Best Food Writing 2017

by Holly Hughes

  I know the very last gluten-based food I ever ate—by which I mean intentionally, not by accident or by “getting glutened” (celiac-speak for poisoned) at the hands of an unknowing or careless person, or even a well-meaning friend. This was my third last meal, the last stop on my farewell tour-du-wheat.

  I remember it well because the same day Dr. Song stamped my celiac passport, I drove to our health-food store, Nature’s Storehouse. I was filling a basket with yogurt, coconut, aloe vera juice, slippery elm powder, and some other natural remedies that the owner had recommended for ravaged GI tracts,* when the idea occurred to me. I texted Bec and told her I’d be just a little longer. Keeping in touch was part of the deal, in exchange for letting me get back behind the wheel. We both knew I shouldn’t have been driving, but she didn’t have the heart to clip my wings, and the store was less than a mile from home.

  She should have grounded me, because after my shopping I drove across town to the pub in the Best Western hotel. I walked in and ordered a Reuben sandwich and fries to go. Then I sat down and waited in the lobby while the order was being prepared. As I reclined by the gas fireplace, my head light and buzzing, I considered, distantly and vaguely, what I was about to do to myself.

  Well? Why the hell not? What was one more day? How much worse could my gut get?

  I had kept craving a Reuben for the several weeks I’d been sick. At odd moments of the day, apropos of nothing, I kept bursting out with “You know what I could really go for? A Reuben!” Bec always looked at me doubtfully; I didn’t seem like a man who could handle a child’s portion of applesauce. I behaved myself, holding to my bland diet of tea, rice, and toast. But in the midst of the Taste Desert, I had never forgotten about getting salt, fat, sour, and cream, all in one bite.

  I should have just eaten the sandwich like I wanted to back in November, I thought. I should have eaten ten of them. What had I gained by trying to placate my gut? Nothing.

  When the order was ready, I paid and took it to the car. I unzipped my parka, opened the clamshell packaging, and ate the whole thing. I was breaking all the rules I usually worked so hard to honor; the ingredients of this last supper, if that’s what it could be called, were processed and from no place that I could even pretend was local. God only knew where the corned beef came from, and how it had come to be “corned.” I now also know that the industrial bread had been stabilized with vital wheat gluten, and there was likely additional gluten in the Russian dressing.

  I ate without any mindfulness. I ate mechanically. Anyone glancing inside the car would have seen a man whose face was utterly blank except for a few stray crumbs. And very white and sickly-looking, too. I was, I now realize, stress-eating. I’d never done anything like this before, but I was so out of my mind that I didn’t even register the strangeness.

  And yet, eating the sandwich also felt a little like getting even. A kamikaze valediction, I was going out on my own terms, in a blaze of gluten, not crawling away like some pathetic creature that had been beaten into submission without stealing one last bite. I felt like a badass—until remorse arrived. That took all of fifteen minutes. It was as if I’d swallowed a live grenade.

  Though a little crippled, I still had enough foresight to take care of the evidence. I tossed the container into a public trash bin before I pulled away. I drove home with the windows open to disperse the smell of grease and rye toast even though it was twenty degrees and snowing. Thinking about it now, my final encounter with the Reuben even sounds shabby, like a food tryst, right down to the meet-up at the hotel bar. I told myself I had no regrets.

  But I did have regrets. I should have ordered extra rye bread and a beer. Two beers.

  I suffered through one more day of GI agony while Bec wondered over the cause. I should have told her, but I kept my secret because, by now, I was ashamed: of my stupidity, of my weakness, of the fact that I couldn’t handle what I had just been told by my doctor, and it wasn’t even that bad. I didn’t have cancer; I didn’t have Crohn’s; nobody was going to have to snip away a piece of my colon. It was just an intolerance to gluten.

  And had I enjoyed my Reuben?

  Years later, I can’t even remember what the sandwich tasted like. All I know is that it’s impossible to get enough joy from one meal to sustain one’s imagination for years. I had eaten takeout, that was all—and middle-of-the-road takeout at that. There are so many better foods that I might have chosen, but I didn’t have immediate access to them, and anyway I don’t think that desperately stuffing my face with a crusty baguette and brie, or homemade ravioli, or a slice of pie would have been any more sustaining.

