I may not have done much else, but I have had the great good luck in life to travel. 

In fact, I’ve been in transit much of my life. My sweetly rebellious salesman dad bucked convention by bringing our family along on his business trips, which were nearly constant. As soon as school let out we would get in the car, and basically drive, and drive, and eat, and drive, until September. I’ve been to 49 states (Hawaii is expensively elusive).  I’ve lived in New York City, Michigan, Georgia, Illinois, Oregon, Washington and Pennsylvania (Dutch Country), as well as the Caribbean, Asia and South America. Thanks to el Oso, this year I’ve starting traveling in Europe.  We figured out recently that in the past fourteen months we’ve racked up fifty-thousand miles of travel.

It’s not the easiest lifestyle, living out of hotels and guesthouses and suitcases; nor one that contains a lot of direct satisfaction. Honestly, it’s pretty lonely. Not being fluent in the local language wears on you. You pretty much always stick out, at first. There’s a lot of creative time-killing and few friends to do it with. Uncertainty is a constant.

But there’s a lot of joy, too. And I, myself, find a great deal of that joy greatly centered around the shared experience of food.  Street vendors,  BBQ’s, deliciously fattening local specialty stores, picnics. Being in somebody’s kitchen, learning to make something new. Snacks. Candy. The little treats we reward or console ourselves with everyday. I find simple, everyday-luxurious food to be the antidote to the ills of the modern world; unpretentious, inexpensive and whatever the opposite of esoteric is.  It’s human connectivity on a scale so basic it transcends not only cultural barriers but across the span of time as well.

My Malay is no longer fluent, but tamarind tastes the same in my kitchen in Argentina as it did in Kg Genting, and more or less the same way it tasted when my students’ great-grandparents cooked with it a hundred years ago. There is a precision, a ritualistic familiarity in the visceral experience of cooking and eating that cannot be expressed in words anyway. 

In addition, I believe we put as much of our unconscious collective identity into our cuisine as we do into our art.  For me, the heady modernity of Singapore is ably expressed in wicked little chocolates from a hyper-modern mall. Conveyer-belt sushi. Amish country in Pennsylvania clings to the caloric necessity needed for farmwork, even if most residents no longer farm, in hearty chicken pot pie, thick egg noodles, jeweled vegetables fresh from the earth. Buenos Aires is defiant and earthily luscious ice cream and grass-fed steak even as the sidewalks crumble and the economy trembles all around. 

I am not a fancy person and this blog will not be a fancy place. There will be no rocket-science recipes or gushing reviews of events-taurants. Sure, sometimes eating an overpriced meal consisting of a tea-infused green bean and a Lincoln-log cabin of halibut is appropriate. 

But what fun is there in being appropriate, anyway?

Oh, and thanks, Dad.

 

 

This entry was posted on Friday, June 20th, 2008 at 4:28 pm and is filed under Comfort Food, Family. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.