Stirring It Up with Molly Ivins Read Free

minds behind almost all of Dallas’s significant voting rights, housing, and school desegregation cases starting in the 1970s and continuing through the 1980s and well into the 1990s. It’s worth noting that their son, Edward IV, a graduate of Baylor University Law School, is following in their footsteps with a plaintiff’s litigation practice, including civil rights. Such are the people Molly called “friends.”
    With those initial introductions, more followed. Through the Cloutmans I met Linda and Steve Anderson, who could always be counted on to have fine food and fabulous gatherings at their Dallas home. In addition to being an attorney, Steve was an excellent cook and Linda was an exuberant hostess. Steve and Linda have since gone their separate ways, but Molly spoke often and fondly of Steve’s paella and Linda’s hospitality. Steve’s sister, Austin artist Courtney Anderson, became a confidante and one of Molly’s closest friends.
    When Molly and I weren’t railing against some aspect of social injustice, we talked about food, from farming and ranching to organics and free trade to the joys of foie gras, vichyssoise, and red beans and rice, prompting a detour to discussing foods that provoke flatulent responses from the average digestivesystem and thereby providing irrefutable proof that Molly was as capable of lowbrow conversation as the next ten-year-old. She could hold forth on almost anything, and it seemed that the more obtuse the subject matter, the more she relished it, although there was nothing obtuse about her love of pork—be it ribs, chops, roast, or tenderloin.
    We talked about food as memory, authoritatively and with no scientific data whatsoever, placing the blame for family breakdowns squarely on the fact that so few families sit down and eat together anymore. We shared remembrances of little details, like when we learned how to set the table, how brothers and sisters took turns screwing up the placement of knife on the right and fork on the left, and how nobody ever wanted to load or empty the dishwasher despite the fact that it relieved us of having to wash dishes by hand.
    She called me a liar when I told her about
The White Trash Cookbook
and how I owned both volumes and had actually found a recipe for an onion sandwich that I made and loved. My father loved them too: thin-sliced Bermuda onion, Miracle Whip (
not
mayonnaise), and lots of black pepper between two slices of Wonder Bread constitute heaven on a plate. You could gussy it up with a slice or two of tomato, but the basics worked just fine, thank you very much. For some reason this prompted a segue into why Americans ate so much bad food. In the mid-1990s she saw food issues as a neglected component of a serious social narrative. By then I had moved from editing to reporting to being a food writer. I began to focus more on food beyond its value as joy and sustenance, trends and recipes. I thought more about how corporate marketing foisted food-like substances on us, how we fell for it, and how the more we fell for it and the more sedentary we were, the fatter and sicker we got. If you wanted to elicit one of those wonderful Molly sneers, all you had to do was mention Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill, or Monsanto—especially insanely litigious Monsanto.
    How I wished she could have lived to meet Robyn O’Brien, the feisty writer, born in Texas but living in Colorado. She wrote a remarkable book called
Unhealthy Truths
, about how additives and chemicals and hormones in livestock have combined to promulgate allergies and mysterious ailments in children. Like Molly, she came from well-heeled Houston social stock; like Molly, she could rattle off the ironic ways in which corporate agriculture is not necessarily food-friendly and how Frankenfoods are making us fat and sick.
    Molly, who stood an inch or so over six feet, fought an often losing battle with her weight. I had long since abandoned my