You are how you cook: nouns and verbs

As I explain at the end of this post I sat down to write something else: an inoffensive post about a recipe from my grandmother’s village. That post took an unexpected detour into family history but also Spanish history and politics. I hope you will be able to read the love between the lines, but also the anger. The anger will explain the terrifying photograph of small children doing the fascist salute as they visit their incarcerated Republican fathers in jail in 1939. I find it so upsetting that I almost censored myself. I now realise that news about the possible discovery of the location of Lorca’s unmarked grave have stirred me.

For someone who has spent the last year assiduously thinking and writing about food and its cultural purchase I have very little interest in recipe books. I wonder why this is: I do like books and food as separate items. I don’t have a problem with the aspirational consumption masquerading as creation they embody. The same thing can be said about books about design and, in fact, most coffee table books and I love those. I used to live with a friend who treasured them: they lined the wall of the kitchen we shared. They were as a rule sturdily yet lavishly put together: thick covers, inventive fonts and layout, expensively lit and studiously composed shots. Yet not even once did I cook following their recipes. I suspect my parents and their own disinterest in cookery books may be behind my own.

I think of their approach to cooking and I realise that it reflects their character, their gender, their age. My father, like most men of his generation in Spain, is an occasion cook. He will prepare the roast lamb we invariably eat on Christmas Eve. He makes a fabulously colourful seafood salad filled to the brim with prawns, mussels, crab, and tuna when he wants to fete friends: the salad reflects his largesse. This material generosity is reflective of his character and attitude to life: he is a man of deeds rather than words. Love walks the walk with him. It also goes beyond his individual history and temper: most Spaniards of his generation pile food on their tables out of an anxiety born out of early deprivation. Madridians like my father grew up in a grey city haunted by a Civil War that had barely ended when they were born. Misery and squalor hollowed the stomachs and starved the spirit of its working class. A fried egg was a Sunday treasure; children plucked the leaves of a tree tellingly known as “pan y quesillo” (“bread and cheese”) and stuffed them in their mouths to stave off hunger; a handful of marzipan figurines were the only present received on the day of the Epiphany. These children were used to the smell of fried innards wafting from corner bars; rarely had proper chocolate; were given a bright orange “American cheese” that came in aid packages. So older Spanish men show their prosperity with their well-stocked larders and generously furnished dinner tables.

My mother, by contrast, although never ungenerous, is thrifty and riffs like a Jazz musician in her daily shopping. She leaves the house to buy hake and comes back with keenly priced steak after extracting a solemn promise that she will not be disappointed and a couple of chorizo sausages from the butcher. She brings marvellously unexpected combinations of fruits: a pineapple that bursts in your mouth sweet and sourly, bags of mahogany chestnuts, pomegranates that she patiently deseeds until her fingers are tainted red and wrinkled. How could she have any interest in the tyrannies of recipe books full of unheard of spices and cream? Memory, necessity, and pleasure, dosed measure by measure, inform her cooking. These cannot be found in print anywhere.

When it comes to food, my parents speak a language that is all nouns and verbs. There are no adjectives: they will never subtitle their dishes in brackets. Food hits the stomach and the palate with a forceful thud. Ingredients transition from counter to pan and then on to table with admirable integrity: an honest steak, roughly chopped then freshly grilled vegetables, a piece of fruit that you peel at the table.

Today I sat down to write a recipe from my grandmother’s village: I was going to dissect it and for once give you what most expect from a food blog. Another time. I now live in another country: I am not my grandmother, or even my mother; I am a woman of another time that speaks another language groping in the darkness of food memory and culture. The book that can guide me has not been published.

How to become a food anarchist

Everything is consumption: you consume the food you put in your mouth, of course, but no longer for sustenance or pleasure but as a vehicle to exercise your virtue or penance. We live in the era of consumption as a cypher for identity, shorthand for morality; we carry our politics in our pocket.

