It's Only Slow Food Until You Try to Eat It: Misadventures of a Suburban Hunter-Gatherer by Bill Heavey

Author:Bill Heavey [Heavey, Bill]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780802193483
Google: EUFfaAnKzFkC
Amazon: B00B6TZHOI
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 2013-05-06T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven:

Of Closet Carnivores and the Gospel

of Small Fish

In falling in love with Michelle I’d unwittingly fallen for a foodie, although of a kind hitherto unknown to me. My experience with foodies had revealed people with more money than imagination who were nonetheless intensely competitive. Food, eating well—these were just the playing field, not the thing itself. The real game was status. You gained status among other foodies by identifying the hottest, most exclusive new eatery; dining there; and then recounting the experience. You might, for example, describe in rapturous tones the perfection of a simple beet, carved to resemble a flower, set in a cucumber granita with the whipped llama bone marrow “snow.” The most irritating thing about foodies was the self-congratulatory tone that invariably crept into their speech. The host of one food-oriented program on NPR was, to me, the embodiment of this. I’m sure the woman knows a great deal about food, but whenever I heard her gush about the pleasures of handpicked wild capers from the mountains of southern Tunisia packed in pink Himalayan sea salt, I was afraid she was headed for an on-air orgasm. This was not something I wanted to hear. But I made a point of tuning in whenever I felt the need to annoy myself.

Getting to know Michelle forced me to do something I abhor, which was to reassess my assumptions. We had met through foraging. She was comfortable in hiking boots and overalls, moving through fields and forests, either gathering wild edibles for herself or teaching others how. For me, the problem was that she was equally at ease in the mainstream food world of hip restaurants and air kisses. She wrote about food and restaurants for several newspapers and magazines in Baltimore. She knew about different cuisines, was up on current food trends, and was friends with a number of prominent Baltimore chefs. These were hard things for me to square.

Taking Michelle to a good restaurant for the first time was an eye-opener. The moment she walked in, her very aura shifted. She became more commanding, exuding a kind of authority I’d never seen. Maybe it was simply a gear she’d had all along but deployed only in certain situations. In any case, I watched, fascinated. She knew how to ask for—and get—a prime table. As we sat down, she was already scanning the floor and taking mental notes as to what the restaurant did well and what it didn’t. We ordered the rabbit terrine appetizer and she perused the wine list for something appropriate. (Okay, she’d ordered it. Actually, I’d had a panicked instant of thinking “terrine” was the French word for “terrarium,” but I knew that even Michelle wasn’t going to order a glass box with a bunny in it.) The sommelier materialized, genie-like, at her side. He knew immediately that the lady was calling the shots. Hearing of the terrine, he suggested a certain bottle. Michelle replied that she knew and liked that wine but wanted “something a bit more tannin-forward.

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