Anything That Moves

by Dana Goodyear

  • • •

  In the two days before The Jungle was published, Harvey W. Wiley, flanked by assistants carrying what The New York Times described as “numerous multi-colored bottles, which contain poisonous substances of various kinds,” testified before a congressional committee on behalf of the latest pure-food bill. When the congressmen asked him about naturally occurring instances of the additives he tested—the benzoic acid inherent in cranberries, for instance—he laid out a personal philosophy of food and culture. “Assuming that the food of man, as prepared by the Creator and modified by the cook, is the normal food of man, any change in the food which adds a burden to any of the organs or any change which diminishes their normal functional activity, must be hurtful.”

  With the momentum generated by The Jungle, the Pure Food and Drugs Act, also known as “Dr. Wiley’s Law,” passed, on the same day as the Meat Inspection Act, which required pre- and postmortem inspection of animals, as well as inspection of all meat products, with special attention given to the rendering process. Together, the laws gave broad new responsibilities to the Department of Agriculture and began to establish an American standard for edibility. Dr. Wiley’s Law made it a crime to adulterate or misbrand any food or drug sold in the country. Food was considered adulterated “if it contain any added poisonous or other added deleterious ingredient which may render such article injurious to health,” and misbranded if it was deceptively labeled, not in its original container, or failed to disclose certain ingredients, including cocaine, heroin, and cannabis. The Bureau of Chemistry, guided by Wiley, endorsed old-fashioned smoke, salt, vinegar, and sugar, while coming out against chemical preservatives. Food Inspection Decision 76, the first ruling from the USDA after the passage of Dr. Wiley’s Law, banned borax.

  Eventually, Wiley’s influence diminished—he made the mistake of condemning saccharine in front of Roosevelt, whose doctor administered it to him daily—but he continued to decry preservatives. “[M]odern housewives are veritable Lucrezia Borgias, handing out poison from the ice box, from the broiler and the skillet, and the little tins of dinner she buys when breathlessly rushing home after her exciting bridge games at the club,” he said. “The average ice box is a charnel house, which not only holds death, but spreads it.” His obsession with labeling, too, was unallayed. Toward the end of his career in government, he sued Coca-Cola—he was anticaffeine—because although the drink no longer contained cocaine, its name suggested otherwise.

  • • •

  What is normal when it comes to what people eat? When a congressman pressed the point with Wiley, saying, “Who is to define normal food; there is a great difference of opinion about that,” Wiley, the first gatekeeper of the American food supply, simply said, “I will admit that.” To him, normal was the food of his rural Midwestern childhood. In 1907, he published “Foods and their Adulteration,” a reference book based on his Poison Squad work, in which he denounced the “sophistication of food articles” as a crime against humanity. Intended for the ambitious housewife, the book outlines chemistry experiments that can be performed at home to detect the presence of unwanted additives and preservatives. But it is also a work of taxonomy, reflecting the cultural biases of the United States in that moment. Under the heading “Animals Whose Flesh Is Edible,” he acknowledges that every animal on the planet has at one time or another been food for someone, before stating that “in a civilized community, however, except in times of disaster and dire necessity, certain classes of animals only furnish the principal meat food.” He limited the list of civilized proteins to cattle, sheep, and swine. Goat flesh was rarely eaten, he wrote, “and horse meat scarcely at all.”

  Wiley insisted that he wasn’t trying to tell Americans what to put in their mouths. “It is not for me to tell my neighbor what he shall eat,” he said once. “Anything under heaven that I may be pleased to do I want the privilege of doing, even if it is eating limburger cheese.” But he represented an era determined to codify our way of eating. The prescriptive attitude and the drive toward conformity were general. One of Wiley’s supporters in calling for a ban on chemical preservatives was a Chicago magazine with an upper-middle-class readership called What to Eat. In 1906, the year of the Pure Food and Drugs Act, it relaunched under the no less sweeping but more official-sounding title, National Food.

