Eating as I Go: Scenes from America and Abroad

EPILOGUE: MY BOOK OF MAPS

247 Leonia,฀New฀Jersey,฀August฀2005 Four months ago, in South Africa, I had a dream about this book. When I awoke, I wrote in my notebook: Once again I am a graduate student at Yale. In a cramped, gloomy office, one of my professors is admonishing me to pay attention to the reading list. You’ll have four chances to prove yourself, he says. Out in the corridor, I hear that a poetry reading is about to begin atYale Chapel. Everyone in American studies will be there. After a brief hesitation, I head off in the direction of the chapel. Suddenly the scene changes. I’m driving a car, which turns into an open truck. The steering wheel is high above my head. I strain as I stretch upward, just barely grasping the wheel. The truck lifts off the ground. I’m flying, fifteen feet over the city. I feel the wind at my back and the sun on my face. I’m not going to crash. My panic dissolves into exhilaration. In the final sequence of the dream, I’m on the ground again, in New Haven. I show the same unsympathetic professor a volume of street maps of Johannesburg—maps that are connected to my explorations of food and politics in that city and elsewhere. I tell him that the book is important for scholarship in American studies and that it illuminates my history as an American. “Irrelevant,” he says, dismissing the work—and dismissing me. I am furious. The guy is dead wrong. I know the significance of maps. Food does not appear in this dream of anxiety and feverish excitement. At Yale, more than four decades ago, eating and drinking were normal, life-sustaining (and sometimes life-enhancing) activities for students of American culture, but they were not subjects for serious study. Food was out of bounds for Americanists —as were women’s lives, sexuality, and the movies. High culture was our business . In the dream I avoid the lecture at the chapel, where poetry, history, and politics are worshipped along with God. I’m in flight, on another path, toward an unknown destination. I know as soon as I awaken that, in this dream of mine, flying is one stand-in D EPILOGUE:฀MY฀BOOK฀OF฀MAPS฀ EATING AS I GO 248 for eating as an approach to culture, and maps are another. Whether those in authority like it or not, I have taken hold of this supremely enticing subject. It not only grabs my attention as an observer and critic of American society but also helps to explain my life. Still, I am anxious. Willy-nilly, I have abandoned the familiar land route, and I can barely control my vehicle. The flying machine and the book of maps, the former unbounded and the latter very grounded, are the yin and yang of my education as an eater. Clearly, flying represents the emotional energy that drives my adventures in eating: the need to cut loose from home and (some) received traditions, to open myself to other people and worlds, and to experience shifts in my thinking and being. The flying machine, my comic dream of freedom, speaks to the restless, risk-taking, and unconventional side of the journey. Maps speak to the practical, tangible, and self-protective side of my history as an eater. I don’t skydive. I move around, picking and choosing my subjects among sites, ceremonies, cuisines, individual ingredients, and relationships. Maps illuminate the origins of my journey, some ordinary and unlikely directions I’ve taken, and connections along the route. With a map, I can retrace my steps when necessary . And I can prepare for potholes, blockades, bad visibility, and roads that lead nowhere. My book of maps points to lessons—in culture, history, and personal relations —offered by merchants and waiters and companions at the table.Taking my cues from others, I observe how food both separates people and brings them together . I scrutinize my own food baggage. I expose the tug-of-war between old habits and new perspectives; and I acknowledge the constraints of my class, culture , gender, and imagination. I use maps and make maps; they are my guide and the spine of my story. My book is finished now, but I have hardly exhausted my supply of maps. A group of Hudson Valley, New York, pickle makers, who are regulars at local farmers ’ markets, attract buyers from many ethnic groups. As I...