Part 12 (1/2)

So the next afternoon, after school, we drove to the Safeway, grabbed a shopping cart, and wheeled it down the long, chilly aisle of freezer cases holding the microwavable dinners. The choices were stupendous-almost stupefying, in fact. It took us more than twenty minutes just to decide among the bags of frozen Chinese stir-fry, the boxed Indian biryanis and curries, the fish-and-chip dinners, the multiflavored mac-and-cheese options, the j.a.panese gyoza and Indonesian satays, the Thai rice bowls, the old-timey Salisbury steaks, the roast-turkey and fried-chicken dinners, the beef Stroganoff, the burritos and tacos and fully loaded hero sandwiches, the frozen garlic bread and sliders, and the cheeseburgers preinstalled on their frozen buns. There were whole product lines targeted at women trying to minimize their caloric intake, and others at men looking to maximize theirs (the ”Hungry Man” promises ”a full pound of great-tasting food”), and still others aimed at kids dreaming of an authentic fast-food restaurant experience at home. I hadn't spent much time on this aisle in years, so had no idea just how many advances there had been in the technology of home-meal replacement. Every genre of fast food, every ethnic cuisine, every chain-restaurant menu item known to man and commerce now has its facsimile in the freezer case.

Judith was willing to go along with our dinner plans but declined to join us shopping for it. She had requested a frozen lasagna, and Isaac spotted a bright-red box of Stouffer's that looked halfway appetizing. Dubious about eating meat under the circ.u.mstances, I first checked out a vegan ”chicken cacciatore” entree, but the lengthy list of ingredients-most of them ultraprocessed permutations of soy-put me off the mock meat. So I opted for an organic vegetable curry from Amy's that seemed fairly straightforward in composition; at least, I recognized all the ingredients as food, which is saying a lot in this sector of the supermarket. Isaac agonized for a good long time, but his problem was the opposite of mine: There were just too many tempting entrees he wanted to try. Eventually it came down to a call between the bag of P. F. Chang's Shanghai Style Beef stir-fry and Safeway's own frozen French onion soup gratinee. I told him he could get them both, as well as some frozen molten (sic) chocolate cookie he'd been eyeing for dessert.

The total for the three of us came to $27-more than I would have expected. Some of the entrees, like Isaac's stir-fry, promised to feed more than one person, but this seemed doubtful given the portion size. Later that week I went to the farmers' market and found that with $27 I could easily buy a couple pounds of an inexpensive cut of gra.s.s-fed beef and enough vegetables to make a braise that would feed the three of us for at least one night and probably two. (The variable, as ever, is Isaac's appet.i.te.) So there was a price to pay for letting the team of P. F. Chang, Stouffer's, Safeway, and Amy's cook our dinner.

I don't think it's boastful of me to say that none of these entrees did anything to undermine my growing confidence in the kitchen. True, I don't yet know how to engineer dishes that can withstand months in the freezer case, or figure out how to build little brown ice cubes of hoisin sauce, designed to liquefy just in time to coat the vegetables after they've defrosted but not a moment sooner. And nothing I learned from Samin could help me design the consecutive layers of cheese curds and croutons topping the chocolate-colored cylinder of frozen onion soup like a Don King fright wig.

So how did it all taste? A lot like airline food, if you can remember what that was like. All the entrees tasted remarkably similar, considering how far-flung the culinary inspirations. They were all salty and had that generic fast-food flavor, a sort of bouillon-y taste that probably can be traced to the ”hydrolyzed vegetable protein” that several of the dishes contained. This is an ingredient-label euphemism for monosodium glutamate (MSG)-basically, a cheap way to boost the perception of umami. The dishes all tasted better on the first bite-when you might be tempted to think, Hey, not half bad!-than on the second or third, when those words would be unlikely to cross your mind. There is a short half-life to the taste of a frozen dinner, which I would peg somewhere around bite number three, after which the whole experience rapidly deteriorates.

Oh, but wait: I've skipped over the cooking, or not cooking, segment of our meal. Which you probably a.s.sumed, as I certainly did, would be nominal, and so not worth going into in this account. That is, after all, the reason people buy these frozen dinners in the first place, isn't it? Well, if it is they're sorely mistaken, because it took nearly an hour to get our entrees on the table. For one thing, you could only microwave one of them at a time, and we had four to defrost and heat, not counting the molten frozen cookie. Also, one of the packages warned that we would not get optimal results in the microwave: The various stages that made up the frozen brown rocket of onion soup would meld together pointlessly in the microwave. If we wanted the gratinee effect promised on the package, then we had to bake it in the oven (at 350F) for forty minutes. I could make onion soup from scratch in forty minutes!

Isaac didn't want to wait that long, so we ended up taking turns standing in front of the microwave. Is there any more futile, soul-irradiating experience than standing before the little window on a microwave oven watching the carousel slowly revolve your frozen block of dinner? Time spent this way might be easier than cooking, but it is not enjoyable and surely not enn.o.bling. It is to feel spiritually unemployed, useless to self and humanity.

Anyway, as soon as the first dish was hot, we swapped it out for the second, but by the time the fourth entree was hot enough to eat, the first one had gotten cold and needed re-nuking. Isaac finally asked permission to start eating his onion soup before it got cold again. The advent of the microwave has not been a boon to table manners. He was already down to the bottom of his bowl when Judith's lasagna emerged from the oven.

