully amused by our numerical systems but these same people are irrationally attached to their Michelin Guides.

  My mother, of 100 percent Swedish derivation, once said to me, “what if everyone was like you?” I admit that might be a sad situation. Why resist a system that so many find helpful? Maybe I have a numbers phobia? By general agreement I’m not allowed a checking account because I’ve never been able to fill out a stub. I have no talent at dates and can recapture most incidents of my life only by remembering what dogs I owned at the time.

  So if I can’t accept pragmatism in wine or literature perhaps it’s my own problem. I fear the banality of the uniform. Will the wines of the future all adhere to the style of the wines judged to be in the high nineties by certain people? Once in New York City I studied the Racing Form all morning, went out to Aqueduct, and lost every bet. I’ve read about touted wines that on tasting I thought unworthy of a Missouri truck stop, but then how many well-reviewed books have I read that carried the scent of Limburger cheese? In literature our pragmatism can be perversely wrongheaded if you look at the hundred or so MFA programs at universities that hope for a uniform approach in teaching people how to write poetry and fiction. It becomes California Cabernet fiction and poetry with only a couple out of a thousand worthy of our attention. Some of these schools yearly outproduce the English Romantic movement.

  I’m cooking guanciale in a pasta sauce this evening. I trust that there will be no overtones or hints of bacon, brisket, shrimp, or tongue. Before dinner I’ll give my dog a chunk of the sharp cheddar she loves, pour a twelve-ounce goblet of humble Rasteau or Bandol, and listen to some Brazilian guitar music. In critical terms I won’t try to figure out if this predinner experience is commensal or symbiotic or etiolated. This is an after-work hour of humility where I’m free to ponder, if I wish, the memories of the thousand or so bottles of great wine I’ve drunk in my life. I won’t wonder if the Rasteau is an eighty-three or an eighty-five, or if my new novel is a forty-seven or a ninety-one, or if the girl I saw at the coffee shop is a ninety-nine point eight, the same as my body temperature and the evening air in Bahia.

  Food, Sex, and Death

  In all of the ten years or so that I spent as a member of the criminal underground in Buenos Aires, I never saw anything so callous as the present Bush junta’s looting of democracy. What began as merely obnoxious has become sinister. As the current chairman of the Christian Environmentalists, I also talk to God, but not on the cellular. At least I go outside and sit on a stump or rock. The Gospels teach us there’s a difference between talking to God and playing God. Bush’s theocratic junta is busy demonizing Islam and is as daffy as our ancestors who launched the original Crusades. I’m tempted to refer to Bush et al. as the spawn of Satan, but I don’t want to fall into their malicious pit of discourse with its foghorn drone of murder.

  That said, I’d like to confront more important subjects: to wit, food, sex, and death, which have all been desperately trivialized by our culture. In moments, perhaps hours, of despondency, I wonder if I have any clarity to offer. Yup, as we say in the northern Midwest. Having kept myself remote from suffocating or drowning in the holding tank, the septic tank of our culture, I can say my heart and words are pure, or relatively so, at least for a member of the tribe of writers, that peculiar race of junkies, alkies, cads, whiners, amateur gynecologists, and desolation angels. They’ll do anything to get your attention, like starting a story with “I can never forgive her for killing our beloved dog with a butcher knife.”

  Occasionally, my self-righteousness makes me a tad nervous. Maybe I’m a victim of a genetic glitch in my family? Maybe I suffer a number of mental and bodily diseases for which there are no apparent symptoms? I can’t forget my great-uncle Floyd, who was the most unsuccessful knife thrower in the history of the American circus. An émigré from Sweden near the Arctic Circle, Floyd had an uncommon flash and sense of showmanship but ended up wounding a total of eleven women, none fatally, before the Barnum and Bailey authorities convinced him to retire. Curiously, despite his public record, Floyd had no problem finding women to stand there and take their chances. A cousin told me that when Floyd died at age eighty-eight in Wisconsin on May 18, 1957, he said on his deathbed, “I could have been a famous knife thrower, but I just couldn’t throw knives.”

  I also admit that I reached full sexual maturity at age seven, about the same time that many began to caution me about my gluttony. One afternoon, I caught and ate ten nice trout and felt a bit ill—but not too ill to climb a dozen trees that evening to peek in the windows at the members of the high school cheerleading squad whose high-kicking antics drove me into a batty sexual froth. More than once, I was caught by a puzzled father.

  “Jimmy, why are you up in that tree?”

  “I’m picking walnuts for my mom.”