  In the coming years, I would ask almost everyone I know, You’re about to lose everything made of wheat, rye, barley, and oats—all of it, forever. What is the last food you eat? Everyone has an answer. Everyone thinks it’s a good one. Everyone is wrong.

  Within a few days of that emotional train wreck, the most obvious symptoms of celiac disease abated just as Dr. Song had said they would. I had doubted whether I could really recover even a semblance of well-being simply by cutting out things made of wheat. I hadn’t believed these foods could be harmful because nobody else seemed to think they were, and because wheat and gluten surrounded us, and I didn’t see other people keeling over.

  When I accompanied Bec to the grocery store for the first time since coming home from the hospital, I perceived that not just a few aisles, but complete zones of the food world, had suddenly ceased to apply to us. We walked past the bakery section, with its glass cases full of doughnuts and cakes, its faux–French market display of wicker baskets tipped on their sides, spilling heaps of not-very-good bread (but bread nonetheless), rolls, and muffins. We skipped the aisle with the rows and rows of snack bags stuffed with chips, pretzels, wafers, and puffs; bypassed the mosaic of cereal boxes with colorful panels of inane cartoon toucans, tigers, dinosaurs, cavemen, and bandits; avoided the granola and energy bars, crackers, the wall of pasta in every shape imaginable, prepackaged seasonings and soups, prepared meals, and the endless cookies and snack cakes that contained, collectively, enough sugary energy to propel a rocket into low orbit. And I couldn’t even bring myself to look in the beer cooler. Our store had a gluten-free corner—it would be an exaggeration to call it an aisle—but we didn’t investigate its offerings yet. I was still subsisting on clear broth.

  None of these foods were, as I would learn to think of it, for me. Some of the international aisle still applied, as did the produce and dairy departments, but I estimated that well over half the grocery store was lost. And while most of it was processed junk that our great-grandparents would not recognize as food, let alone a Mesopotamian farmer grinding wheat flour millennia ago, many of them had formed the tastes of our childhoods: Oreos, Trix cereal, cookie-dough ice cream. They also comprised a garish world of convenience foods and guilty pleasures in the present. The more I thought about it, the more I felt as if I had been suddenly exiled from American food culture. Meanwhile my wife was expatriating herself, willingly turning in her passport to an entire world of food just to come along with me.

  In fact, we had rarely eaten most of these processed foods, and hadn’t brought them home in a long time. Doritos, SunChips, pre-packaged doughnuts, Mallomars: we’d nearly forgotten they existed. Same thing with imitation crabmeat (which contains gluten, believe it or not), Cheez-Its, and ramen. Not long after Barbara Kingsolver published Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, Bec and I became invested in community agriculture, shopping mainly at the farmers’ market and living off our farm shares. Kingsolver’s book, which was so inspirational to many people but tricky to imitate for a variety of reasons—including, most important, access to time and money—nonetheless awakened us to the joys of the agriculture community in our backyard. We were already ripe for conversion because of a cluster of books and authors we read at that time, including Michael Pollan and Wendell Berry. We extended our roots further into the North Country soil, and slowly transitioned to a heavily local diet.
The “locavore movement” has its share of doubters with valid criticisms, but despite the long winters, local eating is easier in the North Country than in most places, provided you’re fortunate enough to have the resources (money, knowledge, and time) it requires.

  In the grocery store, though, I felt keenly that a locavore diet was different from an elimination diet. Philosophical inclination was different from medical mandate. As a locavore, I knew I could at least have a Dorito, or a handful of Nilla wafers, if I wanted to. Did a GF Nilla wafer exist? Did I even want to know?

  * Did these natural remedies work? It’s tough to say for sure, but only the yogurt, which I couldn’t tolerate yet, seemed to hurt me. I had entered into a mental space I never thought I’d go, one where scientifically unproven treatments seemed completely legitimate, and no potential cure sounded too strange or unpalatable: a breakfast of rice grits with powdered marshmallow root and slippery elm powder, washed down with a glass of watery cactus pulp (that’d be the aloe juice), for example. It was the meanest, most desperate eating I’ve ever done.