  The Bureau of Chemistry eventually split off from the USDA and became the Food and Drug Administration. It is responsible for policing the food supply, with the exception of meat and eggs, which are under USDA jurisdiction. “We do the cheese pizzas, USDA does the pepperoni,” an FDA historian told me. Wiley wanted to return food to its natural state, and the food system to its earlier intimacy. But since his time, the sophistication of food articles has accelerated in ways he could never have imagined. The aversion to the industrialized food system that coalesced with Sinclair’s novel did not lead to the system’s dismantling but to its fortification, and the safety net designed to guarantee food purity is now, to some, an emblem of food corruption.

  The deeper into the foodie world I ate, the more aware I became of its reactionary tilt. Though the public has embraced it as a mainstream hobby, foodie-ism is a counterculture. Its shared values are a love of the special, sub rosa, small-batch, and handmade and a loathing of homogeneity, mass production, and uniformity. Among foodies, the FDA, the USDA, and the local health department are often viewed as misguided. One need look no further, foodies say, than the slop sanctioned by the government—meat treated with antimicrobials, hormones, and antibiotics; plants grown from genetically modified seeds—to see why regulations should be ignored. For instance, the USDA approved a process called “pH enhancement,” whereby beef trimmings are exposed to food-grade ammonia gas to kill pathogens (primarily E. coli O157:H7), resulting in a product called Lean Finely Textured Beef (LFTB), which gets mixed with ground beef. Not only has USDA approved the process, but it also distributes ground beef containing LFTB—which goes by the nickname “pink slime”—through the school-lunch program.

  In foodies’ disdain for the rules, there is a note of snobbery: What could the feds possibly tell them about food? “The regulations are designed for larger-scale businesses, not for small-scale producers,” Sarah Weiner, the founder of the Good Food Awards, told me. Her organization honors “tasty, authentic, responsible” traditional foods like pickles, preserves, and charcuterie. “It makes it really hard to have a food culture.”

  In 2011, the Food Safety Modernization Act, the most significant revision of federal pure-foods regulation in decades, was signed into law. A response to a rash of food outbreaks that killed dozens of people across the country—salmonella in peanut butter, E. coli in spinach, listeria in cantaloupe—it gives the government recall powers and sets standards for safe production and handling of fruits and vegetables, even for small businesses. Some worry that it will mean the end of family farms and farmers markets, or at least prove onerous to them. In an interview with Mother Jones, the Portland chef Naomi Pomeroy encapsulated the frustration. “The only reason that we even need to worry about food safety is because large companies and corporations have ruined our food supply,” she said.

  The intellectual heirs of Wiley’s pure-foodists, ironically, are the very same people trying to shield their ways of eating from the purview of regulators. “The reason there’s a food-rights movement is because more and more people are afraid of the food that’s available in the public system,” David Gumpert, who blogs at The Complete Patient, said. “They want to be able to access their food privately.” Stranger still, the movement’s most prominent political supporter is the libertarian former congressman Ron Paul, whose 2011 Family Cookbook opens with a recipe that calls for Double Stuf Oreos, Cool Whip, and instant chocolate pudding.

  • • •

  Appetites are hard to legislate, and people usually end up doing what they want to do. The year Sinclair wrote The Jungle, he got his first summer cold. It was the begin
ning of a series of ailments that led him to John Harvey Kellogg’s Battle Creek Sanitarium, which promoted vegetarianism, and to the writings of Horace Fletcher, “The Great Masticator,” who prescribed chewing your food extra thoroughly. After that, he followed Elie Metchnikoff, the Nobel Prize winner based at the Pasteur Institute. When these programs failed Sinclair, he tried fasting. After twelve days, he broke the fast with a milk diet—two gallons a day, warmed—recommended by the fitness guru Bernarr Macfadden, who had altered the spelling of his first name so that it would sound like the roar of a lion. Then Sinclair went raw, subsisting mostly on fruits and nuts. He felt amazing: he threw away his laxatives and went bareheaded in the rain. In his free time, the man whose affect friends had previously described as “spiritual” found himself doing chin-ups and standing on his head.

