Hungry

by Sheila Himmel

  On a rainy President’s Day, my editor’s editor and I went to talk to the restaurant’s owner. In case he got enraged, the big boss said he would be there to protect me, but in fact he had been a police reporter and wanted to make sure the food writer got it right. The owner thought we were there to discuss the case of a dissatisfied customer, and he had a fat file of her complaints and his responses. When I stated the pork issue, he was relieved and so sure it was a mistake that he took us up to his top-floor office to look through the invoices. Rain pounded the rickety skylight, as in a horror movie, as he rustled through his files for an invoice that said veal. Still confident, he called his supplier and put him on the speakerphone. The supplier said, “Uh, Bill, we haven’t sold you veal in years.”

  Bill said he would call the chef, who did the buying. Two hours later, the chef called me.

  “You guys are right. I thought it (pork) was a superior product. I had received complaints that the veal was tough. Pork had the same flavor, but was more tender.”

  Pork was also $4.50 a pound cheaper. The restaurant was saving about $15,000 a year.

  Had it occurred to the chef, a born-again Christian, that pork is forbidden to Muslims and Jews, or that some people are allergic?

  “I never considered religion or health,” he said.

  I was so stunned that I forgot to ask how long this had been going on. When I called back, the chef was at church. He later said it had been five or six years and, “I don’t know where it’s going to go. I’m leaving it in God’s hands.”

  This story made news throughout the Bay Area. I agreed to do one TV interview, in silhouette, and sounded like Miss Hathaway on The Beverly Hillbillies, mouthing stuffy phrases like “difficult to discern.” Despite me, the story got national play, and that weekend was a test question on NPR’s Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me.

  Investigative reporting was very satisfying. I had started my career during Watergate, inspired to fight corruption, and now I had a “-gate” of my own. And I’d made some enemies. “Vealgate” began as it ended, with phone messages, such as:“How does it feel to be someone who makes their living off of other people’s misfortunes?”

  “You’ve caused a lot of pain. You’re evil. The good Lord is gonna have you pay.”

  The restaurant owner had to pay $35,000 in restitution (providing “free food to victim customers”) and $25,000 in civil penalties (“to address the issue of lack of sensitivity to dietary laws and prohibitions of groups who do not eat pork products”), and the chef faced criminal charges. A group of restaurant supporters took out an expensive advertisement, indirectly recouping some of our FedEx costs.

  My next shot on camera was a fluffy feature. My voice was more natural but the rest of me was a mess. I wore a big straw hat, sunglasses, and an overcoat, going for anonymity but achieving bag lady. Still, the genial host of this Bay Area travel show was skilled at loosening up his guests, amid what seemed to me like a very large staff standing around. This same afternoon was Lisa’s appointment to take her driving test. I had two hours to shoot the piece and pick up Lisa to bring her for her test. It seemed like plenty of time, but with all the set-up activity and reshoots, I started to sweat under the overcoat and spotlights, mentally mapping out the drive to Lisa’s school and then the Department of Motor Vehicles, counting on no traffic tie-ups. Finally, I just had to leave, and let the TV professionals take it from there. Lisa got to her driving test in plenty of time and passed easily.

  Bay Area radio notable Ronn Owens did a regular show about restaurants with newspaper reviewers. On the drive to San Francisco I heard the promo, “And this week, we welcome Sheila Himmel of the San Jose Mercury News to . . .” I immediately blanked out. What was I to do? Discuss Silicon Valley restaurant history? The booker had assured me that we’d just talk about what we liked and didn’t like, but I wasn’t great at bantering. The critics arrived early, as instructed, mingled, and ate the croissants one had discovered in her area. Oh no, were we supposed to bring food? Also I was overdressed in a suit. Owens was in shirtsleeves. Michael Bauer, from the San Francisco Chronicle, looked cool in jeans and a leather jacket.

  Then we went into the studio, put on pilot-size earphones, and sat before massive microphones. I had brought reference material, lists of restaurants in different categories that might possibly come up, but on live radio there is no time to consult notes, and you don’t want to make paper-shuffling noises. Except for the time spent staring into the microphone and thinking about how much of the Bay Area was hearing me mumble and the simple question that stumped me, the hour went by quickly. Owens is a dexterous host and he loves to talk about restaurants.