  “But that’s a pine tree.”

  “Nobody told me.”

  That sort of thing. I want to make my own record clear, as so many in America are doing this election year, when we all feel a little like toilet seats with so many big political asses aimed at us. It’s certainly time to head to the woods or mountains with a load of groceries and French wine. In our own case, we are in the mountains near the Mexican border, purposely without a television so we don’t have to actually watch those zoo monkeys throwing shit at each other.

  Recently, due to the deaths of my brother in December and one of our dearest friends only three weeks before him, I’ve been trying to pitch my vaunted negative capability out of this moving
window and come to some conclusions. For instance, I’ve noted that a large number of otherwise intelligent Americans believe that a particular combination of food and vitamins will produce miracles. Is living until eighty-one instead of seventy-eight a miracle? I have at odd times tried tofu and think of it as a gustatory self-laceration, well below boiled pig liver on my list of preferences.

  Many of my male friends have, of late, been on strange diets so that younger women won’t regard them as biological outcasts. If they are successful, younger women will think of them as thin old men. Of course, it is natural to wonder how you got so old, but then you’re ignoring the obvious answer that it happened behind your back in moment-by-moment increments. I’ve never been the man I used to be. If we keep descending into reality, we discover that we are as likely to be attractive again as our boyhood dog is to arrive at the back door with that softball he couldn’t find fifty years ago. I suspect that time, our singular most fatal disease, has to keep itself largely behind our backs because that’s where the culture wishes it to be.

  It is wonderful how early in life we begin tinkering and toying with our genitals—and then move on to the genitals of others. This is the lovely way that species further themselves. In the outer reaches of the universe, even stars continue to calve. How disturbed should we be that everywhere we look, banality has metastasized and sexuality is a trillion-dollar industry? Not much.

  In these times of personal mental duress, I found myself making soup, a far reach from November, when I sat down in France with a dozen others to a thirty-seven-course lunch. The lunch was basically scholarly in nature—in short, we were searching for truth of the kind that university professors are said to look for, though I know only a few of these rascals feeding at the public trough.

  I suspect that, in making soups, I was looking for bedrock. Of course, none is to be found, but it is consoling to reduce confusion by making a primitive soup of shinbones and short ribs, turnips, rutabaga, cabbage, a head of garlic, and some fresh sage. One can ignore the fetish of chicken soup and simply make a good one. I also cooked a posole, a Mexican slaked hominy stew, with an antelope neck a friend had kindly sent—along with venison and elk—from Montana. The renowned Andrei Codrescu had told me that big peasant women in Romania and Albania will, in the middle of winter, hack meat off a frozen carcass with an ax and stuff it down in their capacious undies for a day or so, the better to brown it for the soup. I wanted this simplicity, having fantasized as a boy that I might run into a group of half-naked savage women deep in the forest who would welcome me to join in the feast of a whole deer they were roasting. This precious meat would naturally give me energy for the sexual bacchanalia to follow. This spectacular event hasn’t happened yet, but maybe it’s more likely in Canada.

  Part of this simplifying process was to watch thirty or so foreign films in the evenings, mostly Mexican, Spanish, and Italian. I was early on put off by a French film where an otherwise attractive woman said, “I feel like a piece of lost luggage.” It was one of those French films where the only story solution is collective suicide.

  I realized during this despondent period that, in terms of food and sex, people will do about anything to get excited and stay excited. There are food magazines published now that are frankly the equivalent of Penthouse or Hustler, full of froufrou recipes by young chefs who couldn’t roast a proper chicken at gunpoint. Doubtless, this food is eaten at wife-swapping parties starring the most daring young Republicans. They eat rare turkey breast sausage with jicama salsa.

  Further along on the path to the primitive and restorative, I’ve been cooking with guanciale, treated pork cheeks sent by my friend Mario Batali along with a fine chunk of lardo, the neck fat of a pig fed a special diet of cream and fruit in the last month of its life. Lardo is brined, then seasoned for six months in salt, garlic, and herbs. You slice it thin and let it melt into warm bread or spread it lavishly on plain pizza. All the great cardiologists admire this dish. One told me that, though the Buddha died after eating bad pork, he probably would have died sooner if he had left pork out of his diet.

