Somewhere…somehow, it was time to return to food roots; to the heritage. There was a season for fruits and vegetables…the random Indian meal…the nod to Korea or the wink at Turkey and the organic movement and the war against plastic food containers and the dilemma of bottled water versus tap. All very tiresome in the end; back to beginnings.
Why crave potatoes or bread and butter at 11 in the evening and not pineapple? Why sod and not sand? Why does the smell of lush marinating pot roast call one back to the table, to the Sunday meals in the Dakotas; the oily cinnamon sun buckle and the orange chocolate doughnut…the boiled coffee with the tinny aftertaste of cooking metal? There is something latent in these smells…some seething memory waiting to birthe…the forgotten peasant, the sorrowing immigrant, the boy with no shoes and the saving of bits and pieces of thread; the sweat, the pain and the simplicity.
It all comes out in the food. Every smell is a link to more than a hundred years gone by. Eat a potato, redeem the memory. Drink black boiled coffee, receive the courage to continue. Buttered toast cures illness and apathy.
Bid farewell to affluence for the moment; this space we live in now with time to kill in leisure until there is no more time to fill. Remember the days of small education and endless work, the careful, prayerful saving of paper, of threads, of food. If they can’t be remembered, then pick up your shovel and dig. And if digging fails, then eat a potato late at night, save a paper bag and consider these things…
690 Saint Paul 