Eat to Live or Live to Eat

I have a friend who eats to live. He doesn’t really care what he eats but only considers food fuel to keep his body going. He doesn’t mind going to a good restaurant, but it isn’t important to him, really.  

On the other side of the spectrum are people who live to eat, or it seems that way: uber-“foodies” parodied in the movie, “The Menu,” starring Ralph Fiennes as a master chef who has had enough of the culinary pretentiousness. To say the least. I won’t give away the ending, but it puts a new meaning to a campfire dessert.

Where do I fall on the scale of eating to live (call it a “one”) and living to eat (call it a “ten”)? I’m probably around a seven or so. Those who know me would agree. I’ve written a commercially published cookbook; Lokshen to Lo Mein, Gefen Press) and competed on the Food Network’s show Cooks versus Cons. I have to love food to do this kind of thing. My wife Bette, in turn, ran our synagogue’s large catering service for over twenty years, so she was into food too and won ribbons at every culinary competition at the State Fair she competed in.

Where I now live in retirement (kind of), most of my friends say they don’t like to cook. Yet many cooked for their families daily in the past and for holidays. I don’t quite understand giving up cooking. As we get older it indeed can be physically harder to prepare fancy meals. Yet, I find it pretty easy to make food better or at least as good than take-out of all kinds but perhaps sushi which I never could master. If you don’t believe me, buy any Mark Bittman cookbook to seet how simple cooking well can be. He’s a “minimalist “chef and food critic. Or buy three-star Michelin chef Eric Ripert’s magnificent cookbook, “Vegetable Simple.”  

How simple? Take some sweet potatoes or yams and smear them with olive oil and then generously sprinkle kosher salt on them. Place them on a baking sheet, or aluminum foil, or in a frying pan and bake at 375 degrees for forty minutes or until the skin gets crispy. Eat. Skin and all.

You don’t even have to add butter to the potatoes; they are so delicious. Or do the same with baby spuds until they puff up. My grandkids love them. It’s a method of cooking more than a recipe.     

Bittman in turn, won a PBS contest against another three-star Michelin chef whose flagship recipe consisted of a lobster tureen that took a day to make. Mark instead, boiled a lobster, jammed the tail and claw meat into a toasted commercial hot dog bun, drizzled butter on it, and sprinkled salt and pepper on top. Ta da. Everyone judging wanted more of the lobster roll; comfort food and incredibly delicious. I buy one at Mason’ Lobster Roll restaurant Rehovot Beach, Delaware, every time I go there.

Fundamentally, good cooking is easy to do. Someone must “clean up” after. No pity party from me. There’s this thing called a dish washer. And paper eco-friendly plates if you can’t do the exercise of bending down to insert dishes, close the door, and push the button. The food doesn’t know the difference between paper or china.

Making tasty food for people you love or want to know better has been a hospitality for almost every world culture I know. President Eisenhower cooked a stew for visitors at the White House. Inviting strangers to eat home-cooked food in Jewish and Moslem traditions became a particularly powerful gesture. Mark Walberg plays a Navy Seal fighting the Taliban in the movie “Lone Survivor.” Walberg, wounded, arrives at the home of a friendly village elder who invites him to dinner and so kept the Taliban at bay, literally outside his tent. The Taliban could not enter the tent to take their enemy because it would violate a cultural taboo of centuries. Eventually marines arrived and the Seal survived. A true story.

In turn, Jews have to invite strangers to holiday Passover meals if they show up at the door. I invited not-quite strangers; my non-Jewish graduate students, but sometimes they would bring a stranger to dine with us too.

Aside from cultural reasons to make food, I get pleasure from the craft of doing it, learning how to use knives well and all the rest. I said on the Cooks versus Cons TV show that my cooking mimics my doing chemistry in the laboratory but I get results a lot faster. Some lawyers when they deposing me once used that comment, publicly made on TV, to try to impugn my science, suggest I didn’t take it seriously.

They didn’t get far.

Bette and I did, as do many who cook well, had one problem. Some friends were scared to cook for us, thinking we would not like a meal as fancy as we would put out. We found this unfortunate. The great Chef James Beard, for whom the highest cooking awards in America are named, had the same problem. He said he only wanted to eat what others felt were their favorite dishes, be it meat loaf, a salad, roast chicken, whatever. He didn’t expect or want haute or fancy cuisine at all, but only home cooking that brought his hosts joy, whatever it would be.

We love eating home cooking of family recipes. Michael and Jane Stern write books on the best regional cuisine in America that can be found in restaurants along major highways and byways in every state. Bette and I lived by this book when we went on road trips, eating the best jello salad with little marshmallows in the Midwest to clam rolls in New England. Not fancy food, but honest food made well by local cooks.    

This isn’t to say I don’t like, now and then, spending “stupid money,” as a dear friend would say every few years when she, her husband, and we would dine at New York City’s Le Bernardin, the three-stared Michelin fish and seafood restaurant. Why spend stupid amounts of money for fish you can by far cheaper in other restaurants? Salmon is salmon, right?

Well, don’t people pay stupid money getting box seats to a popular musical like Hamilton, or the great tickets to a world series game, the U.S. Open Tennis Tournament, or the recent Olympics gymnastics finals. They do it to get the full experience of the best of what the craft can offer, whatever it might be. Hours of experience of it, be it at Le Bernardin or Broadway, Arthur Ash Stadium or in Paris.

Some like sports and music enough to want to be up close and pay through the nose for it. I like fine cuisine enough to want to have the best now and then and pay through the nose. To say “wow” with the first tasting of multiple dishes, just like others say “wow” seeing Simone Biles do her thing. Or swoon looking at Lin-Manuel Miranda close up.

I find breaking bread with friends and family over take-out food fine too. I always enjoy eating food in other’s homes, accompanied with good conversation, no matter where the food comes from. Really. Invite me whatever you want to serve. I have no prior expectations.

It’s just for me, making the food myself is, well, more enjoyable. I weirdly like the challenge of being a bit vulnerable to my guests, because after all, I can and do screw up. I once notoriously added a half a cup of salt instead of sugar to an apple pie. Some friends who to this day remain reluctant to eat pie I make because of it. Yuch!

In any case, try and eat food with friends and family; homemade, in restaurants, and take out. The thing is to break bread together for forge memories and relationships. Gluten or not. It’s the most human thing you can do but for the very intimate. That’s a topic for another posting. Or not. It depends on the quality of spirits I drink and how much…if that…should I try to write a blog on that sensitive topic.

What tune to play about food? There actually are not many in or near the American Songbook. Here’s one by Fats Waller: “Now All That Meat and No Potatoes,” written at a time that men didn’t cook but in fancy restaurants. Some of the lyrics are below.

The fingering of my arrangement on the low strings is stretchy but fun. Sorry for the glare. It’s late after a tough day, and I just didn’t want to re-arrange the lighting in my faux music studio. I record usually in the day when light comes through the windows.

Make sure you read the last line which I added as a comment. :-)

Now all that meat and no potatoes
I just ain't right, they're like the green tomatoes
Here I'm waitin'
Palpitatin'
With all that meat and no potatoes

All that meat and no potatoes
All that food to the alligators
Now hold me steady
I'm really ready
Now all that meat and no potatoes

I don't think that peas are bad
With meat most anything goes
Yes, I look into the pot
I'm fit to fight
'Cause, woman, you know that mess just ain't right
Oh, Pops!

All that meat and no potatoes
Just ain't right, like green tomatoes
Now woman, I'm steamin'
And I'm really screamin'
All that meat and no potatoes.

Unless it’s authentic Texas chili: meat and nothing else.