248 animal, vegetable, miracleattention on each flavor, each perfect ingredient, one uncluttered recipe
at a time. A consumer trained to such mindful ingestion would not darken
the door of a sports bar serving deep- fried indigestibles. And consump-
tion controls the market, or so the economists tell us. That’s why it’s hard
to find a bad meal in Italy. When McDonald’s opened in Rome, chefs and
consumers together staged a gastronomic protest on the Spanish Steps
that led to the founding of Slow Food International.
We did have some close gastronomic shaves in our travels, or so we
thought anyway, until the meal came. Early in the trip when we were still
jet-lagged and forgetting to eat at proper mealtimes, we found ourselves
one afternoon on a remote rural road, suddenly ravenous. Somehow we’d
missed breakfast and then lunchtime, by a wide margin. The map showed
no towns within an hour’s reach. As my blood sugar dipped past grouchy
into the zone of stupefaction, Steven made the promise we have all, at
some point, made and regretted: he’d stop the car at the very next place
that looked open.
We rejoiced when a hotel- restaurant materialized at a motorway cross-
roads, but to be honest, we were also a little disappointed. How quickly
the saved can get picky! It looked generic: a budget chain hotel of the type
that would, in the United States, serve steam- table food from SYSCO.
We resigned ourselves to a ho-hum lunch.
In the parking lot, every member of a rambunctious bridal party was
busy taking snapshots of all the others with raised champagne glasses. We
tiptoed past them, to be met at the restaurant entrance by a worried-
looking hostess. “Mi dispiace!” she cried, truly distressed. The whole din-
ing room was booked all afternoon for a late wedding luncheon. While
trying not to sink to my knees, I tried to convey our desperation. The words
affamatto and affogato blurred in my mind. (One means “hungry” and the
other is, I think, a poached egg.) The hostess let us in, determined in her
soul to find a spot for these weary pilgrims from Esperanto. She seated us
near the kitchen, literally behind a potted palm. It was perfect. From this
secret vantage point we could be wedding crashers, spies, even poached
eggs if that was our personal preference, and we could eat lunch.
The hostess scurried to bring us antipasto, then some of the best pasta