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

by Jim Harrison

  Ultimately, of course, fruit, nuts, fish, rice, and beans might be better for our bodies than vivid food on a strict health basis but we would quickly become as frail and limp as albino sea worms and totally without personal power. We all recall how our media in Iraq became embedded in the military’s collective ass like ingrown hairs. It is the intent of our consumer culture, which in fact has become our total culture, to trap us anaerobically in its intestinal tract where we are meant only to cooperate in our own devouring.

  Of course death is a black door without hinges and opens in only one direction. Death is our ultimate safety net but until that moment our only option is “resist much.” A secret brotherhood insists that there is no God but reality, but I have doubts about this when I read that a single teaspoon of a neutron star weighs a billion tons. Who wants to become yet another conscript in someone else’s world of limited ideas? This Sunni–Shiite quarrel has been going on since 632 A.D. and the Catholic–Protestant silliness has been behind centuries of bloodshed including ignoring the first signs of the Aryan binge. The Hitler–Stalin Pact was mere pro forma and earlier the more than three hundred thousand who died in ten days at Verdun had no real idea of the bottomless hole they had marched into. The pathetically undereducated members of the Bush administration and the U.S. Congress now say re: Iraq, “It seemed like a good idea at the time.” In any of the dozens of countries I visit, people indicate to me the sense that they are being led by low-rent chiselers.

  Oh well, what can I offer you but a few personal clues, mindful of my mom’s stern admonition, “What if everyone were like you?” I am scarcely what you call a role model and there might be a tiny germ of truth in Mom’s attitude. All I do is write novels and poems, hunt, fish, smoke, cook, drink, and treat women, children, and dogs kindly. When I voted in November I had the feeling I was peeing in the ocean but then I won, springing the slightly lesser of two evils onto our world. I may now ignore Paracelsus’s warning about “the dark and turbid entrails of lustful women” because I am a geezer that women have tossed into the biological dumpster. It’s been more than a decade since a ballerina has said to me, “I want to have your baby.” I have discovered that my smoking tends to enliven strangers around me. Since it’s no longer fashionable to publicly abuse gays, blacks, Jews, Indians, and left-wingers, the culture has aimed its instinctive vitriol against smokers. I have abandoned my intelligence and no longer use words like iconic or semiotics. I rarely bray out “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” in public. I take two one-hour naps a day, which reduces possible mischief. I walk two hours a day in remote areas where I can do no harm to my fellow bipeds. Last summer I destroyed a cell phone by pouring coffee on it, my only recent violent act. I have tried to help others but my abilities in this area are indeed limited.

  Just recently I conceived of a helpful project for the four months before May when I’ll return to southwest France to further search for the lost poems of Antonio Machado, certainly a more valid obsession than O. J. Simpson looking for his wife’s killer on the golf courses of Las Vegas. The mountains around Collioure are jagged country and such pilgrimages must be made barefoot, especially painful when your knapsack is full of Domaine La Tour Vieille, my favorite local wine. At the end of the day you run down the mountain and hurl yourself into the Mediterranean, buoyed up by the empty wine bottles.

  Back to the singular figure of Penélope Cruz, who has expressed dismay that viewers are distracted from her acting abilities by her attractiveness. This is certainly not true for me as I’ve long considered her among my top three favorite actresses in our solar system and at the moment I am reviewing twenty of her films through Netflix for my project. In short, I want to secure a double suite at the Hotel Canal Grande in Modena, Italy, near which there is one of the best markets in Europe. I am a Christian gentleman so the door between the suites will be operable only on her side. I will have a simple kitchen installed in my portion of the rooms and in a mere thirty days I guarantee I can put thirty pounds on her delicate frame thus making her safe from the loutish misunderstanding of movie viewers. I am already a Quasimodo in a world without bells and these thirty days of hard cooking would help fulfill my calling as an artist. Doubtless Penélope Cruz will read this piece and either pick up the gauntlet or ignore it. She would emerge from the hotel plump but not dumpy. Maybe we would go to Cannes where I refused to be a judge last year and wear his-and-hers skimpy bathing suits and be amused by the way people would avert their eyes. Penélope would startle the press by only saying, “There is no more grotesque misunderstanding of life than to murder people in the name of ideas.”