Guilt, an emotion previously predicated on an evil done to another, has been appropriated by a simultaneously gluttonous and chastising food industry and turned into a self-directed corrective. To eat a snack is to sin against the self as consumer and to atone one must become a more judicious and vigilant shopper, the right choices must be made: low fat, low carb, sugar free, organic, non-hydrogenated, fair trade, locally produced, pesticide-free, cholesterol-free, green. Orgy and penance must both be checked out at the cash register. Such a tawdry illusion of agency and control: a gestural politics that has replaced the fist in the air with the hand grabbing the wallet.

To err is to incur the censure of our peers: this morning I stood in the staffroom at work hastily washing a pain-au-chocolat down with the dregs of an Americano and a colleague saw it fit to rap me on the knuckles for eating a pastry. “It is not worth it”, she said with a grave countenance. This same woman, much older than me, grew up in a country were such censure was reserved for the sexual sinner but now lives in one that judges us as we walk down the aisle at the supermarket. It happens so often this unwanted intervention, particularly to women, that sometimes I don’t register it. Most days, however, it is only a summons to the highest order of civility that stops me from rebelling against these self-appointed inquisitors and blaspheming against the rice-cracker wafer they commune with.

I am another consumer in this endless free market maze, how can I not be: I wear a new dress and, for a moment, I think that it covers my body but bares my soul; I display a vase on my table and I see echoes of the literature on my shelves, some remote childhood memory; my serially manufactured and mass produced “choices” intoxicatingly whisper “me, me, me and nobody else” in my ear. I am a fool, of course, the biggest fool that walked the corridors of this shopping centre we are imprisoning ourselves in, like you and you and you. But damn it if I am going to be that same slavering fool when it comes to food.

Food is not the answer to anything except hunger.

 

¡Salud y República!

The Hunger

As a teenager in the late eighties I watched my share of American TV series. Then as now, television was largely the monopoly of American culture with the exception of a few locally produced and worthy adaptations of Spanish literary classics and the occasional release of highly theatrical BBC dramas. As a result, thanks to the excellent Hill Street Blues I had to, among other lessons that are only useful to feed the pop culture idiot savant in me, learn to decipher the unknown code underlying the snappy repartee of cops and lawyers battling their respective corners of law enforcement in New York City.

Be careful out there and have a sandwich or something

Watching LA Law I also learnt a few lessons regarding the combination of feathery hair, shoulder pads, tan tights, and clip-on earrings (mainly not to wear them all at the same time) that have served me sartorially for a couple of decades now. Although I must confess that, as a child, I used to consider the un-clipping of the said earrings to take a phone-call the height of sophistication. Again, to my surprise, the judiciary world in LA revolved around a heady palette of pastel colours, far removed from the moral black and whites that one would expect in the presence of justice. I confess I still have not figured out, however, how one plain clothes detective in Miami, namely Sony Crockett in Miami Vice, could own a Ferrari Testarossa without being flagrantly corrupt, nor, more urgently, how he could be in pursuit of criminals, wearing loafers with no socks, without tripping at every move.

Eating dinner in Miami Vice: a risky business wearing an all-white suit

The quality of TV series has exponentially improved since and I will spare you yet another article about the HBO-led renaissance of the last decade. The series I am currently watching, The Good Wife, a thought-provoking crime and legal drama, has dispensed with the inoffensive pastels of LA Law, to emphasise the moral greys that sully the conduct of those involved in the legal and political systems in Chicago. One thing has not changed, though, and that is the alarmingly poor dietary choices of characters in crime and legal dramas. As a teenager, my parents and I mined the “walking and talking” scenes of American series for laughs. Could these people ever stop on their tracks for a minute to have a conversation? And what was that strange tick they had of lifting things (a folder from a desk, a ringing phone from its hook, a jacket from a chair) as they moved along firing one-liners at their equally kinetic adversaries? Most hilarious was the tendency not to eat at all or, when compelled by what must have been pangs of near starvation, to wash a stand-bought hot dog with a coffee as they marched down some skyscraper-lined avenue in pursuit of a greater truth or a bigger lie.

