Knife fight: Part 2

The day after I talked to Rinpoche, I got back on a plane and pulled out my new issue of The New Yorker. It was the annual food issue. Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum. This is going to be good, I told myself. The New Yorker is the last print paragon of good taste, and food is me.

Ha.

First up was a report on what's happening to chili peppers. I knew what had happened: Americans spent the 70s and 80s breeding the life out of them. All those Tex-Mex aficionados turned out to be so Tex and not Mex, they didn't want sass from their jalapenos. They wanted them as dumbed down as they are, so breeders put the fire out, making supermarket chilies as bland as bell peppers. (In case you wanted to know why they are.)

Now, the New Yorker was telling me in a report titled Fire-Eaters, men are breeding chili peppers to soar off the Scoville hotness charts, higher and higher into the fiery stratosphere of molten lava volcano and nuclear meltdown hot three times the peak of the Scoville register. Hobbyists described as "essentially American, Australian and English guys" have zealously cross and cross bred plants to get the daredevil thrill of "being face-fucked by Satan" or "Hell in my mouth" from peppers named "ghost" (bhut jolokia), Armageddon and Naga Viper. It's all about safe near-death experience.

So there it is, what roils this cauldron of Samsara. When life itself goes gaga and becomes roller coaster dizzy or gets complicated by too much whether --which is what real life tends to do, people want their food dependably flat and bland. No challenges, no extremes because we have enough already. Just give us our daily mass produced safely predictable eats. But now that we've catered to this risk aversion, now that our have it your way consumer culture has made everything so dependable we've bred all uncertainty out of life, (you know: hedge funds, derivatives, franchises, sequels), bored beings are thrill seeking through risky food. Chiliheads rely on these new ghost and ghastly peppers for cheap, cowardly daredevilry. These guys are, scientific tests say, sensation seekers.

And in another report, so are out of control carnivores, men happy to eat whales, cod sperm, baby salmon, pigs' ears, duck hearts, insects and horses. "The less acceptable something is, the more delicious it seems," the author says. She used the words orgy, Caligula and savage. Why yes, of course, extreme eating. What's new?

For at least a decade, this orgiastic barbarity has been on media display as the sideshow to the loosened constraints on capitalism. Those Wall Street wonders who savaged the economy making their killing have been much publicized for brazenly feasting on whole spit roasted pigs, barbequed steers and foie gras in everything imaginable. Bacon in everything edible including ice cream. That's a lot of brutal killing, but I guess when you have no respect for some laws, you have no respect for others. Bye bye shame. And whales.

Sadly, the horrors of savage devouring aren't just on display in glossy magazines like The New Yorker. They're close to home. Once I got back from this trip, I was on the phone catching up with a childhood friend who lives in New York, has her own florist and thinks nothing of owning an alligator skin handbag if that's what the elite fashion statement of the moment is. This being November, the conversation inevitably turned to Thanksgiving and the mandatory banquet she usually prepares for her immediate family. "It's 20 this year," she moaned. "I've never cooked for that many."

As a caterer, I had, and for lots more to boot. On Thanksgiving when we welcomed those who had nowhere to go, sometimes I hosted 35. "Two small turkeys are better than one of those terrible big ones," the cooking instructor in me blurted. "More juice, more parts, more different stuffings, less cooking time."

"I know," she sighed, "but I hate dark meat. My family doesn't like it either. So I've ordered two turkey breasts, two large breasts. And my butcher assured me I can have all the giblets I want to still make my gravy."

So there you have it: a turkey's breast capable of feeding at least ten people. Barbaric sadists create turkeys with breasts so big the pitiful bird cannot stand up or move at all. A living creature savagely imprisoned so people don't have to eat wings or thighs, parts that say "live animal here."

Sometimes, the hard earned awareness eked out of two and a half decades of Dharma practice overwhelms me with despair. I want to ask: what are people thinking? but I know they aren't thinking. They are totally unaware of what they are doing, text examples of the ignorance that creates Samsara.

But maybe all is not lost. Yesterday my young Spanish friend Sonia came by to introduce me to the love of her life, a fellow Spaniard who has become an increasingly publicized four-star chef. He's about to open a restaurant in LA. "What will you cook?" I said. "All sorts of fancy paellas?"

"No," he said. "I'm done with fancy. I'm going to serve what I love the most. I'm going to present simple Spanish home cooking with all the flare I can. It's tradition too good to change."

Ha!

~Sandy Garson "Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
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