| >> |
05/10/11(Tue)04:16 No.2799621
File1305015365.gif-(32 KB, 249x248, jeff5.gif)
 "My first impulse was to fall upon the cook," wrote Edmondo de
Amicis, a nineteenth-century traveler to Morocco. "In an instant I
understood perfectly how a race who ate such food must necessarily
believe in another God and hold essentially different views of
human life from our own. . . . There was a suggestion of soap, wax,
pomatum, of unguents, dyes, cosmetics; of everything, in short,
most unsuited to enter a human mouth."
This is precisely how I felt about a whole range of foods, particularly
desserts in Indian restaurants, until 1989, the year that I,
then a lawyer, was appointed food critic of Vogue magazine. As I
considered the awesome responsibilities of my new post, I grew
morose. For I, like everybody I knew, suffered from a set of powerful,
arbitrary, and debilitating attractions and aversions at mealtime.
I feared that I could be no more objective than an art critic
who detests the color yellow or suffers from red-green color blindness.
At the time I was friendly with a respected and powerful editor
of cookbooks who grew so nauseated by the flavor of cilantro that
she brought a pair of tweezers to Mexican and Indian restaurants
and pinched out every last scrap of it before she would take
a bite. Imagine the dozens of potential Julia Childs and M. F. K.
Fishers whose books she peevishly rejected, whose careers she
snuffed in their infancy! I vowed not to follow in her footsteps.
Suddenly, intense food preferences, whether phobias or cravings,
struck me as the most serious of all personal limitations.
That very day I sketched out a Six-Step Program to liberate my
palate and my soul. No smells or tastes are innately repulsive, I
assured myself, and what's learned can be forgot. |