  One Good Thing

  Leads to Another

  I am intensely knowledgeable on all matters nutritional but somewhat ineffective in applying this knowledge to myself. A friend, the novelist Tom McGuane, once said to me, “You can lecture a group of us on nutritional health while chain smoking and drinking a couple of bottles of wine in less than an hour.”

  Sad but true, but how sad? Ben Franklin said, “Wine is constant proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.” Despite this many Americans own a hopeless puritanical streak that makes them beat on themselves as if they were building a tract house. The other day I took out a pound of side pork from the refrigerator, exemplary side pork raised by E.T. Poultry which I favor above all domestic pork. I put the package on the table and circled it nervously like a nun tempted to jump over the convent wall and indulge in the lusts of the body. My intellect warred against this side pork while my heart and taste buds surged. I was again modern man at the banal crossroads where he always finds himself bifurcated like Rumpelstiltskin.

  Naturally the side pork won. My art needed it, plus I knew that a simple bottle of Domaine La Tour Vieille would win the battle with pork fat if drunk speedily enough to get down the gullet to disarm the gobbets of side pork. To achieve health one must be able to visualize such things in terms of the inner diorama.

  A number of doctors have been amazed that I am still alive, but the explanation is simple: wine. I started out in a deep dark hole being born and raised in northern Michigan which demographically is the center of stomach cancer in the United States. Up home, as it were, they love to fry everything and when short on staples they favor fried fried. To be frank, the French raised me, though I didn’t get over there until my thirties due to a thin wallet. Since my mid-teens I loved and read studiously French literature so that at nineteen in Greenwich Village I was scarcely going to drink California plonk while reading Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Apollinaire. Instead I drank French plonk at less than two bucks a bottle, slightly acrid but it did the job, which was to set my Michigan peasant brain into a literary whirl.

  Whiskey is lonely while wine has its lover, food. Last evening here at a remote hunting cabin in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula we ate an appetizer of moose liver (excellent and mild), goose, and woodcock with Le Sang des Cailloux Vacqueyras, Domaine Tempier Bandol, and Château La Roque with Joe Bastianich’s Vespa Bianco with our cheeses.

  Wine leads us to the food that becomes our favorite. It would be unthinkable for a Frenchman to eat his bécasse (woodcock) without a fine wine, say a Clos de la Roche, beside his plate, though this fine Burgundy is mostly affordable to moguls who unlike me don’t have the time to hunt woodcock, grouse, doves, quail, and Hungarian partridge. Since I love wild food and wine I have been kept active in the sporting life by these addictions. I will shuffle through the outdoors for hours to shoot tonight’s dinner though in the case of woodcock they are better after being hung for a few days. If the weather is too warm a forty-two-degree refrigerator works fine, though you keep your eye on how you rotate the birds. I’ve never had a woodcock turn “high” on me but you must be much more careful with the white-breasted grouse. I have frequently eaten the “trail” of woodcock, the entrails minus the gizzard, on toast, a French tradition that some of my American friends are squeamish about. I insist that the best cooking method fo
r woodcock is to simply roast the birds over a wood fire making sure the breast interior is pinkish red. Much like doves and mallards an overcooked woodcock is criminal. Last year near our winter casita on the Mexican border I shot well over a hundred doves but when I cooked a few of them minutes too long my wife was utterly disgusted. Perhaps I did something truly stupid like answering the phone.

  So wine fuels my sporting life but the hunting season ends and I become a bird-watcher rather than a hunter partly to keep moving and make sure my appetite is revved. Woodcock don’t freeze well but Hungarian partridge and grouse do, plus there are gifts from friends of elk, antelope, moose, and venison, which all cry out rather silently for red wine.

  We had a nasty summer in Montana due to a two-month heat wave. I ate sparingly and shed ounces like dandruff, sensing that I was becoming too light on my feet for Montana winds. The heat forced me to drink whites, my favorites being Bouzeron and La Cadette’s Bourgogne blanc, their Vézelay blanc, too, and also a lot of lowly Italian prosecco which was amenable to the weather. My appetite recovered slightly when the garden flourished in August but it wasn’t until September that I could again fully embrace my first love, French reds.