  During the call-in portion, someone asked for the best hamburger place in San Jose. Um, hamburgers, San Jose, I couldn’t make the connection. Owens quickly changed the subject.

  Still, they invited me back. Eventually I got into a groove. As I learned, even a shy person can do radio and television. You just have to do it more than once.

  One morning at the neighborhood coffeehouse, I was in line with a companion, talking about restaurants, when the woman in front of us turned around and said, “You’re Sheila Himmel?” Or she said, “You’re Sheila Himmel?” I heard it as the latter, my friend as the former. But whether surprised by my size or disappointed in my fashion sense, this citizen was impressed to be waiting for coffee with a marquee player.

  lisa: Many people envied Mom’s job and talked about it as their dream career. For years I felt privileged to be able to taste gourmet foods from around the world. Not many other middle school kids ate at four-star restaurants or had frequented Boulevard, a San Francisco favorite with great views of the bay. I loved the atmosphere and the food. We ate there as a family, but I loved the time I went just with Dad and we sat at the bar, watching the cooks. I had wonderful scallops and a poached pear dessert before we went to see the musical Chicago on stage. We both knew the lyrics by heart. Dad and I did a lot of eating together. If anyone was to accompany Dad on weekend trips to visit family in San Diego or Chicago, it was me, his baby girl. We enjoyed deep-dish pizza in downtown Chicago, fresh fish tacos in San Diego, dim sum on Sundays in San Francisco, and smoky barbecue in Oakland. We’d share molasses chips from See’s Candies and nibble at a pound of chocolate truffles. We had our favorite ice cream flavors and burrito fillings and pizza toppings. We bonded over food, over our love for cooking and all the tools and dishes.

  But Mom’s job fed into my food addiction, this constant supply of oversize portions and richly decadent desserts. My food life took buffet form and my hips took on more fat than they wanted—or my society accepted, more important.

  When I was passionate about eating, I loved Mom’s job. With food as my very best friend, of course I loved Mom’s job. For the first five or so years, I loved Mom’s job. After that, I became disinterested and then disconnected and finally disgusted with the whole concept of eating out for a living.

  seven

  You Are What You Don’t Eat

  Lisa was too busy to notice, but when she developed serious eating disorders in high school, she wasn’t the only one busily crossing foods off the list. Americans increasingly disdain certain foods for religious, ethical, political, and health reasons, imaginary health reasons, and just plain orneriness. We all have our food quirks, but lately in America we are very loud about the feared and frowned-upon, not the favorites. We hear “I don’t eat” about everything from red meat to white flour to blue food coloring. Here are a few:

  I can imagine “Doesn’t Eat” as a category on Jeopardy!

  ALEX TREBEK: “Doesn’t Eat for two hundred dollars: This U.S. president made about big fuss about broccoli.”

  ALERT CONTESTANT: “Who is George Herbert Walker Bush?”

  The first President Bush set the tone when he reportedly stated at a news conference in March 1990: “I do not like broccoli. And I haven’t liked it since I was a little kid and my mother made me eat it. And I’m president of the Uni
ted States, and I’m not going to eat any more broccoli.”

  He got a lot of mileage out of this little outburst, refusing to kowtow to the nutrition police who were suggesting that broccoli, among other vegetables and fruits, might have health benefits, like warding off cancer. Bush the elder reminded me of Lisa the toddler, stamping her feet and wailing, “Not gonna!” Our president was letting us know he was a regular guy.

  Oh yeah? I have foods I don’t like, too. Plenty of them. Since birth I have been a picky eater. Only I’m not president, just a restaurant critic, and part of the job is to push aside personal preferences. Reviewers eat first and criticize later. If a restaurant’s specialty is cream of broccoli soup, no aversion to broccoli is going to stand in the way, although the critic may enlist a companion or two to help rate the soup. One of the few downsides of the job is that you can’t say, “No, thanks. I don’t eat that.”

