Edible San Francisco

My mother feels that I’m too hard on my children, so when they visit her she likes to spoil them.

“Would you like a piece of chocolate?” she asked Lena one evening.

Lena was watching Loony Toons. “Is it Sharffen Berger?” she asked over her shoulder.

I got a phone call about that. But what could I say? I’m a farmer. Many of my friends are farmers, or they have restaurants, or they take cooking seriously, or they have beautiful gardens. For better or worse, my wife and I are surrounded by great food. By the time Lena was seven, she was personally acquainted with three chocolate makers. On the “worse” side of the equation, our children have to eat a lot of weird food—like salad.

“I’m not hungry,” Lena says, stirring her salad with her fork.

If I get flack from the kids because I’ve used a light vinaigrette that brings out the flavors of the lettuces, rather than a ranch dressing that cloaks them. I retaliate by telling a story.

“When I was a kid,” I start, “salad was a wedge of iceberg and a pink tomato.”

My son, Graydon, has learned to lay low in such circumstances, but Lena loves combat. She bugs her eyes out and gasps, “Must…must get…must get air.”

Her cynical riposte demands an escalation of rhetoric on my part. I grew up on the Hastings Reserve, a biological field station in the Santa Lucia Mountains managed by the University of California at Berkeley, so my “when I was a kid” stories can get scientific.
“When I was a kid,” I continue, “I knew a parasitologist who trapped ground squirrels in order to count and examine any flukes residing in their livers. In order to make his research reach a little farther, he’d stew the squirrels up and eat them, once he’d removed the relevant organs.”

Lena is rendered temporarily speechless. Maybe she’s counting the days until she’s eighteen. When Julia and I struggle to get supper on the table for our kids at the end of a long day, and they reject it, I ask myself how, year after year, my parents cooked for my sister and me.
One way, of course, was convenience—-my parents weren’t burdened with the ideology Julia and I have adopted of making home-cooked meals with fresh ingredients from producers we know and trust. We had dinner when I was growing up, not cuisine. The meat loaf was sauced with ketchup; the hamburger got “help” from a packet purchased from Safeway; and the chicken wasn’t an heirloom breed, it wasn’t brined, or free-range—it was just baked. My parents didn’t cook with passion, but they cooked every day whether they wanted to or not, and I understand now that they cooked with love.

“Sick!” Lena has found her voice. “You’re just sick!”

“He shared his rodents with me,” I continue, “and what I remember most—besides his ice box full of squirrels, with manila data tags dangling from their curled toes, showing the dates, times, and locations of capture—was spitting out bones. Bones, bones, and more bones.”
“Completely, totally, absolutely gross!”

“The squirrels I ate at the parasitologist’s table were tastier and more tender than the rattlesnakes I ate with the herpetologist though.”

“Disgusting!”

“Maybe the rattlers should have been brined.”