Creek Running North

An interesting effect of my recent cat bite: each day I need to make sure to eat at least two good-sized meals. This is a cushion against the unpleasant effects of the giant, equine-veterinary-sized amoxicillin/clavulinate pills I’m taking. The less said about those effects the better, though I’ll admit I’m enjoying the excuse to eat large amounts of Brown Cow yogurt.

And eating a full meal first thing in the morning compels me to realize that I don’t like doing so. Don’t get me wrong: I like to eat, as a recent step onto the hospital scale confirms. As is true of many Americans, my body mass index is uncomfortably close to my age. (And I’m not particularly worried about that: I enjoy weighing in at more than 200 pounds, if only for my ability to move large appliances.)

But there’s something about that morning hunger. It’s familiar; an odd comfort, enough so that when something upsets me deeply, my first response is to lose my appetite. In major life crises, I can dwindle perilously close to 190 pounds.

I published an article on genetically engineered food crops about ten years ago, and shortly thereafter got a phone call from former California governor and then talk-radio host Jerry Brown, who wanted to learn more. At his home a few days later, I more or less patiently waited to speak without luck. Jerry would ask me a question, I’d get a few words in, and then Brown’s longtime associate Jacques Barzhagi, obviously put out at the notion that someone else had Brown’s momentary attention, would interrupt to rebut everything I’d said, or to spin a complicated web of non sequitur.

It was a mildly unpleasant and mostly forgettable day, redeemed mainly by Brown’s desultory graciousness, but one thing Barzaghi said sticks with me. Jerry had asked me what the connection was between environmental activism and eating. Jacques answered nonsequituriously, saying that eating for any reason other than fueling the metabolism was a symptom of decadence.

This was, of course, a load of unmitigated bullshit. Black bears, with millions of years of carnivore ancestry behind them, prefer now to eat fruit and honey and the occasional stolen potato salad. Are they to be accused of decadence? (If they were, I suspect they’d claim the label proudly.) Raccoons love to break open and eat watermelons, which contain almost no nutritive value. Are raccoons decadent? Hummingbirds? Who is more decadent: the diet-obsessed American who carefully plans her meals for perfect nutritional balance, or the cuisine-obsessed Japanese sushi master who carefully plans her meals as minimally processed homage to the beings eaten?

I’m tempted to blame Barzhagi’s nonsense on that odd mix of Catholicism and Zen Buddhism he shares with Brown. But the best refutation of Barzhagi I can find is Catholic to the core: eating is communion. We picture ourselves as separate from the environment, but every bit of us is fashioned from something we ate, drank, or breathed. Even the bad food. Carbon atoms cooked in the hearts of long-dead stars, riding to earth on chondrite meteors, built into polymers by giant ferns, cycled through dragonflies and dinosaurs, corn and cow; nitrogen fixed by the millions of tons by invisible beings beneath the soil; water off the backs of uintatheres and Unitarians; all of them make up the artery-clogging, prion-ridden burger you ate last night. One cell encounters another, engulfs it, and oozes off to find more. An entire biosphere based on eating. What could be a more central underpinning of this existence? What one process more worthy of reverence, of enjoyment for its own sake?

Well, yeah, other than THAT one. And just as sexual longing is the obverse face of rutting, hunger and satiety are meaningless each without the other. Morning satiety dulls me, and I’m looking forward to the last of those antibiotic tabs so that I can get back to that best of sauces, a craving for communion honed slowly and patiently until mid-afternoon.

Or that’s how I rationalize it to myself.

At a point somewhere in the mid-1970s, my mother stopped feeding her children. It’s hard to pinpoint when, exactly. When I was 14, she would give me 80 cents for round trip bus fare each school day; I’d hitchhike to school, panhandle another quarter, and eat lunch at an all-you-can-eat salad bar. The next year, she decided I should ride my bike to school each day and cut off the bus fare. Though the extra effort and fewer calories made staying awake in class tough, I usually managed to recoup at dinnertime. And then Mom stopped buying food for us at home. Weeks would pass with nothing in the refrigerator other than a head of iceberg lettuce and some industrial-strength blue cheese dressing, which we kids drank on the sly. It wasn’t too long after that that I quit school, left home, and found that I could usually feed myself, more or less, on the odd and demeaning jobs available to a 17-year-old in Jimmy-Carter-Recession-Buffalo.

I’m the oldest of four kids, and I had it easier than the others. I had girlfriends whose mothers would feed me. I worked a couple mornings a week at the local collective bakery for credit: those dozen loaves of whole wheat bread every month were a godsend, as was the local organic restaurant, where I washed dishes, again for credit. Dumpsters behind supermarkets were an important resource, not only for the baked goods and potato chips that were a day past their expiration, but for the occasional cut of beef with one green edge. Shoplifting probably saved my life more than once. Cigarettes were seventy-five cents a pack; an extravagance in retrospect, but one that helped stave off hunger for a full day. Same for the free coffee in the lounge at the nearby college campus.

My siblings, on the other hand, had fewer tools at their disposal, and we acted toward one another as starved dogs over a single scrap of meat. My father did buy food, and one of my sisters — sensibly — moved in with him. The rest of us quickly learned that we should eat his food while he was gone, so as to avoid the lectures about eating his food. It wasn’t until just a few years ago that I realized there was anything wrong with the situation. I was in my late teens, after all, and susceptible to the argument that I should be pulling my own weight at that point. (And it would have been easy: on my 19th birthday, standing 5’9”, I weighed 117 pounds.)

In retrospect, I find it odd that I didn’t protest. I’d visit friends, and knew full well the first question parents typically asked their kids when we’d walk in: “Are you hungry?” That was just something my family didn’t do, like game night or group singing or sharing feelings.

After I moved to California and started eating regularly, people started talking about the concept of “comfort food” — meatloaf, mashed potatoes, fried chicken, the food of childhood to which you retreat for reassurance in times of minor crisis. I used to think of the stuff I started eating in California as my comfort food — deep fried squid, cha siu bao, black bean burritos and so forth.

But I wonder lately whether I’m not hiding something, ignoring the New York exoskeleton I’ve been trying to molt for two decades. This raw, empty feeling; this gnawing void in my gut I find so compelling: it’s just like Mom used to make.