  Fruits and nuts and milk-cleanses, though, were not food for thought. He could jump around and never got colds but found that the diets weren’t conducive to what he called “brain work.” (He referred to himself as a “brain worker.”) Trying to write a novel while eating raw, he lost twelve pounds in sixteen days; after six weeks, he’d lost twenty. Eventually, he discovered the work of Dr. James Salisbury, an early advocate of low-carb eating and the inventor of the Salisbury steak. (Salisbury steak, according to the USDA, must be at least 65 percent meat—beef, pork, cow heart—and the rest can consist of varying amounts of bread crumbs, flour, fungi, vegetables, liquids, and binders.) After several years as a committed vegetarian, Sinclair heeded Salisbury’s advice, and adopted a diet of broiled beef and hot water, relieved by periods of fasting. At first he was repulsed by meat; he couldn’t stand the thought or smell of it. But he came around. “I am sorry to have to say that it”—the Salisbury system—“seems to be a good one,” he wrote in a book about his dietary adventures that was published in 1913. “Sorry, because the vegetarian way of life is so obviously the cleaner and more humane and more convenient. But it seems to me that I am able to do more work and harder work with my mind while eating beefsteaks than under any other regime; and while this continues to be the case there will be one less vegetarian in the world.”

  Six

  HAUTE CUISINE

  For six months after our border run, Quenioux had been thinking about that pot-smoked chocolate. In his mind, he had begun to build a menu around it, with a theme, medicinal herbs, that would also reveal the yet-unknown flavors of the Chinese markets and apothecaries in the San Gabriel Valley. After a long search, he found his hostess, an elegant, dark-eyed woman with a blameless putty-colored ranch house in the hills above Encino, surrounded by overbuilt mansions on small lots and defended by a large electric gate.

  On the day of the first site meeting with Quenioux and the Starry Kitchen team, she opened the door in yoga pants and a black Izod sweater, dark hair pulled back in a black headband. She had designed the kitchen at her house herself, with two ovens and a long dining table extending from a center island, and a picture window framing a stand of birds-of-paradise and a view of the San Gabriel Mountains. Now her sixteen-year-old son had taken over and was using it to make pickles and ice cream and his current fixation, coffee. He prepared himself a cup in a vacuum siphon while drip brewed for her guests.

  Sitting down at the kitchen table, she put on her glasses and opened a laptop. It was time to plan the party. How many people should come? Would it be too cold, in early April, to grill outside? Her husband appeared at the door that led to the patio and pool. His shirt was untucked; he was coming from the gym in the pool house, where there was a sauna and a Viagra clock. “You guys take your meeting and have fun!” he said, rushing past us into the house.

  They talked about timing and dress code. The hostess mentioned that she didn’t want her name disclosed and that the faces in the photographs should be blurred. “No social media,” Nguyen said, a violation of his business strategy and personal philosophy, but sensible under the circumstances. “Are the kids going to come?” Quenioux asked the hostess. She and her son looked at each other. “He wants to, but . . .” she said. “They’ll stay in the kitchen with us,” Quenioux said reassuringly. They agreed: no smoking. “Smoking is so cliché and gross,” Quenioux said. “Let’s keep it about the food,” she said.

  “I’m a foodie girl,” she said. “It’s the circles I run in. For me, that’s the whole thing.” She just hadn’t yet figured out how to tell her husband, a straight arrow, that the culinary event they were hosting, with food by one of their favorite chefs, was already being widely discussed as the Weed Dinner.

  • • •

  One afternoon, I met Quenioux at a neat white clapboard house, where he lives among collections of china bric-a-brac and intoxicating European perfumes. He wore a yellow-brown-and-green-striped ski cap and a pair of red Converse. We took my car, a station wagon—his is a silver convertible, and too small—picked up Daniel, and headed east. Quenioux had been researching Chinese medicinal herbs and was getting excited. “Some are dangerous—fatal, actually—and some have a very distinct taste,” he said. “We need to gather the actual product.”

  Quenioux has been shopping in the SGV for years. “There I find everything we need for the cooking we do—sea urchin, yuzu, green tea powder,” he told me once. “I can get two pounds of duck legs, no problem. I defy you to find me that on the Westside. Or some fresh blood, or a live squab—even live frogs.” He gets alligator at the Hong Kong Supermarket and swears by the chicken testicles from a Taiwanese-American chain called 99 Ranch, which he refers to as “white kidneys” on his menus. “If you want to buy a pound of top round at six p.m. on Thanksgiving Day, you can go to the Chinese,” he says. When he needs black-fleshed Silkie Bantam chickens, he pops out to the Chinese-Vietnamese grocery store Shun Fat, branches of which have replaced Targets and Vons and Ralphs, and which, because of the meat selection—far more inclusive than Wiley’s “civilized” array—is known to some as the Dead Pet Store.