Will and Alicia: will they, won’t they ever have something to eat?

I admire American culture in many ways: its greatest writers, filmmakers, and now TV writers, have produced work that is simultaneously compelling, complex and often a direct challenge to its citizens’ self-perception. There is, however, an aspect of American culture that I instinctively link with the sterility of corporations and the heartlessness of capitalism that manifests itself in the perennial lack of food outlined above. I don’t think this is a conscious motif in American TV writing but when I watch the characters in The Good Wife go hungry from one episode to the next, I realise how poorly I would fit in their milieu: the hunger for power, money, and status that oils the capitalist machine leaves me cold. I am afraid I would always insist on getting lunch and being home for dinner.

The revolution will not be televised

There are three things that I enjoy above all else in my spare time: having a meal, going to the movies, and a drink in a pub. The first two I can do by myself, although I would rather in company, the third one is unthinkable on my own. All three require a degree of concentration and ceremony. I’d rather watch a film in the cinema than at home: I like the darkness and quiet of the theatre, and I like the community of voyeurs. I like to plunge into the darkness so that I can enjoy watching films like I enjoy dreaming. I strongly disapprove of chatter of any kind in the cinema and disdain crunching and cracking noises, although not the consumption of food per se if done with a modicum of discretion. Again, I think of film like I think of slumbering: I do not mind the smell of coffee and toast drifting into my dream world, but hate to be rudely awaken by careless clatter in the kitchen. Today I went to the IFI and they dutifully warned patrons not to make noises during the film. A perfect silence reigned throughout the projection of Like Father, Like Son: you could hear the sizzling of Japanese dumplings on-screen above your neighbour’s breathing.

When it comes to eating, Ireland still has enough reverence for the rituals of restaurant dining and I have not come across any public dining ruined by the blare and glare of TV screens.  The most frequent acoustic offender tends to be Muzak and this is quickly gobbled up by the growing din of conversation. Low lighting and convivial chatter are as essential to a good restaurant outing as good bread and wine.  I wish the same could be said about pubs. Why is it so many publicans have decided to ruin their otherwise atmospheric pubs with television sets turned to an infernal blast? Is there a conspiracy out there to turn every bar in this country into the back room of a spin-doctor at the White House? Or perhaps they are aiming to recreate the sitting room of the  hardest of hearing most cantankerous and socially inept grand-uncle in the land?

My latest outing to a pub would suggest this is the case. Last Tuesday I went out for a drink and found my straightforward plan to have a private conversation in a public place thwarted at every turn by televisions blasting the budget debate in the Dáil. Every sip of excellent stout, every line of riveting conversation was punctuated by the offensive banality and obdurate shamelessness of Noonan and company. A good conversation in a pub is the grease of a well-oiled relationship, and the Minister for Finance and his adversaries were hell-bent on making mine screech. The bummest note was struck when Noonan and one of his opponents quoted lines by W.B. Yeats in an effort to give complexity and gravitas to their shopkeepers’ rhetoric. I felt like the beast had quit slouching towards Bethlehem and was sprinting towards me to take a dump on my head. The evening turned into an unplanned pub-crawl as we chased the pipe dream of a TV-less pub. We sat in two and put our heads in four before finding one with a screen-less area. Some evenings the best course of action is to go home and read some Yeats in peace. We need some warnings to stop publicans from switching on their televisions at every turn. Even better, we need a campaign to ban screens from pubs. As with the smoking ban, it will be hard at first, but we will soon grow to appreciate the clean air(waves).

Is Romantic Ireland dead and gone? It  bloody will be if they insist on installing a TV set in every pub

Abandon all hope

   

Who takes your money to enter the buffet?

An Indian woman in her sixties. Lilac under her eyes. A faint smile worn out through the night and a monotone “can I see ID please?” as you get a stub for a Bloody Mary.

Who takes you to your table?

An aging Filipino woman. Her floral polyester shirt in no way connected to distant Manila. A stooping figure who deftly negotiates the cluster of hungry gamblers crowding the seafood stand.

