The Haves and the Havents Part 5

What does not kill you only makes your pot bolder

Photo by Lefteris kallergis on Unsplash

Hi beloved readers,

Happy New Year, 2022. Er…not much to say and I don’t have an editorial voice, so I’ll be brief, abrupt even.

I intended for this blog to feature burst of short, marginally-, tangentially-, or substantially-linked articles, but find myself slipping into a more structured essay form—that I take longer to come up with than I initially planned. I think I’ll go back to factory settings, and try to capture the carefree spirit this blog should have. Hope this goes down smoothly.

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The tastes of the well-to-do often hark back to hard times. The aged delicacy, for instance, might have been a product of a risky last test of food gone bad, the cellar otherwise empty, with surprisingly pleasant results. The six-month-old soy sauce, the four-year-old cheese, the fifteen-year-old malt whiskey, and the hundred-year-old wine.

Or the taste for the tender and immature, veal and the like, where a person is in such straits that he must eat the potentials of his crops or livestock, set aside for sowing or breeding, if he is not to resort to cannibalism — fingerlings or fingers; take your pick.

Or the rare weird eating, like truffles, when one probes an object of questionable nutritive value, and finally sweeping aside the question mark buzzing round his head to throw it into his mouth.

Or the poison in tight embrace with food, which must be extracted through a painstaking delicate operation, or poison that must spoil to become food. This puzzle of very high stakes, what pushes a person to eat something, die of it, and return to it try again later—albeit in an altered form? What pushes him to search for a needle of nutritious life in a haystack of gastronomic death? Here goes ricin-rich locust bean made into ogiri and puffer fish fugu.

All men must die, and a fifty-fifty chance at life is better than certain death. Once life is secured in that chancy moment, we can then be surer of future moments. The paths of life pass through valleys of the shadow of death.

Heck, even in normal times, we can only recall these eatings with great expenditure; we indulge in these extravagances—food put off too long, consumed too soon, or derived through too rigorous a route—when we have too much at our disposal. The height of our food culture thus represents these earlier hazardous states mitigated and subsidized. We recall, as in a play, our near brush with death. For the expense incurred, though, it is little wonder that culture is the preserve and heritage of the well-off in our societies.