  “God created a huge palate, and it’s there to be picked up,” he said in the car. “There is a flavor I love, that so few people do: bitterness!” He described a dessert composed of a beer fruit roll-up, beer taffy, and hops crème caramel, finished with Italian white truffles and served with truffle-barley ice cream and beer nuts. Tasting individual components, the kitchen staff puckered their lips and complained; the diners, eating the whole, loved it.

  “My thing is opening up new tastes,” Quenioux said. Sweet coxcombs—poached in simple syrup and grenadine to give them the bounce and flavor of a red gummy bear, and served on top of vol-au-vent filled with orange crème pâtissière—he counts among his great discoveries. Then there was rabbit tartare. “Nobody’s ever done something like that,” he told me. “To the foodie person, to eat raw rabbit is new. You develop a new taste in your palate, so it’s exciting for people. Rabbit is very lean but it’s full of gelatin. When it’s raw it smacks.” He mixed it with yuzu, chilies, and olive oil, rolled it into a ball, and tossed it in white truffle powder. “It was really so fricking good.” Lately, Quenioux has been focused on ingredients like okra, sea cucumbers, cactus, and raw egg white, whose slippery textures are difficult for Americans. “I want to teach people to appreciate it,” he said. “There’s so much about slimy that is good.”

  When we arrived at Wing Hop Fung, a huge Chinese apothecary in a Monterey Park shopping mall, the Trans were waiting, Thi in gray surgical scrubs, Nguyen eating some kind of doughnut from a restaurant in the mall. She knew Wing Hop Fung’s selection well: she brings her parents there to shop whenever they are visiting from Texas. She handed out a list of ingredients, including aphrodisiacs, longevity tonics, diuretics, sedatives, red bird’s nest, and something called dodder, to remedy male impotence.

  “The smell!” Quenioux exclaimed as we walked in, passing an impressive wine and spirits department—$2,000 bottles of Latour and Château Lafite; 1953 Macallan—on the way to a wall of bins filled with astragalus, peony root, and cordyceps, a mus
hroom whose common name is caterpillar fungus, due to its way of invading larvae and replacing the animal tissue with its own. (In Hong Kong, Thi said, it is steamed and served with meat.) The range of items was astonishing. Most of them did not register to me as food. There were dried fish maws, yellow as dead toenails, and deer tendons, hoof on: seasoning for congee. Quenioux held up a package of Hangzhou chrysanthemum that looked like a brick of hash. “Oooh that smells good,” he said. Thi pointed them to the wolfberries, shrunken red sacs. “Twenty splashes of that for sexual vitality,” Thi said. “It’s good with wood pigeon.” Quenioux swooned over the dung-like Chinese truffles—“A hint of chicory,” he said, huffing—before stopping at a bin filled with dried apricot kernels. He scooped up a handful and let them slip through his fingers. “There’s a north one and a south one,” Thi said. “You can’t use that much of the north one because it becomes poisonous.” The menu, they decided, would have to come with a disclaimer. No pregnant women, Thi said. I looked away.

  The back wall of the store was devoted to dried seahorses. Sold in $500 kits for making soup, they looked like they belonged at a crafting fair. Behind a counter, framed, was an $8,000 piece of ginseng from the Blue Ridge Mountains. Under the counter were trays of Catskills ginseng, for $1,899 an ounce. Appalachian ginseng-hunters? The mind reeled. “The older it gets the more expensive it is,” Thi said. Barrels of cheap, young stuff ($280 a pound, from Wisconsin) were scattered about the floor.

  “Can we do, like, ginseng gelée with an aspic, in a consommé? Or start a soup with it?” Quenioux said.

  On the way home, Quenioux continued to imagine the dishes he might make. “We have to think about ginseng, longan berries, the celery-scented thing, that risotto-like grain, the bird’s nest,” he said. “If I smell something, I can mix the flavors in my head.”