  Baby Foodie

  BY ERIC LEMAY

  From TheWeeklings.com

  Author of Immortal Milk: Adventures in Cheese and Essays on the Essay and Other Essays, Eric LeMay teaches writing at Ohio University. In this deadpan piece for The Weeklings (a website devoted to the art of the essay), he shares an ingenious plan for the gustatory education of his soon-to-be-born first child.

  SALT is our first taste.

  About five weeks into a pregnancy, when we’re still embryos, our nervous systems start to form. The cells that will become the brain and spinal cord divide and cluster. At the same time, our taste buds start developing alongside our tongues. A few weeks pass, and our buds eventually link up with our brain through the seventh, ninth, and tenth cranial nerves, at the end of which is our gustatory cortex. It sits in the center of our brain like the pit of an avocado. With this link in place, we still need eight more weeks for our taste buds to develop taste receptors, little pores that allow us to sense the flavors in our food. At that point, we can taste.

  And the first taste we experience is salt. It comes from the amniotic fluid that surrounds us and has a flavor similar to sea water. I know because the other day I made a batch.

  “It has the brightness of the sea,” said my wife, turning over the spoonful of salty water. She was a little over sixteen-weeks pregnant, the moment when a fetus’s senses come online, and her belly billowed like the tiny sail on a toy schooner. “But something’s missing.”

  My wife has a good palate. She couldn’t have known I’d used a fleur de sel to approximate the 98% water and 2% salt that makes up amniotic fluid. Ever since we’d starting reading about fetal development, I’d been curious as to what the baby would be tasting. Concocting amniotic fluid seemed like a good way to find out.

  I confess that, when I came out of the kitchen with a pint-sized Mason jar and a spoon, I didn’t tell her that the whitish water swirling in the glass was amniotic fluid. For the last few weeks, she’d been repulsed by foods she ordinarily loved. Kale, eggs, and chicken now turned her stomach, so I figured I wouldn’t introduce my little experiment with “Hey honey, let’s sample the liquid in your womb.” Instead, I tasted it first—nothing to fear here—then said, “Try this.”

  “There’s no taste of seaweed,” she continued. “No funk. No dead thing floating in it, like you get at the shore.”

  That’s because there’s a live thing floating in it—a fetus!

  Sometimes what a husband doesn’t say shows he cares. I didn’t say that. Instead, I calmly listed the ingredients then calmly explained how they calmly approximated amniotic fluid. When I finished, I may have seen her cheeks convulse (“I wish I’d had some warning”), but on the whole she was game. No reason to let her know that, in a few more weeks, the amniotic fluid in her belly would include our baby’s urine. That funk she was missing would arrive soon enough. I simply focused on my own salty mouthful and saw she was right: the taste was very clean.

  “Umami!” she declared, her buds fully recovered, “that’s what’s missing!”

  Umami is a taste identified in 1908 by the Japanese scientist Kikunea Ikeda. He found that glutamate, an amino acid found in salt but not identical to it, was the taste that gave a succulent flavor to broth made out of seaweed. He named it “umami,” but non-foodies usually call it “savory.” It’s the taste in soy sauce, parmesan cheese, and anchovies that imparts their deep, rich flavors.

  Baby, it appeared, would not be tasting deep, rich flavors in the womb. Which raised the question: what flavors would baby taste? Would saltiness be the only one? A baby destined for nothing more, gastronomically speaking, than a bag of potato chips? What about sweetness? What about sour and bitter? What, in short, could a father-to-be do to ensure the widest taste experience for his child at the very moment that he, that she (because we’d decided not to find out the baby’s sex) is first able to experience the world through taste?

  I decided on nothing less—what else do you expect of a first-time father?—than giving our baby the world.

  Now, I’ll eventually describe this global culinary journey, one that I cooked up for a creature who has yet to develop the ability to swallow, but what I really hope to do is show how we enter into the world of taste. How, that is, we make our journey from fetus to flavor to the foods we’ll eat long after we leave our mothers’ arms. And to do that, I first need to explain how it feels, as a father, to track the development of your newly conceived baby.

