The Evolved Eater

by Nick Taranto

  Susan fought a long, hard battle against breast cancer, but in 1996, four years after her diagnosis, the cancer won. We were as prepared for Susan’s death as you can be, but when she finally lost her fight, we were all devastated. Our families stuck together like magnets. We were raised Jewish, and they were raised Catholic, but that didn’t matter. We spent most holidays and school vacations together. My parents even arranged for the boys to be in the same class at school and on the same soccer team.

  The week before Labor Day in 1998, my family spent ten days at the beach on Long Island with the Merollas. It was the tail end of summer, the last big hurrah before the school year, and we had a great time. We went Jet-Skiing and ate mozzarella sticks at a crummy diner. After the holiday week, we all returned, sluggish and sunburned, reluctantly ready for the new school year. I was moving to a new school for ninth grade, and my mind was occupied with thoughts of what high school girls looked like.

  The call came on a sunny Saturday morning. My mom answered the phone. It was one of the Merolla boys, and he was scared. My mom rushed out of the house immediately, still in her bathrobe, and sprinted over to the Merollas’. Because she’s a doctor, she immediately understood Joe was dying.

  By the time the ambulance got there, he was gone.

  The only relatives the Merollas had were family in Massachusetts and an older grandmother in Brooklyn, and for the kids to move to either place would have caused major tumult. They would have had to change schools and move to a completely new community, and they had already been through so much.

  Instead, my parents just looked at each other and then looked at the kids and said, “You’ll come live with us.”

  Within a matter of days, my parents worked with an extraordinary lawyer to make everything happen, becoming the official guardians. The members of the Merollas’ extended family were incredibly supportive; they knew the kids were already very close to our family and that in some ways, blending the two families together was the most natural thing in the world.

  Two weeks later, all three Merolla kids moved into our house, and overnight we went from being a family of six to a family of nine. We had become a modern-day Brady Bunch.

  Within a few weeks, it felt like the Merollas had always been there. We looked kind of similar, and we really did act like brothers and sisters. I went from having three to six siblings in an instant; the only difference was that half of them were biologically related to me and the other half weren’t. We’d go on family vacations to Arizona to visit my grandparents, and when we’d roll into the hotel, everybody would stare at our huge family—seven noisy kids, ranging in age from five to sixteen. Sometimes we’d do weird stuff like grab each other’s butts just to screw with people. We deployed a potent combination of humor and love to overcome the tragedy and transition that deeply affected all nine of us.

  Humor can be a very powerful tool for building culture and camaraderie, especially when times are tough.

  Make Family Meals a Mandate

  Meanwhile, my mom put her career on hold for four years so she could be a stay-at-home mom, caring for the kids and holding the family together. Both my parents did everything in their power to make sure life went on normally—at least as normal as life would ever be after tragedy. We had exploded from six to nine overnight, and that brought with it a whole new set of changes and challenges. My parents understood that we needed to gather together, and one place we did that was the same place families had been gathering together for millennia: the kitchen table.

  Meals were an extremely important part of our lives. Sitting down at the table, eating well, eating together—these were the staples of our family, and they were nonnegotiable. Never was that truer than when we’d gather around the table for Shabbat dinner, the special meals Jewish families have on Friday nights.

  My siblings and I were raised Jewish, but we weren’t that observant. We were the sort of Jews who’d go to temple on the high holidays. But every Friday night we would say prayers at home and light candles for Shabbat. My mom would serve roasted chicken and challah, delicious braided bread, and we’d say a blessing over the candles, bread, and wine. We’d also pass around a tzedakah, or charity box, and each of us would put in a couple of coins. It was more symbolic than anything, a way to give back to those who were less fortunate.

  For as long as I can remember, Shabbat was a mandate in our family. Even in high school when we were dying to go out with our friends on the weekends, my mom expected us to be home for dinner Friday night. We were all scattered in every which direction, but we’d still come together once a week no matter what else was going on in all our lives. It’s been a special thing in our family for as long as I can remember. Even once we all started going off to college, the rule was that if you were in town, you had to be butt in chair.

  For my mom, it was important that food be about more than just nutrition and physical sustenance. When I was a kid, a lot of data came out about how kids from families who have meals together every night grow up to be happier and more successful later in life. As a pediatrician, my mom was very attuned to this data, and after the Merolla kids moved in with us, it became all the more important to give all seven of her kids a strong foundation from which to build.

  Family meals had always been special, but from that point on, they became an extremely important part of our lives.

  My mom wanted us to love food, love shopping for fresh ingredients, cooking, and eating together. The way she saw it, our big home-cooked meals were the glue holding the family together. And it was a lot of glue. Seven growing children meant seven hungry mouths to feed. She cooked three full chickens every Friday afternoon for Shabbat.

  Keep in mind that a couple of years later, my mom had four teenage boys in the house at the same time. We were all superactive, involved in different kinds of sports and after-school activities, so we were ravenous. We would stuff our faces every morning before school and then get home at night and devour anything we could find in the house. My dad did a ton of grilling on the weekends—we all loved a good steak. It probably would have saved money in the long run if my parents had just invested in their own herd of cattle.