  When I started reviewing restaurants a dozen years ago, I didn’t eat mussels. Having gotten cinematically ill on mussels, I had maintained a fifteen-year boycott. Oysters, clams, and other shellfish were no problem. The bad guys had come in a package, in the days before sell-by dates. Maybe there was only one offender in the bunch, because Ned ate them too and was fine. My grudge held firm against the sight and especially the scent of mussels. Eventually Ned was allowed to order them in a restaurant, but not to cook them at home. With all the French restaurants on my beat, and mussels commonly harvested on the Pacific Coast, I dreaded the day I would face moules in a signature dish.

  Alain Rondelli’s restaurant was to be my mussel Waterloo. The chef-owner had been executive chef at Ernie’s, a San Francisco landmark, and recently opened his own place. Rondelli was a Paul Bocuse protégé and a former chef for the president of France.

  I had one dinner at his new restaurant. Other newspapers sent their critics three or four times to each restaurant before writing a review, but mine had decided that once was enough. Our public posture was that reviewers should act like regular customers: You don’t like a restaurant, you don’t go back. And that the critic’s job was to provide a snapshot so that readers could see if the place appealed to them. The expense account was of course the real reason, but after a dozen years of reviewing restaurants, I have to say that this limitation forced me to pay attention and to do my homework. A reviewer can visit a restaurant nine times and be very confident in what he writes, but the next day the chef has a fight with the owner and disappears, or the produce truck breaks down, or the only well-trained server calls in sick, and it’s a whole different experience. Restaurants, unlike movies, are moving targets.

  Considering the one-visit rule, Rondelli’s eight-course tasting menu was the best way to get a fair sample of his cooking, except that right after the chef’s amuse-bouche came mussels and orange soup. I looked at that and thought, “Uh-oh.” We had just begun a meal that likely would go three hours. Maybe I’d get sick right away, run to the restroom, and be done with it. I couldn’t imagine sitting through seven more courses with waves of nausea.

  And yet the orange mussel soup was astonishing. To a base of chicken broth and fresh orange juice Rondelli added squares of fresh fennel and half-dried orange, and plump green lip and Prince Edward Island mussels in a martini glass. Maybe because I was so surprised that the mussels didn’t kill me right away they tasted even better, but by any standard those mussels were fabulous, and I’ve been able to judge them fairly in the line of duty ever since. As a civilian I prefer clams. Avoiding mussels has become part of my identity, just as my friend’s son avoids anything blue.

  In the twenty-first century, we see so many food products that it is prudent to draw fences around certain of them and say, “I don’t go there.” We need the “I don’t eat” routine so we can pare down the possibilities. In Mindless Eating, food scientist Brian Wansink calculated that the average person makes more than two hundred food decisions per day. If even one of those choices didn’t have limits, life would be impossible.

  Have we all gotten a little carried away? When silly as well as legitimate reasons for avoiding food become central to our identities, my theory is that we’re all a little eating disordered. We are what we don’t eat.

  In some countries, such as Japan, individuals mainly want to fit in and be like everyone else, and their diets follow suit. America is the opposite. We are all special, and we all have special dietary requirements.

  In Silicon Valley, dietary variation is a commonplace cost of business for large companies and meeting and event planners. The giant Cisco Systems has cafeterias that meet Muslims’ halal requirements. Google became renowned for its seasonal, local, organic food and its celebrity chef, Charlie Ayers. When he left Google to open a restaurant based on the Google philosophy, it took the company a year and a half to find a replacement who met all of the requirements: five years as a sous chef and three years as an executive chef, plus experience preparing ethnic and vegetarian cuisine using organic ingredients. They would need these skills, the job posting said, to cook an “eclectic menu capable of suiting every Googler palate, from vegan entrées to pad Thai, grilled burgers, and wood-fired pizza.”

  Of course there are serious health concerns that cause people to reject certain foods, such as lactose-intolerance, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes, gluten intolerance, and food allergies. People with allergies commonly avoid milk products, wheat gluten, a particular spice, and most notably, peanuts. Parents didn’t need salmonella to add to their worries about peanut butter. Once a parent hears about anaphylaxis, a life-threatening reaction to peanuts that requires an emergency injection of adrenaline, she becomes very cautious.

