I'm a Stranger Here Myself Read Free Page B

the list again, so I ask for the only one I can remember, which I am able to remember only because it sounded so awful—Gruyère and goat’s milk vinaigrette or something. Lately I have hit on the expedient of saying: “I’ll have whichever one is pink and doesn’t smell like the bottom of a gym bag.” They can usually relate to that, I find.
    In fancy restaurants it is even worse because the server has to take you through the evening’s specials, which are described with a sumptuousness and panache that are seldom less than breathtaking and always incomprehensible. My wife and I went to a fancy restaurant in Vermont for our anniversary the other week and I swear I didn’t understand a single thing the waiter described to us.
    “Tonight,” he began with enthusiasm, “we have a crêpe galette of sea chortle and kelp in a rich
mal de mer
sauce, seasoned with disheveled herbs grown in our own herbarium. This is baked in an inverted Prussian helmet for seventeen minutes and four seconds precisely, then layered with steamed wattle and woozle leaves. Very delicious; very audacious. We are also offering this evening a double rack of Rio Ròcho cutlets, tenderized at your table by our own flamenco dancers, then baked in a clay
dong
for twenty-seven minutes under a lattice of guava peel and sun-ripened stucco. For vegetarians this evening we have a medley of forest floor sweet-meats gathered from our very own woodland dell. . . .”
    And so it goes for anything up to half an hour. My wife, who is more sophisticated than I, is not fazed by the ornate terminology. Her problem is trying to keep straight the bewilderment of options. She will listen carefully, then say: “I’m sorry, is it the squib that’s pan-seared and presented on a bed of organic spoletto?”
    “No, that’s the baked donkling,” says the serving person. “The squib comes as a quarter-cut hank, lightly rolled in payapaya, then tossed with oil of olay and calamine, and presented on a bed of chaff beans and snoose noodles.”
    I don’t know why she bothers because, apart from being much too complicated to take in, none of the dishes sounds like anything you would want to eat anyway, except maybe on a bet after drinking way too much.
    Now all this is of particular moment to me because I have just been reading the excellent
Diversity of Life
by the eminent Harvard naturalist Edward O. Wilson, in which he makes the startling and discordant assertion that the foods we in the Western world eat actually are not very adventurous at all.
    Wilson notes that of the thirty thousand species of edible plants on earth, only about twenty are eaten in any quantity. Of these, three species alone—wheat, corn, and rice—account for over half of what the temperate world shovels into its collective gullet. Of the three thousand fruits known to botany, all but about two dozen are essentially ignored. The situation with vegetables is a little better, but only a little.
    And why do we eat the few meager foods we do? Because, according to Wilson, those were the foods that were cultivated by our neolithic ancestors ten thousand or so years ago when they first got the hang of agriculture.
    The very same is true of husbandry. The animals we raise for food today are not eaten because they are especially nutritious or delectable but because they were the ones first domesticated in the Stone Age.
    In other words, in dietary terms we are veritable troglodytes (which, speaking personally, is all right by me). I think this explains a lot, not least my expanding sense of dismay as the waiter bombarded us with ecstatic descriptions of roulades, ratatouilles, empanadas, langostinos, tagliolinis, confits, filos, quenelles, and goodness knows what else.
    “Just bring me something that’s been clubbed,” I wanted to say, but of course I held my tongue.
    Eventually, he concluded his presentation with what sounded to me like “an oven-baked
futilité
of pumpkin rind and