  We had a commercial freezer in the basement, the kind you see at a restaurant where the lid opens on top, and we had mountains of things stocked in there. The house was a central hub; it was filled with kids constantly. It was packed with boisterous activity and people eating anything and everything they could find. Oftentimes we had at least ten people for dinner—seven kids, two parents, and the inevitable friend one of us invited over, or a friend who still hadn’t been picked up from practice. “Once you’re at ten, what’s one or two more?” my dad used to say. He would always come home with a couple of gallons of milk. “You didn’t have to call and check,” he says.

  I’m lucky because my mom was a very good (and creative) cook, and my dad was more than passable himself. He cooked the way his mother in Istanbul had cooked before him—a pinch of this, a bit of that, hardly ever referring to a cookbook. As a family, we didn’t just grab food and then run out the door to do something else. My dad always made sure napkins and silverware were set for every meal. Eating was worth stopping and sitting down for. It wasn’t just an activity—it was a central activity that served as a centerpiece of family life.

  But I’ll be honest: My brothers and sisters spent far more time in the kitchen than I did, slicing and dicing, having conversations with my mom while doing food prep. You know how there are some kids who wander over to the stove when their mom or dad is cooking and say, “Gee, what’s that yellow stuff? Is that saffron?” I was not that kid. (I understand it’s kind of ironic given what I do today. In our office, I now wander over and ask questions and steal bites of deliciousness and get yelled at by our culinary team for ruining our photo shoots.)

  I was excellent at eating food, but I wasn’t particularly interested in learning how to prepare it. In high school, I was more interested in other things, like girls and getti
ng in trouble—preferably at the same time.

  Toward the end of high school, the low-carb diet craze started. I had an obese buddy who used Atkins as an excuse to eat nothing but bacon for an entire month. He ended up breaking out in horrendous acne and reverted to his standard foot-long meatball Parmesan sub. I was a big dude—six foot two and two hundred pounds by the time I was a high school freshman—and I was briefly swept up in the Atkins craze myself. I spent a few weeks subsisting on cans of tuna with a glob of spicy mustard on top. My strict tuna diet helped me shred my tummy—in addition to hours in the gym every day—but I perpetually smelled like tuna. It was pretty gross.

  I threw myself at Atkins the same way I threw myself at anything. After watching what had happened to my friends’ parents, I lived every minute like it was my last. My awareness of life’s one-way march led me to push myself to live and experience life at warp speed. If I was only here for a very finite chunk of time, I had to cram everything possible into my living days and nights. After high school, I charged full-force into the future. Big challenges, big missions, and moving fast would come to define my life.

  Mountain Man

  In college, I found that I was like a shark—as long as I constantly kept moving forward, I survived. Laps around the pond outside my dorm turned into running thirty, then forty, then fifty or more miles at a time. I’d stuff my backpack full of Clif Bars, PowerGels, cookies, and whatever else I could get my hands on and jump onto my motorcycle. Then I’d drive up from Hanover on the Vermont border straight into the White Mountains in New Hampshire, where I would run for six, eight, ten, sometimes even fifteen hours at a time. I was a total wild man. Alone in the mountains for hours on end, I wouldn’t even pack water—I’d just drink out of streams whenever I could find them. I’d always hated being the chubby, big kid, and now, for the first time in my life, I could eat whatever I wanted. I’d scarf down thousands of calories over the course of a day running forty, fifty, and eventually over eighty miles at a time through the mountains.

  Part of what drew me to running those crazy distances was that I could stuff my face and burn it all off. My running allowed me to unleash my inner fat kid, the one who wished he could have eaten that whole Hefty bag of Halloween candy. I felt like I had found the loophole, a way to eat whatever I wanted while also feeling incredibly alive. In retrospect, I realize that I was literally and figuratively trying to outrun both my adolescent inner demons and my bad eating habits.

  In the long term, it’s impossible to outrun an unhealthy relationship with food.

  Going to Extremes to Find Myself

  I was going to be the youngest person to ski to the North Pole. It was a totally wacky scheme I’d cooked up, the kind people have at 3:00 A.M. when they can’t sleep, and then the next morning, in the cold light of day, they realize it was totally nuts. But for me, the cold light of day did not have a sobering effect.

  If people aren’t making fun of your dreams, your dreams might not be big enough.

  I spent spring break my sophomore year in the Canadian Arctic doing a ten-day polar-exploration training session to prepare myself for my expedition. I found a retired polar explorer named Paul Landry who agreed to teach me the basics: polar bear protection, how to pack and pull a sled over ice, how to cook and camp when it’s negative forty degrees. I drove up from Dartmouth to Montreal, slept in my car, and then flew four hours north to get to Iqaluit, the capital city of Nunavut. Nunavut is the biggest territory in Canada, the size of all of Western Europe combined—and most people have never even heard of it.

  And here I was—in the middle of Iqaluit, this frigid little city with a population of fewer than seven thousand people. The whole city is under ice nine months of the year, and when I got there in March, the temperature had not risen above zero in six months. There’s not much in town, and all the buildings are specially constructed to withstand high winds and ultracold temperatures. There’s one supermarket and one McDonald’s, both tucked into special buildings because of the extreme cold.

