I am pushing my pine-green shopping cart -- or buggy,
as we say in Louisiana -- through the wide, colorful aisles of
the Whole Foods that recently opened up in Baton Rouge. This food-lover's
nirvana has people running up their credit cards with such items
as chocolate almond tangerine cookies, mild basil-chipotle pesto
and salmon so fresh it's practically still swimming. The store
opened, to much fanfare, in late July. Now it's mid-September,
just two weeks after Katrina, but business is brisk.
I always thought that people who obsessed about food, like my
friend Mark, who regularly drove the 70 miles into New Orleans
from Baton Rouge to get the exact right ingredient for whatever
divine concoction he was whipping up, were basically nuts. With
millions dying of malnutrition in far-away places, all this concentration
on food struck me as being, well, downright unseemly. But something
happened to me along the way from idealistic undergraduate to
middle-age mom, and now, like Mark, I dream about creamy meetha
kaddoo, homemade fusilli with zucchini and basil
sauce, and expensive Swiss chocolate.
In the meantime, there is Katrina -- the shameful spectacle
of Americans dying for lack of emergency resources, the tens of
thousands of newly homeless, and New Orleans, the queen of the
South, buried under tons and tons of toxic muck. In the shelter
where I've been volunteering, people who once worked on river
barges, taught in the public schools, tended gardens, fixed cars
and worked in restaurants huddle on fold-out canvas cots, hundreds
and hundreds of them, their clothing bunched in black plastic
Glad bags, their families scattered, their homes and jobs and
photographs and family recipes gone. Indeed, these are the working
poor -- proud people who have never asked for a handout or a dime
from Uncle Sam, who have now been rendered homeless, without ever
having made enough money to have much in the way of savings. Here
at the Baton Rouge convention center, the Red Cross is serving
hundreds of meals a day: ready-to-eat, microwavable containers
of lasagna, hamburgers. fried chicken and grits, paid for, in
the main, by private funds. Thank God no one here is going hungry.
You have to work hard to find a bad meal in New Orleans -- or
so we used to tell our friends who wanted advice about where to
eat in the Big Easy. Like its music, the varied cuisine of New
Orleans was high-brow and low-brow, a saucy, excitable and wholly
original American art form, combining the local love of hot spices
with the flavors of the world. There were some 50 oyster bars
in New Orleans, fancy cafes serving the finest Creole cuisine,
corner joints where you could munch on world-class po-boys while
you watched the Saints getting demolished on TV, and soul food
so good you wondered why anyone was ever unhappy.
In Judaism, the religion into which I was born, more often than
not the rabbis teach the middle way. Thus, it's all right to consume
beef, but one must do it with a certain awareness that the cow,
like any living creature, was created by the Almighty, and is
hence a small piece of Divine Unity. So too it's okay to enjoy
life's sensual bounty. We bless God because He is the creator
of the bounty that sustains us and gives us such ridiculous --
even heavenly -- pleasure.
But in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, is it okay to buy a $14
bottle of extra-virgin olive oil? In the wake of Katrina, is it
permitted to sit at my kitchen table, reading Marcella Hazan?
Amazingly, at the first shelter where I worked -- set up overnight
in an abandoned Kmart to serve the sick and the elderly -- the
food was fabulous: red beans and rice; seafood gumbo; po boys
on thick French bread; and chewy, rich chocolate chip cookies.
Every bit of it was supplied, gratis, by local caterers. But in
the enormous Red Cross shelter at the convention center, things
are a bit more basic. Not that anyone's griping about it.
James is a handsome, lean, tall black man in his late 50s, who,
because he didn't have a car, weathered the storm in his New Orleans
apartment building. For two weeks after the levees broke, James
rescued old people, sick people, and dozens of dogs and cats with
the help of an improvised boat. His feet are covered in sores;
his legs look like sacks. Before the storm, he was a cook -- first
at New Orleans' famed racetrack and later at Mike Anderson's,
a popular seafood restaurant. He can't wait to get back to the
kitchen.
When I ask him how the food at the shelter is, he shrugs, flashes
me a smile and says, "Baby, I can't complain." And thus it is
here in the strangest of makeshift communities, with people who
have everything in the world to complain about gracefully accepting
their circumstances and, in the main, showing gratitude.
I've been showered with thanks, with "you so sweet, dahlin',"
and "the folks here been right good to me," and "it ain't Momma's
home cooking, but it ain't bad either." I've been blessed, hugged,
patted, told that I'm an angel. This in a place where 500 sleep
in the same room, and the noise from announcements coming through
the P.A. system never ceases.
America, the breadbasket of the world. Louisiana, home of the
world's warmest people.
And in my own home, just two miles from the cavernous River
Center shelter, where James and others like him are grateful for
the food that sustains them, my cabinets are filled with olive
paste, Indian spices and five different kinds of vinegar. What
do I do with this? Where do we go from here? And what's to become
of the land of gumbo and shrimp etoufee?
Jennifer Moses lives with her husband and three children
in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. She is the author of Food and
Whine, a memoir, and writes regularly for The New York
Times and The Washington Post.
(January 2006)