Who serves your drinks?

An overweight Mexican man slowly shuffles to the table balancing a tray with tumblers. You catch the corner of his eye and realise that hell is at his doorstep day in, day out. He will not acknowledge that you share your mother tongue.

Who clears your table?

An octogenarian Guatemalan woman, fingers warped by arthritis. She drags a trolley, Windex dangling; a mop, like a cadaverous amulet, springs up from a bucket. She should be rocking herself on a porch, delicately bathed by declining sunshine, instead she sprays the table behind you and her eyes squint through the chemical mist.

Later you will lose all the money you play at the slot machines, but you  already know that the game is rigged, and that most leave the room empty handed.

Austin, the weird

The unofficial motto of our second destination in Texas, Austin, is “keep Austin weird”, a slogan reportedly coined by local community college librarian Red Wassenich, and his wife, Karen Pavelka, in response to what they felt was a “rapid descent into commercialism and over development”. It follows then, that any good Austinite will purport to keep his or her city “weird” not by, say, strapping a live duck to their chins and walking backwards reciting sections of the Book of Revelations in Klingon –undoubtedly a weird sight, but one that would hardly have an effect on the stultifying conformity of a corporate mass culture; but by continuing to support and sport alternative lifestyles as well as local individual businesses, keeping franchises at arms’ length and promoting the city’s unique culture through its business ventures.

The irony of the rapid descent into commercialism and uniformity of the “keep Austin weird” slogan when printed on an ubiquitous t-shirt notwithstanding, there is a salutary rebelliousness to the motto, refreshingly unburdened of the usual platitudes about the American can do spirit.  To be weird is to be unique in a manner that may be disquieting to others and not hastened to be imitated. The motto suggests that Austin’s tradition is at odds with the Texan, even American tradition, and invites all potential rebel rousers and miscreants to enjoy the city’s famed tolerance. I consider myself a person with a healthily quirky disposition and have raised an eyebrow or two in my life time when voicing unexpected viewpoints. My life style, whilst not completely on the avant-garde of human behaviour, does not fit into the mold of the average person my age. Yet, upon arrival in Austin, I was crippled by the uncomfortable feeling that I was not weird enough, something that as a Madridian[1] I never thought I would experience. You see, being consistently, even persistently, weird is hard work. It is hard work to always be genuine, original and slightly odd. Now and then we all relax into a slouch of conformity by talking about the weather, having a Starbucks coffee or getting a mortgage. (In fact, just there I was thinking about getting a mortgage whilst having a Starbucks coffee.)

 So we arrived in Austin and began our foray into weirdness very poorly by driving to the vicinity of 6^th Street in the hopes of having a drink and maybe getting a whiff of some live music. If there is any city in the United States where we could have put our usually disconcerting pedestrian yearnings to good use in the service of enhancing our weirdness, that city is Austin. But no, we drove instead, just like anybody else. Austin had demonstrated just how weird it could get earlier by furnishing us with an extraordinarily good Mexican meal in an authentic Mexican restaurant –not Tex-Mex, you see– and this is how we repaid it. Driving into town. Like anybody else would.

I must say, though, that although we drove into town, something magical happened when we arrived, indeed something that you may call weird outside of Brooklyn: restaurants, bars, cafes, shops, you frigging name it, all stood within walking distance of one another. You could, for argument’s sake, get a burrito in one of the many food trucks parked in lots and sporting picnic tables, and then WALK to a cocktail bar for a slice of pie and a michelada for dessert, then take another few steps and stare at the wondrous and, indeed, weird, bric-a-brac in a vintage store and finally be blinded by the neon sign of a fifties motel. Just like that. One foot in front of the other in a matter of minutes: one small business after the next, mostly owned by the people who run them. Nobody need tell you about the secret cafes and bear bars that grace the remotest corners of suburbia like in Houston. Nobody had to tell us about the vegetarian café where I had one of the best breakfasts I have ever tasted in the shape of a perfectly fried egg, perfectly airy and moist slice of corn cake, perfectly pulpy freshly-squeezed orange juice and perfectly roasted coffee.

