Observing with delight his sister’s discomfort with the salad and the conversation, Graydon asks for seconds on both.
“Can I have more salad? And please, tell us another story, Pappa.”

“Well, man cannot live off of meat alone. There was one post-graduate I grew up with, Dr. Michael MacRoberts, who studied the social habits of the California Acorn Woodpecker. The problem with eating acorns is that they’re very tannic when fresh. The Esselen Indians solved this problem by cracking the acorns and putting them in a woven basket in a fast-moving creek to leach for a few weeks. Then they’d dry them and make flour. But there was no water in the creek when Michael was hungry and the acorns were ripe. So do you know what he did?”
“Do we have to know?” Lena asks.

“He filled a plastic mesh bag with acorns and suspended it in the reservoir tank at the back of the toilet. That way, every time the toilet was flushed the tank was drained, and the water that had become infused with tannins was swept away. It wasn’t a babbling brook, but it worked. After several weeks of soaking, I helped him grind the acorns, and we made gruel.”
“Maybe this salad should soak in the toilet,” Lena says.

Dinner conversation is going downhill fast, and I can tell I’ve taken my stories too far. I shut up, but I can’t stop remembering.
The field station where we lived was remote, the better for all the wild animals to go about their natural business uninhibited by the public, as scientists peered at them through spotting scopes, made notes about their various manners of sexual congress, or analyzed their feces, their feeding patterns, and their social structures. My father was a botanist, so he had only to walk out the door of our home and he was at work in the middle of his living laboratory, with the wild hills and fields surrounding him. But my mom was a school teacher, and she had to get up at 5:30 a.m. and commute to Salinas, where she taught, 30 miles away. When she came home at 5:30 p.m., mom had to cook for the family. My father deserves credit; as often as not, he cooked the meal.

Every once in a while, my father’s boss, Dr. Frank Pitelka, would visit the reserve to inspect the work going on, and while he was there he would stay at our home. Dr. Pitelka was an erudite gentleman and when he was “at table” he liked to talk about food. It was the early seventies. Dr. Pitelka would sit down for dinner, look at the salad my mom had prepared, and begin to wax misty-eyed about this “charming little place on upper Shattuck called Chez Panisse, where they serve the most delicious mesclun salads.”

I know now that the word mesclun, the name of Dr. Pitelka’s favorite salad, comes from the Vulgar Latin verb misculare, meaning to mix thoroughly. I didn’t learn that at table. In between bites of shredded iceberg, Dr. Pitelka only said that mesclun salad was a perfectly balanced mix of tastes, textures, and colors. In distant Berkeley, within the confines of what journalists would one day come to call the “Gourmet Ghetto,” these perfect little salads were causing quite a stir. Mesclun salad remained an abstract notion for me until I was in college myself, at the University of California at Davis.

I got a summer job on a farm on Garden Highway, north of Sacramento, owned by a fellow named John Hudspeth who worked at Chez Panisse.

On John’s farm, I learned first hand about a world of lettuces I’d never heard of before, like Merveille de Quatre Saisons, Rouge d’Hiver, and Lollo Rossa. We even grew a lettuce named La Reine de Glace, from the French for “ice queen,” which can fairly be described as an iceberg lettuce that speaks French. But exotic salad greens weren’t the only crops John introduced me to. We grew an atlas of crops for Chez Panisse, including Sicilian purple artichokes, Black Spanish and French Breakfast radishes, Florentine fennel, Lebanese squash, and Hamburg parsley. I’m a horse that was led to water and drank. I’m still growing these crops 30 years later.

I was still working at John’s farm when I visited my parents one Labor Day weekend. Dr. Pitelka was at table. Mom had prepared spaghetti and meatballs, with cantaloupe wedges for dessert. Frank started in about “this perfect little French restaurant on upper Shattuck where the very ripest, most flawless Charentais melons are paired with prosciutto.” I cut him off.

“Chez Panisse doesn’t get the very best Charentais melons,” I said.

“Have you ever eaten at Chez Panisse, young man?” he asked.

“No, I haven’t,” I replied, “but I work on a garden that supplies them, and since I’m only a farm worker and can’t afford to eat at Chez Panisse, when I see the very best Charentais melon, a melon that is beyond compare in the beauty of its form and the succulence and scent of its flesh, I cut that melon open, and I pop the slices in my mouth until the juice runs down my chin.”

Years later, my mother thanked me for those comments.