  For starters, you don’t enter into it until the third week. That’s right, the pregnancy clock officially begins when a woman menstruates for the final time before conception. It takes two weeks for an egg to bobble from the ovary down the Fallopian tube, where, in week three, it meets up with one of your sperm. This is your big moment. At conception, you contribute half the genetic material that will eventually become a baby. Half baby’s gangly limbs and spotty moles, half its bad teeth and moodiness come from you. And then, as far as you’re concerned, that’s pretty much it. Thanks, Mr. Ejaculate, mom’s got it from here.

  And what mom does, in all its developmental complexity, is marvelous. In the fourth week, she provides baby with a uterus, so it can burrow and grow. She also starts nourishing baby through her own blood. You, if you’re smart, will wave the pregnancy test enthusiastically without flinching at its pee-soaked end.

  The following week, mom gives baby blood cells, kidney cells, nerve cells. Here’s the beginning of a brain, kid. Here’s the start of a heart. How about a spinal cord, would you like one of those? And you, dad, you lovingly dish out a prenatal vitamin that your wife ordered three months before she became pregnant.

  Weeks six and seven, mom gives baby arms and legs, eyes and ears, a spinal cord, a heartbeat, bones. Dad gives nothing.

  Week eight, mom provides a pair of lungs. Week nine, she follows up with hair follicles, nipples, those tiny toes and fingers that you’ll feature in the photos from the hospital. She also gives baby every organ. And don’t forget that mom has grown an entirely new organ herself, just for baby. Her placenta is feeding baby, eliminating baby’s waste, and protecting baby from disease. You purchase the wrong flavor of ice cream.

  On it goes. Mom gives the baby eyelids, nails, facial features, skin. She’s the prime mover for all of baby’s biological systems—circulatory, muscular, endocrine, nervous, digestive—all while you gain five pounds of sympathy weight.

  So, at sixteen weeks, when baby can finally perceive the outside world, when its sense of hearing kicks in and touch becomes possible, when it can finally taste, for the very first time in its existence, of course you, as baby’s father, want to make it something special.

  The pressing question becomes: what, besides salt, can baby taste?

  We quickly discovered one answer. My wife had yet to feel the baby move. She might have—maybe, perhaps, she wasn’t entirely sure—felt a flutter one night after I had dozed off and s
he said to the ceiling, “Baby, do something.” Maybe, at that request, baby moved. She’s certain, however, that a few nights later, while we were once again lying in bed, she felt it. She sprang up, and her eyes brightened.

  “The baby’s moving,” she gasped, in a low voice, as though she might spook it.

  “What’s it feel like?” I asked

  She cupped her stomach. “Like that wire brush you use to play the cymbal.” She demonstrated, moving her fingers to a soundless tune. “But inside.”

  “Is it still happening?”

  “Yes. No.” She hadn’t moved. “Maybe.”

  Neither of us breathed.

  “It’s gone,” she announced, a smile still gripping her cheeks.

  Let me pause on this beatific moment and mention that my wife, with her fine palate, had of late not only been rejecting some of her favorite foods. She’d also been gripped by certain cravings. Cravings for pasta. Cravings for cookies and crusty bread and other carb-loaded foods that beckoned to her in the bakery and stalked her in the check-out line. Still worse for a woman who prides herself on her ability to cook up dal makahini from memory, she was craving clichés. Pickles, yes, pickles. And ice cream, in both the wrong and the oh-so-right-just-one-more-bite flavors.

  So when I pointed out how baby must have enjoyed the pralines and cream that she’d polished off earlier, I thought I was saying the obvious. I was wrong.

  “Oh no,” she said, slumping over her belly. “I’ve given the baby type 2 diabetes.”

  “You can’t give the baby type 2 diabetes with Häagen Dazs.”

  “You can,” she groaned. “I read about it. Gestational diabetes.”

  “You had three bites. That’s like a sip of soda. Most Americans brush their teeth with soda.”

  “Still,” she wavered, unconvinced.