 

All was out in the open here. I have always liked a city that opens its arms to strangers. Weirdness can be beautiful like that.

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[1] I have always been plenty weird in Madrid. I wonder what could become the unofficial motto of Madrid, what is there to preserve that is unique to its culture? “Keep Madrid noisy, polluted and a stronghold of PP” does not exactly roll off the tongue…

Houston, we have a problem

My first destination in Texas, Houston, gave me an unprecedented taste of urban space built to an American model that has no replica in Europe. Sure, I had experienced the dismally unnourishing ratio of restaurants/bars-to-people in Downtown Washington but the capital was still redolent of some Olde Worlde ideal in the fuck-off size of its Neoclassical public buildings. Downtown Houston, on the other hand, looks like a really boring financial district on steroids: skyscrapers, huge parking lots, no people anywhere in the evening. Actually, very few cars in view, now that you ask. Just huge tall buildings made of glass and various metals where an evil mastermind is plotting a second financial meltdown that will magically line his pockets and leave everybody else destitute.

The size of buildings and the blood-chillingly sterile feel of a place, however, are per se of no importance whatsoever to somebody driving into a city with an empty stomach at 9pm because as I have discovered in this trip nothing is important when your stomach is really empty after a really long drive. To wit: Your mother had a triple-bypass and also needs your kidney? Not important. Ethan Hawke -coincidentally a Texan– makes eyes at you and throws the keys to his house on your lap after shoving his current wife under a car? Not important. North Korea has nuked South Korea and is imminently going to nuke Houston where you are really hungry right now? Not important. So, really, clever(ish) observations about architecture, so NOT important.

Why do you make clever(ish) observations about architecture then? You may ask. The answer is that, as per the Washington example, urban planning gives you vital information  about your chances of getting to a restaurant ON FOOT without being committed to a mental asylum or mistaken for a Depression-Era hobo carrying his clothes in a stinky bundle hanging from a stick. And if you have been in a car for about 10 hours, the last thing you want to do upon arriving at your destination is drive anywhere. And in Houston we just wanted to walk the twenty-odd minutes to a Mexican restaurant calculated by Google Maps. Only deserted streets that look like the lair of a twisted financial mastermind are unsettling and make you ask cops if you are walking in the right direction and the cops –echoing a widespread American sentiment– go “I would not walk there” deterring you from continuing your quest. Unfortunately you have not realised yet that the emphasis is on WALK and not THERE. You see, walking is something that only toddlers and New Yorkers do in the US. Everyone else has experienced walking only vicariously in poorly lit scenes in slasher films, where a teenager walks into a wood to find out what the heavy breathing is all about, or a lonesome traveller walks into a gruesome-looking den where somebody is fine-tuning something that sounds suspiciously like a chainsaw. And they saw them at a drive-in.

So in Houston, unwisely, we decided to turn around and find somewhere local. Nothing fancy, we thought. Fast food will do. A reasonably stocked grocery store will suffice. A two-day-old sandwich kept cool we will not refuse. Our minds were open. Our pockets had enough dough. Our feet enough vim. We were in a sincere “it will do” mood. Unfortunately there was nothing for us to tolerate, condescend, or even grit our teeth to, in the knowledge that it would make a really good anecdote back home. Nothing. Nada. Or as they say in Texas –or at least an annoyingly cartoonish Southern voice in my head– “darn tooting nothing, no siree.”

We would walk for a block and spot a neon sign in the distance and say to each other, “There it is, that’s where I am going to eat an undetermined foodstuff that will do!” only to have our hopes crushed upon discovery that it was a bail bond outlet. Trust me, after eight potential eateries are revealed to be garishly-lit bail bond outlets you do not exactly lose your will to live, but let’s say that you seriously consider holding somebody at knife point to get some food, since clearly, bailing or being bailed is a much easier thing for a pedestrian to do than eating in Downtown Houston. I may be in a detention centre somewhere in Houston right now if it were not because there was nobody to mug for food in the street and I would be easily out on bail by now. (Ok, I don’t carry a weapon either, but I was planning on a devastatingly withering remark.)