  With these and more to keep in mind, home cooks and anyone in the hospitality industry might as well subscribe to Prevention magazine. Restaurants receive all manner of special requests and interrogations about ingredients. Menus often encourage this, to avoid poisoning the diner and the expensive lawsuit that would result. Diners with serious food issues may know enough to mention them when they make a reservation. Or to inquire about the ingredients before they order a dish. At Manresa, consistently the top-rated restaurant in Silicon Valley, diners have used a card that says, “Hi, I’m eating at your restaurant, and I’m looking forward to my meal. These food groups will make me severely ill and will be life-threatening.” Those foods tend to be onions, mushrooms, garlic, oil, and nuts, says chef-owner David Kinch, who photocopies the card for every station in the kitchen.

  Other restaurants have received instructions for “nothing acidic,” “no yeast,” “nothing fermented,” “no seeds,” “some kinds of squashes but not others,” Lessley Anderson wrote on the foodie website Chow.

  And dinner parties, phew, what a headache. Evite should add a box for “Guest Doesn’t Eat X.” Guests may say, “Oh, don’t make anything special for me,” and mean, “Just don’t make anything that’s going to gross me out.” Now, do you have to ask every guest if he or she is a vegetarian, and if so what type? The etiquette is evolving.

  In an email from Panama, nutritionist Marion Nestle told me about attending a pig roast. “The host told me later that several people complained they don’t eat pork,” Nestle wrote. “They, of course, had been specifically invited to a pig roast, and there were plenty of other things eat.”

  In my little circle, Lia is lactose-intolerant, Cathleen can’t have wheat gluten, Ellen has a violent reaction to cinnamon. Ellen’s husband, Neal, is a pescatarian and eats tomatoes cooked but never raw. If possible, he’s fine with picking out the tomatoes. Just having them in the vicinity, even touching the lettuce, doesn’t spoil the salad for him. If we served paella, though, most likely we would leave out the pork, just as people who know Ned know to leave the nuts out of cookies and cakes. Ned hates nuts as ingredients but if you put out a bowl of salted Marcona almonds, watch out. What he hates is the textural interference of nuts in food. They disrupt the chewy landscape of brownies, the creaminess of puddings and ice creams.

  Food
preferences and aversions like Neal’s and Ned’s often get established in childhood. Ned recalls, “Maybe it was religious. I went to a Jewish preschool and hated it because they often served nuts in lunch foods.” Because of the nuts and equally appalling raisins, Ned’s whole preschool memory is painful.

  Parents are cautioned to respect strong food dislikes, and to keep in mind that while food is prepared and offered with love, children naturally reject some of it. Control and rebellion are powerful motivators. Don’t be like the Himmels with their finicky first child, hovering and fretting at every occasion, so that Jacob became the One Who Didn’t Eat. Or the older Himmels with their finicky second child, Ned Who Doesn’t Eat Nuts, for whom special cakes were baked.

  But why do these food quirks stick around, long after they’ve outlived their youthful usefulness? I had to wonder if biology somehow cemented those feelings into our sense of self. Scientists are finding that more and more human traits and behaviors are based in organic life processes, rather coming strictly from experience or choice. Nearby at Stanford University, preeminent neurobiology professor Robert Sapolsky was the one to ask. Sapolsky studies the biology of every important human behavior, from people who can’t stop working eighty hours a week to those who won’t eat sushi.

  Sapolsky has found that adolescence and early adulthood are the ages when humans and other primates enjoy novelty. And for music and fashion as well as food, that window snaps shut around age thirty-nine. A prolific author and MacArthur “genius” fellow, Sapolsky did a study of fifty sushi restaurants in the Midwest and found that if an adult hadn’t voluntarily tried sushi by age thirty-nine, there was a ninety-five percent chance he or she never would. While culture and psychology are the usual suspects, Sapolsky sees biology at work. “It is a rare adult monkey who would try a new food. When you see the same thing in a rat, you’re looking at biology,” he said. Sapolsky summed up the human quandary in a 1998 piece for the New Yorker: “If I’m actually going to die someday, I’m sure not going to waste any of my finite number of meals on some new food that I turn out not to like.” Extrapolating on my own, I figure that biological imperative could have something to do with why we hang on to childhood aversions as well. “If I already know I don’t like black licorice, why bother? There are lots of other chewy sweets.”