Good taste

"The flavor of this abundant nation resides in its homegrown specialties and its factory-made treats alike, and in the many foods that we've adopted and adapted from the tables of the world.

"It's found in pimento cheese and bandage-wrapped Cheddar, apple cider and ginger ale, miso and tortillas and knishes, Coca-Cola and peppermint stick ice cream and whoopie pie.

"America has not one taste but a panoply of them, an immense multicultural sensory anthology of good things to eat and drink, commercial and artisanal, decadent and virtuous, silly and sublime."

Colman Andrews in "The Taste of America"

"Natural" goodness

Joe Dobrow charts the remarkable growth of natural foods over the past 15-plus years in an enlightening volume, "Natural Prophets: From Health Foods to Whole Foods - How the Pioneers of the Industry Changed the Way We Eat and Reshaped American Business."

Having worked with companies such as Fresh Fields, Whole Foods, Balducci's and Sprouts, the longtime marketing exec offers valuable insight on how consumer demands evolve and the ways in which organic food producers work to meet these changes. 

Dobrow introduces key moments and players, combining history and sociology with "biographical memoir and corporate profile." He explores the influence of widespread critiques of chemical agriculture such as Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" and, more recently, Michael Pollan's "The Omnivore's Dilemma." 

The author also profiles forerunners behind some name brands, including Mo Siegel, who started Celestial Seasonings in Colorado, and Bob Moore, who turned Bob's Red Mill "into a $120 million business selling a wide variety of wholesome stone-ground grains, flours, and cereals," among others. 

Their stories prove interesting and their continued success reflects the increasing popularity of the industry as a whole. 

(A version of this review appeared originally at Publishers Weekly.)  

 

Like liquid gold

I opened a decades-old bottle of wine the other night, wanting to see if I could drink it or if it had secretly turned into vinegar. It was months after my father's funeral, when the grief had begun to subside.


The wine was a revelation. It still is.

It was fruity and quite mellow. It tasted bright and complex. It was eye-opening. Free of the tannins that sometimes accompanied wines I had, it went down smoothly. I drank two or three glasses effortlessly. Like water from a spring. Then, of course, the alcohol kicked in. 

***

The bottle had been among those in dusty cardboard boxes inside the garage, moved not long ago from the basement of my parents' house in Chinatown to my place in the Oakland hills.


To proceed with a seismic retrofit my mother wanted, we cleared out old mattresses, tattered board games, and items from earlier renovations. We didn't know what to do, however, with cases of wine my parents had also kept there.


My brother wondered if we could donate them. But the food bank, for example, he learned, didn't accept alcohol. He considered pouring wine down the sink before tossing the empty bottles into recycling. But that seemed drastic and extremely wasteful.


He said he wasn't a drinker. What would we do with so much? I drank wine sometimes and cooked with it, too, scanning shelves at Trader Joe's for interesting, affordable bottles. My brother insisted he did not drink. Soda, certainly, and juice nearly every day. But not wine. I told him he could always start.


We negotiated and compromised the way we negotiated every little thing. I would find room for the tattered boxes somewhere in the house, I said, at least temporarily. He would not chuck any bottles down the drain just yet.

***

My father owned a liquor store in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury neighborhood decades ago, commuting across the bridge six days a week. 

Growing up, my sisters, brothers and I spent summers there. We stocked shelves and worked the cash register. We earned money, but were rewarded mostly with candy, ice cream and comic books.


We began to recognize California wine labels: Almaden, Inglenook, Charles Krug. We learned spellings and pronunciations for words like Merlot, Riesling and Sauvignon Blanc.


A woman on the way to her boyfriend's once asked my brother to recommend a good Chardonnay. He instinctively flagged our father over before slipping away from the conversation.


A man asked me once what went well with fish. I was no more than 13 perhaps. What could I tell him? I mean, I knew as much about varietal and vintage as the next child, which was not a lot. On the other hand, if there had been talk of Life Savers candy, It's-It ice-cream or Richie Rich.

***

Sometime in the 1980s, my father lost his lease. Rather than move the business, he retired altogether. He had worked 10-hour days for as long as he could remember. He needed a break.