  The city of Lyon has kindly decided to give me a medal and is flying me over in a few weeks. Only by dint of tromping through forests and fields several hours a day can one be physically ready for Lyon, which makes me the man for the job. After each meal in Lyon I will climb the mountain, glance at the cathedral but not actually go inside, and then trot back down. Bishop Irenaeus of Lyon irritated me when in the second century he proclaimed animals don’t go to heaven because they can’t contribute monetarily to the church. I adore the classic bistros in Lyon, also a restaurant called Aux Fins Gourmets. These sturdy folks eat sturdily and I will ferret away a collection of fromage de tête (head cheese) in my hotel room in case I awake in the night disconsolate.

  After Lyon I will positively reconstruct the nature of my blood in Narbonne, Collioure, and Bandol. Most intelligent people recall the established scientific victory of the Mediterranean diet over half a dozen others. The effect of the south is immediate. Once while writing for a week at the splendid Hotel Nord-Pinus in Arles, I became daily less somber and tormented so that what I wrote there was untypically jubilant. Doubtless if I wrote a whole novel in the south of France I would lose my winning reputation for melancholy. Once on the streets of Arles, for instance, I met a very undoglike lassie who was half-French and half-Egyptian. My knees buckled and I had to have two glasses of wine to make my way a mere block to the hotel.

  Our last evening at the cabin we had grouse and woodcock again, and a leg of lamb from my neighbor’s ranch in Montana. A friend, Rick Baker, brought along some Beychevelles from the 1980s, a Grand Cru Mondot from Saint Emilion, and more Domaine Tempiers. The Mondot was a little muddy, perhaps from shipment.

  All in all it was a decidedly non-triumphant summer. In mid-September I made game pies from venison, mallards, doves, Hungarian partridge, ground veal, and pork fat with a lard pie crust. Superb. Unfortunately it was hot again and I had to eat one with a white Cadette. It worked, but in the middle of the snack it occurred to me that weather is God’s work while wine is man’s. René Char told us not to live on regret like a wounded finch. A few years ago a friend gave me an ’82 Pétrus and I swilled it before I learned I could have sold the bottle and bought a ticket to France where I’m closer to the heart of the matter, wine and its lover, food.

  Don’t Go Out Over

  Your Head

  Of late I’ve determined that I am largely unfit for human consumption. We can think of ourselves accurately as five billion tiny fish swirling in a big green pond and I’ve only had passing contact with one in fifty thousand which seems more than enough. This idea came to mind recently when I finished the last stop on the last book tour of my life which came by happenstance in a foreign country, Canada, a somewhat alien and mysterious country to Americans. The pork sausage at the Park Hyatt in Toronto was the best in my long experience and I felt inclined to stay there indefinitely. Doctors recently have come to highly recommend the diet of pork sausage, room-temperature Swedish vodka, and the stray pack of airline peanuts found in one’s briefcase. If you crave greens you merely eat the leaves off the fresh flowers in your room. If they make you ill, stop eating them.

  Toronto seemed like a good place to end a public literary career, partly because I felt at home in the many wooded ravines and kept a sharp single eye out for places I might pitch a tent and lay out my sleeping bag. In the United States these marvelous ravines would likely have been bulldozed long ago for no particular reason. One reason to live in a ravine is so you don’t have to go to the airport to fly home. Airports and office machinery lead the list of our current humiliations. Another reason to stay in Toronto is that the people are antiquely polite. I could see I wouldn’t be turned away at men’s clothing stores for being poorly dressed as I have been in New York City.

  I’ve spent most of my life out in the water over my head and I want to come to shore if, indeed, there is a shore. Right after World War II, my father, grandfather, and uncles built us a cabin on a remote lake for nine hundred bucks’ worth of materials. The lake was about fifteen miles from our home in the county seat where my father worked as the government agriculturalist advising farmers. My uncles who had recently returned from the war were in poor shape in mind and body and so was I from a rather violent encounter with a little girl that took the sight from my left eye. My response, wonderfully close at hand, was to spend all of my time swimming and fishing and wandering in the woods. Every morning at breakfast my iron mother (of Swedish derivation) would say, “Don’t go out over your head.”

