Medium Raw

I figure, I’m going to spoil the shit out of this kid for a while, then pack her off to tae kwon do as soon as she’s four years old. Her first day of second grade and Little Timmy at the desk behind her tries to pull her hair? He’s getting an elbow to the thorax. My little girl may grow up with lots of problems: spoiled; with unrealistic expectations of the world; cultural identification confusion, perhaps (a product of much traveling in her early years); considering the food she’s exposed to, she shall surely have a jaded palate; and an aged and possibly infirm dad by the time she’s sixteen. But she ain’t gonna have any problems with self-esteem.

Whatever else, she’s never going to look for validation from some predatory asshole. She can—and surely will—hang out with tons of assholes. Dads, I’m assured, can never hope to control that. All I can hope for is that she hangs out with assholes for her own reasons—that she is genuinely amused by assholes rather than needing them to make her feel better about herself.

I wish.

John F. Kennedy said something truly terrifying—guaranteed to make every parent’s blood run cold: “To have a child is to give fate a hostage.”

Something I wish I’d never read. I can only hope she’s happy—even weird and happy will suit me just fine. She will feel loved. She’ll have food. And shelter. A large Italian and Sardinian family—and a smaller American one. She’ll have seen, by the time she’s six years old, much of the world, and she’ll have seen, as well, that not everybody on this planet lives—or can live—anything like the way she lives. She will, hopefully, have spent time playing and running barefoot with the children of fishermen and farmers in rural Vietnam. She will have swum in every ocean. She will know how to use chopsticks—and what real cheese is. She already speaks more Italian than I do.

Beyond this, I don’t know what else I can do.

12

“Go Ask Alice”

To him the markets were like the stomach of the shopkeeping classes, the stomach of all the folks of average rectitude puffing itself out, rejoicing, glistening in the sunshine, and declaring that everything was for the best.

—ÉMILE ZOLA, LE VENTRE DE PARIS

Alice Waters wants to help. Shortly after Barack Obama’s election victory, the “Mother of Slow Food” wrote the new president a letter, advising him of his first order of business: that “the purity and wholesomeness of the Obama movement must be accompanied by a parallel effort in food at the most visible and symbolic place in America—the White House.”

Reminding the president that they had helped raise money for him, she proposed that she and her friends, then–Gourmet

editor Ruth Reichl and restaurateur Danny Meyer, be brought aboard immediately, “as a small advisory group—a ‘Kitchen Cabinet’ if you will—to help with your selection of a White House chef. A person with integrity and devotion to the ideals of environmentalism, health and conservation…”

That there already was a chef at the White House, a person of “integrity and devotion,” seems not to have occurred to Ms. Waters. Nor did it seem to matter that this chef had been sourcing and serving largely organic, local, and sustainable food for years—or that there already was a kitchen garden. Making the mistake of judging a kitchen staff solely by its customers, Waters, observing—or at least hearing of—the previous tenant, no doubt assumed the worst. But I doubt she considered the matter long enough for even a cursory Google search.

It was, as it so often is, ultimately, all about Alice. “I cannot forget the vision I have had since 1993,” she gushed beatifically, “of a beautiful vegetable garden on the White House lawn. It would demonstrate to the nation and to the world our priority of stewardship of the land—a true victory garden!”

She got her garden in the end, as things turned out. Though the new president managed to resist the temptation to appoint Ms. Waters to government office.