That night we went to bed hungry and frustrated. The following morning, our charming hostess –an artist living in a loft with an exquisitely stocked fridge that we did not dare to raid– after offering us coffee and breakfast, revealed all we needed to know about eating in Houston. First of all, the quest for an eaterie in the area was doomed from the start, there are none. Walking is, of course, viewed with suspicion and/or alarm. A Houstonian would have hopped in his/her car and driven to the restaurant. Presumably, those without cars are too pauperous to eat in a restaurant, so no point asking about their chances of fine dining. (In the interest of full disclosure, I am obliged to say that you can cycle in Houston as there is a public bike system.You could also take public transport to a destination in the vicinity, I guess.) To sum up, we wanted to walk to a restaurant and that was wrong, wrong, wrong.

She then recommended a place for brunch she frequents called Baby Barnaby’s. We could drive there in about 20/25 minutes, wait for a while to get a table as it is really popular and enjoy an excellent meal in a bright welcoming space before heading to Austin. That is exactly what we did, driving to a pleasant suburb in the outskirts of Houston where you can find Baby Barnaby’s in a clapboard residential-looking house across from a bear bar sportig a rainbow flag cross-pollinated with the Texan flag. The brunch was perfectly satisfying, not only because the food was excellent but because there were other people sitting in the same room, strangers at that, something that seemed in short supply in Downtown Houston. It was well worth the wait in 40 plus degrees in the sweletering sun.

If you know anything about the States you may realise that there is something a bit odd about this, admittedly bland, finale with pancakes and eggs. You may not bat an eyelid at the lack of restaurants in an office area, but surely you will find both a cafe and a bear bar in a residential area bizarre. Well, you are not wrong to raise an eyebrow, and the reason for this unusual mixture of subarban houses and commercial buildings lies in the fact that Houston is a zoning-free city: this means that you can build anything you want anywhere you want, provided it will be financially sound to do so. In theory you could erect, say, a chemical factory next to a residential estate, although in practice, strong private covenants tend to be enforced to prevent that kind of development in residential areas.

Supply and demand dictate construction in Houston, which explains why the particular Downtown area we stayed in had nothing but bail bond outlets, since that is what is in particular demand in the area (I am presuming there is some sort of detention centre nearby). Wtih few residents and fewer visitors wandering the streets at nightime looking for food, marketplace logic dictates that there will be no eateries. Cue my aimless ravenous hunger.

Lack of zoning also explains the intriguing presence of the much appreciated cafe and its gay-friendly counterpart in a neighbourhood where elsewhere you will only find picket fences and lawn sprinklers. Two places that lifted the spirit of an area that may otherwise have been dampened by the conformity and self-satisfaction of your typical American suburb.

Here I take the liberty to momentarily go back to my hostess’s loft downtown: a beautiful space filled with her art sporting a well-dressed library. During this trip I fancied myself in possession of Holmes-like powers of deduction when it came to various hosts’ life styles. A sure way to find out whether you can have a decent conversation with a stranger is to peruse their shelves: to see a beloved book or two on a stranger’s shelf is heartening and bodes well for the quality of the conversation you may enjoy. I was pleased to find out that our hostess had several books that were also sitting on my shelves in Dublin: although I had not met her yet (she had left instructions on how to get into the house and make ourselves at home) she was clearly talented and had excellent taste. My vanity directed me to the harmonious correspondence of art and literature in the loft and to the potential reflection of similar qualities in my character as the possessor of some of the same volumes. Alas, on the top shelf, I also found a book by Milton Friedman (of the Chicago School of Economics that so perniciously shaped the economy in the last few decades of deregulation) and a well-thumbed copy of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (a book that has probably fed in equal measure adolescent fantasies of self-sufficiency and free market zealotry.)

