waiting for asparagus 31Routine Maintenance Department over to the Division of Recreation. It’s
hard to reduce our modern complex of food choices to unifying princi-
ples, but this is one that generally works: eating home- cooked meals from
whole, in-season ingredients obtained from the most local source avail-
able is eating well, in every sense. Good for the habitat, good for the
body.
A handful of creative chefs have been working for years to establish
this incipient notion of a positive American food culture—a cuisine based
on our own ingredients. Notable pioneers are Alice Waters of Chez
Panisse in San Francisco, and Rick Bayless of Chicago’s Frontera Grill,
along with cookbook maven Deborah Madison. However, to the extent
that it’s even understood, this cuisine is widely assumed to be the prop-
erty of the elite. Granted, in restaurants it can sometimes be pricey, but
the do-it- yourself version is not. I am not sure how so many Americans
came to believe only our wealthy are capable of honoring a food aesthetic.
Anyone who thinks so should have a gander at the kitchens of working-
class immigrants from India, Mexico, anywhere really. Cooking at home
is cheaper than buying packaged foods or restaurant meals of comparable
quality. Cooking good food is mostly a matter of having the palate and the
skill.
The main barrier standing between ourselves and a local- food culture
is not price, but attitude. The most difficult requirements are patience
and a pinch of restraint—virtues that are hardly the property of the
wealthy. These virtues seem to find precious little shelter, in fact, in any
modern quarter of this nation founded by Puritans. Furthermore, we ap-
ply them selectively: browbeating our teenagers with the message that
they should wait for sex, for example. Only if they wait to experience in-
tercourse under the ideal circumstances (the story goes), will they know
its true value. “Blah blah blah,” hears the teenager: words issuing from a
mouth that can’t even wait for the right time to eat tomatoes, but instead
consumes tasteless ones all winter to satisfy a craving for everything now.
We’re raising our children on the definition of promiscuity if we feed them
a casual, indiscriminate mingling of foods from every season plucked
from the supermarket, ignoring how our sustenance is cheapened by
wholesale desires.