  Consequently I’ve spent a lifetime doing so. There is a beauty in threat. A rattlesnake is an undeniably beautiful creature as is a pissed-off mountain lion, or a grizzly bear hauling off an elk carcass. The boy loves the icy thrill of taking a dare and running through a graveyard at night. Why not drop ten hits of lysergic acid and go tarpon fishing? Why not hitchhike to California with twenty bucks in your pocket? We can be perplexed and wanton creatures with all of the design of Brownian movement. When I begin a novel I always have the image of jumping off the bank into a river at night. There is no published map for the river and I have no idea where it goes.

  Of course deciding to avoid the public doesn’t mean I’m going to stop writing my poems and novels, which are my calling. I’ve looked into the matter and it will be easy to Cryovac my work like those vain bodies suspended in liquid nitrogen and encased in aluminum tubes. They could have been stored in Saddam Hussein’s underground palace, but it turned out that our intelligence was in error and he didn’t have an underground palace.

  Meanwhile, as I try to make my way to shore I have a number of significant projects and questions in mind, especially whether or not dogs have souls. Rather than stray off into the filigree of mammalian metaphysics my research into this question, already considerable, is dwelling on diet, with many clues coming from the coordinates in diet between humans, who presumably have souls, and dogs, who don’t—or so it was established by the Catholic Church in the ninth century when it declared that animals don’t have souls because they couldn’t monetarily contribute to the Church.

  To start at the beginning we have to posit that reality is an aggregate of the perceptions of all creatures. This broadens the playing field. I was never a member of the French Enlightenment and most of my sodden but extensive education didn’t stick. All I recall from my PhD in physics at Oxford is that the peas were overcooked, the sherry was invariably cheapish, and that in the 1960s in England there were thousands of noisy bands with members wearing Prince Valiant hairdos. I survived on chutney and pork fat and the sight of all the miniskirts that rarely descended beneath the hip bones. No, all of my true education has come from the study of six thousand years of imaginative literature. As Andrei Codrescu said, “The only source of reliable
information is poetry.” In addition I am widely traveled and have lived my life in fairly remote and vaguely wild locations where the natural world teaches its brutally frank lessons and where the collective media has no more power than a meadow mouse fart on a windy night. Prolonged exposure to nature gives one a sort of grammatica pardo, a wisdom of the soil.

  Just the other day a woman, a rather lumpish friend, said to me over a lunch of squid fritters, “My life is so foreign, I wish it were subtitled like a foreign movie. Just this morning I noted that unlike me songbirds never seem overweight.”

  “O love muffin,” I said, “life properly perceived is alien, foreign, utterly strange. If life seems familiar you’re afflicted with lazy brain. Birds don’t plump up because they have no sphincter muscle. They let go fecally on impulse. This would work out poorly in human concourse though it would seem appropriate in politics.”

  A literary scientist must take note of disparate elements. In the very same newspaper the other day I noticed two important items. The world’s oldest man, a 113-year-old from Japan, said, “I don’t want to die.” (He’s evidently waiting for an alternative experience.) In the second article a young woman who is an ultramarathoner wasn’t feeling well and did thirteen “stop-and-squats” in a hundred-mile race that she won. It seemed a tad narcissistic to count, but more important she appeared to possess a genetic glitch that made her part bird.

  Dogs have great powers of discrimination. They are said to have less than a quarter of the number of our taste buds, but this is more than compensated for by their vast scenting powers. Rover can be snoozing way out in the yard, but if you begin to sauté garlic he’s suddenly clawing at the door. The intense happiness you see in French dogs is doubtless due to superior leftovers. I noted that in over two decades at my cabin, my bird dogs were Francophile. They loved Basque chicken, the heavy beef stews called daubes, cuisse de canard which is a wonderful duck preparation from southwest France, and Bocuse’s bécasse en salmi, a rather elaborate woodcock recipe. It should be said that during hunting season it is hard to maintain the weight and strength of an English setter or a pointer. If you’re walking five miles a setter or pointer might cover thirty-five if it’s high-spirited. Compared to Labradors, setters can be finicky eaters. One of mine named Rose learned to refuse Kraft parmesan in favor of Parmigiano-Reggiano.