It could, of course, be that she had those books on her shelves because she was well-read and wanted to keep her (literary and political) friends close and her enemies closer, but somehow I doubt it. They were displayed on the top shelves at eye-level for easy reach when standing up and Atlas Shrugged was lovingly worn out, like a teddy who has lost an eye because of a child’s too enthusiastic and frequent effusions.

When I finally met my hostess she was charming, intelligent, helpful and warm. I did not mention her books nor enquire about her politics. We did converse about education and, of course, urban planning, but we made vague noises in the general direction of good will and concern that even a seasoned Egyptologist may have found hard to decipher. The secret of harmony when conversing with strangers is not to avoid politics (which is impossible and also moronic) but to speak about problems, never about solutions. There are very few people out there who will profess a desire to see education standards decline, hordes of famished people in the streets, and environmental meltdown, but many will disagree on how to achieve desirable outcomes in those fields.

We did not broach our political leanings but I suspect that hers were a reflection of the mixture of free market endorsement and social tolerance that was evident in my limited but illuminating gastronomic adventures in Houston. On her shelves Rand rubbed elbows with Bedchel, Friedman with Spiegelman. On the streets of Houston, the foodless sterility of financial might with the unexpected culinary bounty of a socially inclusive suburb.

Don’t mess with Texas

Is politics determined only by the vote people put in the ballot box or can you take a place’s political pulse by the food they put in their mouths? Take Texas, for instance, a place best known for pint-sized big-breasted ladies lounging by their swimming pools (ok, this may just be the one time I managed to get an eyeful of Lucy Ewing in Dallas as a kid before my parents booted me back to bed, but you get the idea); or petrol gushing out of the soil in enormous sky-soaring spurts turning cowboys into oil tycoons thus generating a rivalry between fellow ranchers that will pinpoint important cross generational issues in an epic and somehow melodramatic storyline (ehem, this may be taken from the IMDB plot summary of ill-remembered James Dean vehicle Giant, but please look the other way and continue to believe that I know what I am talking about); nevermind, perhaps you know Texas as the place that gave intellectual wunderkind George W Bush his first shot at thwarting evil folk and stuff (this is taken from… shit, this is taken from reality. Gasp).

Ok, let’s face it. The truth is that neither you (particuarly you, European leftie type) nor I (also European leftie type) know nothing about Texas but I was there on my road trip for a grand total of three days, spoke to some good people, seemed to spend the majority of the time driving through enormous unpopulated expanses of land going “fuck, this is big” and peddling the oft-repeated “Texas is bigger than France but only has 25 million inhabitants” to my travelling companion enough times to make Cliff from Cheers blush, and stopped in a number of places to have widely differing eating experiences that, upon reflection, seem to say something or other about the diversity of the Lone Star state’s politics and culture. So here is my twopence. Oh, and don’t expect me to be so forthcoming about my ignorance anywhere else in the future.

(Clears throat.)

So…

Is politics determined only by the vote people put in the ballot box or can you take a place’s political pulse by the food they put in their mouths?

All will be revealed in my exposé about Texas, where I spent a grand total of three days imbibing and digesting the culture to an extent hitherto unimagined by super smart travellers covering impressively big expanses of land at lightning speed…

In our first instalment in this series our writer tries to eat in a Restaurant in Houston with intriguing results that will help our readers understand the Lone Star’s politics better and provide them with witty repartee!

Don’t mince your words: on burgers and culture wars

You may think that history is exclusively written on the battlefield and in the lab: remember the time all those men fought all those other men for that cause? Or the time that dude discovered that bacteria under the microscope? Yes, you do. And if you don’t, don’t fret, you can find it on the interwebs: all you have to do is Google “dude”, “bacteria”, and “microscope”. But history is also written in a grease joint: as the exponential expansion of burger chains in the second half of the 20^th century attests. We are all familiar with news of the proliferation of fast food outlets beyond the Iron Curtain after the fall of the Berlin Wall. When it comes to the end of the Cold War, the McDonald’s in Red Square is more eloquent than any erudite treaty on the matter.