  There wasn’t a lot going on in Iqaluit, but there was one little pub. They stopped serving beer after 8:00 P.M. since they didn’t want people coming in and getting drunk and dying outside in the cold. But on my first day in the city, Paul took me to the pub and we had beer and a dish called muktuk—whale blubber stew.

  If you think eating whale blubber means eating fat, you are correct. It was flaccid and rubbery. Not much taste. Imagine chewing on a tire made out of balloons and flavorless salmon skin. It was definitely not delicious. But the Inuit had to eat fatty, tasteless provisions like muktuk in order to survive because it was so freaking cold.

  “Because we are essentially living inside of a freezer, our bodies are burning an insane number of calories just to stay warm,” Paul explained to me. “The more you can eat, the better your chances of survival.”

  It was basically “muktuk or freeze to death.” I chose muktuk.

  I spent the rest of my time out on the ice. I camped next to Paul’s sled dogs and fell asleep to the Arctic Ocean creaking and cracking beneath my head.

  Toward the end of the camp, Paul spent a day teaching me how to cross open stretches of water. The best time of year to make a bid from Canada to the North Pole is the spring, when at night it’s negative forty instead of negative one hundred. The downside is that the ice starts to melt, and you have to cross open stretches of slushy black water.

  Paul showed me the technique, which involved a graceful balancing from ice blob to ice blob. When it was my turn, I took three steps, slipped, and fell into the Arctic Ocean up to my neck. It was negative twenty-five degrees outside.

  Paul acted quickly. He pulled me out of the ocean, and as I felt the water begin to crystallize all over my body, he had me roll on the ice, strip off all my clothes, and run in circles to stay warm while he threw a tent up and fired on the stove. I spent the rest of the day thawing out in the tent, feeling enormously lucky things had turned out okay. After that harrowing incident, I realized that I wanted my life to be about more than freezing to death alone at the North Pole.

  I decided that skiing to the North Pole was my version of proving myself to the world, but I wasn’t even remotely sure what I was trying to prove. I wanted to have an impact on the world. I wanted to be a part of something bigger than myself and improve people’s lives.

  My time training in the Arctic taught me that you don’t need millions of dollars or years of instruction to turn your dreams into reality—you just need the right dream and enough passion to pressure test it against reality.

  To Make Impact, Make Profit

  After I graduated from Dartmouth in 2006, the U.S. government paid for me to move to East Java, Indonesia. I lived in Madiun, a small city where my home base was a local teacher’s house. From my front porch, I had views of the sun setting over a rice paddy with a dormant volcano on the horizon. I paid fifty dollars per month for three meals per day, house cleaning, and all the locally harvested and roasted Javanese coffee I could stomach. I was thrown into a totally foreign culture where the sounds, flavors, and traditions were a daily exercise in adaptation.

  In theory, I was there to teach English part-time at a local school. In practice, between Ramadan and a seemingly endless supply of other holidays, I ended up teaching only a few hours per week. With my spare time, I teamed up with a group of local community organizers, and we started a microfinance nonprofit together. The guys that I worked with already had nonprofit status, and we folded our microfinance institution into their organization, Konsorsium Monitoring dan Pemberdayaan Institusi Publik (KOMPIP). These guys were hard-core Democracy rights advocates, and they had weathered the overthrow of the Suharto regime in the late 1990s. When I first met Akbar, the head of KOMPIP, he invited me into his one-room, tin-roof home that he shared with his wife and young son. We shared a meal of red rice, sautéed vegetables, fried tempeh, and a spicy Javanese peanut sauce called pecel. Sushi and Chinese takeout had been the extent of my Asian foo
d education growing up, and the textures, spices, and flavors in Java expanded my mental horizons of what was possible for food. We slept on the cement floor on top of rattan mats and shared steaming cups of local coffee in the morning. They were fascinated with this big, goofy, white American guy, and they were excited to put my microfinance theories into practice.

  I had done research on microfinance as part of my honors thesis. The basic concept was giving small loans (under a hundred dollars in most cases) to people who otherwise couldn’t access loans from banks or credit cards. Most of the loans were used by laborers to buy brick-making machines or by farmers to buy seeds or tools for their plots. In place of using traditional collateral (like a house or car), we used the relationships within the community. We found that our clients would beg, borrow, and steal before committing the cultural faux pas of failing to repay a loan.

  Over the course of the next year, I learned how a small, agile, creative kind of enterprise could make a big difference where large, more established organizations were unable or unwilling to meet consumer demand.

  Overall, I saw how small efforts on a small scale could make a difference in individuals’ lives. Following an earthquake in the area, one of our clients broke her leg. The bone broke through the skin, and with no insurance or savings to pay for a hospital visit, weeks later, the area between her knee and ankle was festering and gruesome. Through KOMPIP, she was able to take out a loan, pay for surgery, and return to work in a few months. Otherwise, she most likely would have been crippled for life and indefinitely dependent on the goodwill of her neighbors.

  I had some exciting adventures while I was living in Indonesia, traveling to the outer islands like Mentawai, Sumba, and Lombok. Microfinance was exciting, too—or at least it had the potential to be.