  By this point, many of you are probably wondering at the subtlety with which I’ve woven food, sex, and death together with the dense beauty of a Berber rug. The other evening, two lovely women walked into the dining room attached to the grocery store in my mountain retreat, also used by Vladimir Nabokov, who thrived on sticking pins in local butterflies. One of the women ignored me while I struggled with a tough pork chop, but the other’s eyes flickered at a point above my hairline. I scented her plume of pheromones and would have dropped my fork for a peek up her skirt, but she was, sadly, wearing hiking trousers. I loitered, pretending to read Merrill Gilfillan’s fabulous Rivers and Birds, but didn’t get past a single pork-stained page, which happened to be sixty-six, my age. When her order of fried chicken arrived, she first ate all of the skin with a fair amount of salt. What did this mean? Doubtless something perverse, I thought as she cleansed her lips with a vaguely oversize tongue, a tongue that didn’t jibe with her Botticelli face. Perhaps it was the rough tongue of a lioness that can easily lick the skin off a human body. I’d love to take the chance.

  I fear that, in my despair, I’m losing weight too precipitously. Whole ounces of flesh are floating off into the void, which, among other things, is a fat trap for all of the world’s silly diets and famines. Does this mean that my novels and poems will become thin and sallow? Can the death of my brother and our dear friend possibly mean I’m going to die someday? Will I be able to smoke cigarettes and drink wine in the afterlife? I conclude with a recent poem, which you must paste on your bathroom mirror.

  Time

  Nothing quite so wrenches

  the universe like time.

  It clings obnoxiously

  to every atom, not to speak

  of the moon, which it weighs

  down with invisible wet dust.

  I used to think the problem

  was space, the million miles

  between me and the pretty waitress

  across the diner counter stretching

  to fill the coffee machine with water,

  but now I know it’s time

  which withers me moment by moment

  with her own galactic smile.

  A Really Big Lunch

  On our frequent American road trips, my friend Guy de la Valdène has invariably said at lunch, “These French fries are filthy,” but he always eats them anyway, and some of mine, too. Another friend, the painter Russell Chatham, likes to remind me that we pioneered the idea of ordering multiple entrées in restaurants back in the ­seventies—the theory being that if you order several entrées you can then avoid the terrible disappointment of having ordered the wrong thing while others at the table have inevitably ordered the right thing. The results can’t have been all that bad, since both of us are still more or less alive, though neither of us owns any spandex.

  Is there an interior logic to overeating, or does gluttony, like sex, wander around in a messy void, utterly resistant to our attempts to make sense of it? Not very deep within us, the hungry heart howls, “Supersize me.” When I was a boy, in northern Michigan, feeding my grandfather’s pigs, I was amazed at their capacity. Before I was caught in the act and chided by my elders, I had empirically determined that the appetite of pigs was limitless. As I dawdled in the barnyard, the animals gazed at me as fondly as many of us do at great chefs. Life is brutishly short and we wish to eat well, and for this we must generally travel to large cities, or, better yet, to France.

  Never before have the American people had their noses so deeply in one another’s business. If I announce that I and eleven other diners shared a thirty-seven-course lunch that likely cost as much as a new Volvo station wagon, those of a critical nature will let their minds run in tiny, aghast circles of condemnation. My response to them is that none of us twelve disciples of gourmandise wanted a
new Volvo. We wanted only lunch and since lunch lasted approximately eleven hours we saved money by not having to buy dinner. The defense rests.

  Some would also think it excessive to travel all the way from Montana to Marc Meneau’s L’Espérance, in Burgundy, for lunch, but I don’t. Although there are signs of a culinary revolution in the United States, this much-bandied renaissance is for people in cities such as New York, San Francisco, Seattle, and Chicago. When traveling across America over the past forty years, I’ve repeatedly sought extreme unction of a sort while in the midst of digestive death in the parking lots of restaurants. I’ve found it best, in these situations, to get some ­distance—to drive for a while, pull over, take a walk, fall to my knees, and pray for better food in the future.

  I suspect that it’s inappropriate to strand myself on a high horse when it comes to what people eat. We have proved ourselves inept fools on so many mortal fronts—from our utter disregard of the natural world to our notions of ethnic virtue to the hellish marriage of politics and war—that perhaps we should be allowed to pick at garbage like happy crows. When I was growing up in the Calvinist Midwest, the assumption that we eat to live, not live to eat, was part of the Gospels. (With the exception, of course, of holiday feasts. Certain women were famous for their pie-making abilities, while certain men, like my father, were admired for being able to barbecue two hundred chickens at once for a church picnic.) I recall that working in the fields for ten hours a day required an ample breakfast and three big sandwiches for lunch. At the time, I don’t think I believed I was all that different from the other farm animals.