He returned as much inventory as he could to distributors. The alcohol he still had at the end he brought home to Oakland. My parents put cases away in a corner of the basement.


Though it saddened my mother to close the store, she understood my father's decision. Besides, my siblings and I were high-school students then, anxious to start college. Would we even want the business? Could we handle the responsibility? We said no.

***

Years later, I returned to Haight-Ashbury, curious to see if the streets had changed. The sidewalks, for example, appeared as crowded as I remembered them, peopled, as always, by a wide cast of characters.


I entered the building that used to house my father's liquor store, happy to find it had since become a bookshop, one of the few remaining Bay Area independents.


In an instant, I flashed back to childhood. In my mind, what had once been there replaced all that was actually there. Instead of shelves filled with books, I saw shelves on my right lined with wine bottles. On my left, behind the cash register, shelves crowded with liquor bottles.


An employee, a woman in a brown T-shirt, must have noticed me standing, staring into the space. She asked if she could help me locate something in particular. Oh no, I replied. Thanks. I was just looking.

***

Growing up, I did not connect much with my father. We were not as close as we could have been. The fifth in a group of six children, maybe I got lost in the scrum. I don't know.


In the throes of adolescence, I pulled away. Or was he the one who resisted? The kind of man whose actions spoke louder than words perhaps, he kept opinions and feelings to himself.


On car rides home from school, I struggled to make conversation with my father. The radio became my salvation. I craved affection long before I knew I needed it.


I meet a man with a teen-age daughter. Separated from her mother, he tries hard to spend time with his child. I want to tell him to not stop trying, to never stop really. His daughter needs her father even if she pretends she doesn't, even when she resists. She needs him to guide her. She does.

***

A scene in the movie "Sideways" stops me cold. The DVD had been playing at my brother's place. In the exchange, Virginia Madsen talks with Paul Giamatti about her attraction to wine.


"I like to think about the life of wine," she tells him, "how it's a living thing. I like to think about what was going on the year the grapes were growing, how the sun was shining, if it rained. I like to think about all the people who tended and picked the grapes. And if it's an old wine, how many of them must be dead by now...”


It is a terrific encounter, a quiet, genuine moment between two key characters. I grab a pen and some paper, and take notes.

***

I hadn't thought before about any of that, about what it might have meant.


The wine I opened, I realized eventually, had been one of the last things left from my father's store, a part of his legacy and my personal history.


It represented his commitment, the way he earned a living to support my sisters, brothers and me. His hard work, coupled with my mother's frugality, helped to raise a family. Their sacrifice sent me to college across the country. It sent me on my way.


For the longest time, I wondered if my father actually cared. Nonchalant, he remained a mystery. Indecipherable. I didn't know how he felt or what he felt. I wracked my brain. But maybe his love had been there all along. I just didn't know it. Maybe I simply hadn't figured out where to look.


It was there when he sided with me after I bought blue jeans. My father convinced my mother to let me keep them, telling her I needed denim for winters on the East Coast. He sided with me when I wanted dark colors, to my mother's floral-print chagrin.


It was there at his kitchen table. He read the local paper every day when I worked there after college, scanning it for articles I had done. Had he been proud? He never said.


When he went to produce markets in Chinatown, it was there. He heard I would be home from grad school in Oregon and knew I liked the way my mother cooked eggplant, stir-fried quickly with ground pork, water, soy sauce, sugar and chile paste. He asked her to make my favorite dish.


He shared other foods, too, over the years, inviting my siblings and me not only for birthdays and holidays. These we expected. They were reasons to feast. But he called us for ordinary meals as well, on random weeknights. Just because.


And it was there when he held my hand those days he spent in the hospital. When the doctors spoke, we listened. I held his hand. He didn't pull away. I watched as he rested. I cried when he died.


Maybe his love had been there all along, bottled like liquid gold. There in the basement for me to discover and appreciate when I was good and ready. It might take years, even decades. But I would learn.


It had been there all along waiting for me to uncork and savor.


(A version of this essay appeared originally at www.culinate.com.)