Microwave Night turned out to be one of the most disjointed family dinners we have had since Isaac was a toddler. The three of us never quite got to sit down at the table all at once. The best we could manage was to overlap for several minutes at a time, since one or another of us was constantly having to get up to check the microwave or the stovetop (where Isaac had moved his stir-fry after the microwave got backed up). All told, the meal took a total of thirty-seven minutes to defrost and heat up (not counting reheating), easily enough time to make a respectable homemade dinner. It made me think Harry Balzer might be right to attribute the triumph of this kind of eating to laziness and a lack of skills or confidence, or a desire to eat lots of different things, rather than to a genuine lack of time. That we hadn't saved much of at all.

The fact that each of us was eating something different completely altered the experience of (speaking loosely) eating together. Beginning in the supermarket, the food industry had cleverly segmented us, by marketing a different kind of food to each demographic in the household (if I may so refer to my family), the better to sell us more of it. Individualism is always good for sales, sharing much less so. But the segmentation continued through the serial microwaving and the unsynchronized eating. At the table, we were each preoccupied with our own entree, making sure it was hot and trying to decide how successfully it simulated the dish it purported to be and if we really liked it. Very little about this meal was shared; the single-serving portions served to disconnect us from one another, nearly as much as from the origins of this food, which, beyond the familiar logos, we could only guess at. Microwave Night was a notably individualistic experience, marked by centrifugal energies, a certain opaqueness, and, after it was all over, a remarkable quant.i.ty of trash. It was, in other words, a lot like modern life.

I thought about that at dinner the following night, when we sat down together to eat one of the pot dishes I'd made the previous Sunday. Duck, which I had braised following Samin's recipe, with red wine and sweet spices in my new terra-cotta pot. Since the dish had been in the fridge since Sunday, it was easy to skim off the fat before putting the pot in the oven to reheat. By the time the sweet smells of allspice, juniper, and clove began to fill the house, Isaac and Judith had gravitated to the kitchen; I never had to call them to dinner. I brought the pot out to the table, and began serving everyone from it.

The energies working on the three of us at the dinner table this evening were the precise opposite of the ones that had been loosed in the house on Microwave Night. The hot, fragrant ca.s.serole itself exerted a gravitational force, gathering us around it like a miniature hearth. It was no big deal, really, a family sharing a meal from a common pot on a weeknight, and yet at a time when so many of the forces working on a household are so individualistic and centrifugal-the screens, the consumer goods, the single-serving portions-it's a wonder such a meal ever happens anymore. It certainly doesn't have to, now that there are easier ways to feed a family.

There's something about a slow-cooked dish that militates against eating it quickly, and we took our time with dinner. Isaac told us about his day; we told him about ours. For the first time all day, it felt like we were all on the same page, and though it would be overstating things to credit that feeling entirely to the delicious braise, it would also be wrong to think that eating the same thing from the same pot, this weeknight communion of the ca.s.serole, had nothing to do with it, either. Afterward, when I lifted the lid from the pot, I was glad to see there would be leftovers for lunch.

Part III

AIRTHE EDUCATION OF AN AMATEUR BAKER

”There is not a thing that is more positive than bread.”

-Fyodor Dostoevsky

”Bread is older than man.”

-old Albanian saying

I.

A Great White Loaf

One way to think about bread-and there are so many: as food or Food, matter and Spirit, commonplace, communion, metaphor, and medium (of exchange, transformation, sociality, etc.)-is simply this: as an ingenious technology for improving the flavor, digestibility, and nutritional value of gra.s.s. True, the technology doesn't work for all gra.s.ses, mainly just wheat, and it really only works for the seeds of that particular gra.s.s, not the leaves or stems. So it's not quite as ingenious as the ruminant's system for processing gra.s.s. The cow carries around a whole other stomach for the sole purpose of fermenting all parts of all kinds of gra.s.s into usable food energy. Our single stomach can do no such thing, but when, about six thousand years ago, we learned how to leaven bread, we joined the gra.s.s eaters of the world in earnest, much to the benefit of our species (not to mention the gra.s.ses).

Ruminant or human, the advantages of being able to eat gra.s.s are many. Gra.s.ses occupy some two-thirds of the planet's landma.s.s and, among plants, are especially good at collecting solar energy and transforming it into bioma.s.s-”primary productivity,” in the ecologist's jargon. Before we learned to eat gra.s.s directly, we availed ourselves of its energy by eating the ruminants that could eat gra.s.s or, sometimes, the predators that ate them. Yet second- or third-hand is a wasteful way to eat gra.s.s. Only about 10 percent of the energy consumed by an animal pa.s.ses up the food chain to an eater of that animal. (Among other things, a lot of that energy is ”wasted” by the animal in trying to avoid being eaten.) In fact, for every step up a food chain (or ”trophic pyramid”), 90 percent of the food energy is lost, which is why big predators are so much more rare than ruminants, which in turn are so much more rare than blades of gra.s.s.

Even as Paleolithic hunters we ate whatever gra.s.s seeds we could gather, but figuring out a way to consistently get enough of the little things to make a staple meal represented a momentous development for our species. (It may also have been an obligatory development, since we were running out of gra.s.s eaters to hunt.) Learning how to eat lower on the food chain gave us access to more solar energy than ever before, and by doing so allowed us to create many more humans than would otherwise exist. Agriculture-which consists mainly of growing edible gra.s.ses like wheat, corn, and rice-is our term for this revolutionary new approach to getting food from the soil and the sun.