As a child growing up in the 1980s in Spain, it was very clear to me that, when it came to food, a cultural war was being fought behind the glass doors of McDonald’s and Burger King. Of course, at the time, I would not have put it that way, but children are often, as I wrote in an earlier post, at the mercy of adults when it comes to eating, and are thus, more privy to their culinary idiosyncrasies than adults would realise. The complexity of that cultural war cannot be underestimated. The first McDonald’s opened in Spain in 1981, only six years after the death of Franco, three years after the 1978 Constitution was approved by referendum, and one year before the Socialist Party won the elections for the first time by a landslide majority. You may argue that McDonald’s, and the other fast food outlets that came in its wake, were tied to a nascent Spain airing the dusty remnants of Francoism and its decrepit rituals; A Spain yearning for more colour and less solemnity. But the early 1980s were also a time when a sizeable number of Spaniards, in the thick of the Cold War and its block politics, were reconsidering Spain’s geopolitical alignment.

In the 1950s Franco had allowed American bases on Spanish soil as part of a renewed trade and military agreement with the US. In exchange, the American government reviewed its position on the dictatorship culminating with Richard Nixon declaring Franco “a loyal friend and ally of the United States” (this statement left a bad taste in many a Spaniard’s mouth). In 1984, only three years after the opening of the first McDonald’s in Spain, a referendum was held to decide whether Spain would remain in NATO or return to its previous non-aligned position. In the increasingly tense climate leading up to the referendum American cultural presence was put under scrutiny by those who had felt betrayed by the US endorsement of Franco in the 50s and increasingly disillusioned with American foreign policy in the 1970s and 80s, particularly in Spanish-speaking countries like Chile and Central America.

Franco and Nixon: great chums

Sometimes, a burger is not just a burger. Sometimes a burger is seen as the friendly face of ugly foreign policy. Ronald McDonald as a front for Ronald Reagan. Sometimes politics can give tasty food a nasty flavour. Spaniards in the 1980s may not have felt the threat of American intervention like Nicaraguans or El Salvadorians, but they were immersed in a complex redefinition of their political institutions and cultural identity: paradoxically eager for the outside world and weary of its most strenuous influences.

When it comes to defining what Spain is, I struggle as much as anybody, but one thing I am certain of, food is at the heart of whatever it means to be Spanish. This means that in Spain cultural identity is transmitted to children at the table more than from the pulpit or lectern. Take the child I was in 1983, the child of leftist parents who disparaged American food, yet loved American music and film; a child who was exposed to American classic movies, rock and roll, and jazz from an early age; a child who thought nothing of eating octopus, yet found cereal and hotdogs alien. The child I was in 1983 badly wanted to have a burger, but did not dare to ask until, one day, my father suggested I try one for the first and last time by taking me to a well-known chain.

I ordered a burger with fries and a vanilla milkshake and to this day, I don’t know for sure what I really thought of the burger. I took a bite and told my father I didn’t like it but ate the fries and drank the accompanying vanilla shake with relish. I suspect I was telling my father what he wanted to hear. Perhaps I had built up the flavour of burgers to such an extent that I was disappointed. We are always tottering on the line between independence and conformity. I wanted to sample food untainted by paternal sanction by ironically subscribing to a growing global trend that thrives in uniformity and mass consumption. In the end I returned to the family fold.

It was much later that I realised that, when it came to food, the cultural war was won by Spain before it even began because Spain has its own indigenous fast food: bocadillos, pinchos de tortilla, pimientos de padrón, calamares…All you have to do is walk into your local bar at any time of the day and take your pick.

Spanish Fastfood: in this instance in Restaurante Oriza, Seville

A child can learn a lot with a simple bite. The taste lingers and becomes food for thought. I have also won my own personal cultural war: unlike my elders I don’t mistake burgers with the corporations that mass-produce them. I don’t eat them often and never in corporate outlets, but I will confess to liking them as much as I like some native foods. I think I have managed something hitherto thought impossible: a healthy relationship with fast food.