Opa

Every year I go to the Vancouver Music Folk Festival. The festival starts on a Friday evening in the middle of July and ends that Sunday night. At the festival they have an area set up for vendors to sell various kinds of foods to the festival goers. This past year on Friday evening I went to see what there was for dinner. I noticed a new vendor who hadn't been there in prior years: Opa’s Suppenküche. It was a cool evening and I thought to myself, “Mmmmmmmmmmm, soup. A nice, rich, hearty bowl of some kind of German soup with a hunk of rye bread slathered with butter. That would be perfect."

I walked over to peruse the menu:

·         Chili – $8.00

·         Vegetarian – $7.00

·         in bread bowl – add $2.00

Top with your choice of chopped onions or cheese.

There was an old man standing behind the counter. I said to him "Opa’s Suppenküche?”

"Yes," he replied, "I'm Opa,” then he leaned in and added, "Opa is German for grandfather."

"Yes, I know, and ‘Suppenküche’ is German for ‘soup kitchen,’” I replied. He looked pleased that I knew what it meant. "But you don't have any soup," I said.

"We have chili," he said. "It's very good chili."

"But if you don't have soup," I said, "you can't call yourself Opa’s Suppenküche.”

Opa no longer look pleased. "It's $8.00," he said, "or $10.00 if you want it in a bowl made of hollowed out bread. It's very good chili."

"I was really wishing for a nice, rich, hearty bowl of a German soup. Perhaps with a hunk of rye bread. And butter. That would have been perfect. Beans, er, give me… ah... gas. It's not something I really want to eat here at the festival." I said.

Opa did not look happy. "It's very good chili," he said.

"No, thank you." I said as I walked away.

The next day around lunchtime I went back to the food area to get something to eat. I glanced over at Opa’s Suppenküche. A sheet with the word "chili" had been pinned over “Suppenküche,” so now the sign read, “Opa’s Chili." I still didn't want chili, but I looked around for Opa to give him a thumbs-up on changing the name. He wasn't there. Instead there was a young man behind the counter. I didn't see Opa again for the rest of the festival.

In my head I made up a story of a conversation the night before:

“I wanted to make soup," Opa said, "but noooooo, you said that people would want chili. You said it had to be chili."

"You wait and see grandpa," said the younger man. "Canadians love chili."

Of course, I have no idea why Opa was only there Friday night, but I like the story that I made up.

Opa, if you're out there, thumbs-up on changing the name, and next year, if you are returning to the festival, don't listen to your enkelchen. Serve soup. It's what you know.

Void

Not long ago someone asked me why I'm blogging. I suspected my reasons are pretty much the same as anybody else's: I have some things I want to say, and I enjoy writing. I started this blog two and half years ago, primarily to get myself writing again. I had been involved in another project and had stopped writing. Virtually all writers, and writing teachers, will tell you that if you want to be a writer you have to write every day. The blog concept seemed like a good motivator to start writing again. But there are a lot of other ways to exercise one's writing muscles: diaries, journals, and of course working on the book that I will never complete. The main difference with a blog is that it's public, while each of those others is a private endeavor.

So the main driver for this being a blog, rather than some private writing exercise, is the notion that I want other people to read what I have to say. I suspect that that's true of virtually any blogger, anyone with a personal webpage, anyone posting a review on Amazon.com, anyone posting a video on YouTube or photos on Flickr, etc., etc.

I read somewhere that the average blog is read by six people and maintained for three months. In terms of duration, my first shot at this blog beat the average. I kept it going for four months. I'm not certain, but I don't think I made it to six people. Six months later, two more postings – almost like a hiccup, or perhaps a flashback. A year and a half after that, for some reason I started up again.

The distinction between a blog and a private journal is that others are reading the blog. The author is looking for feedback, or a reaction, or something. Throwing a blog out into the void is spectacularly frustrating. If I were writing a private journal that no one would ever see, feedback would be surprising and possibly horrifying. But writing a public blog with no feedback just feels ridiculous. Hello? Hello? Is there anybody out there? There are little buttons at the bottom of each blog that say "like," and "dislike." No one ever pushes them. Is that because there's no one reading the blog, or because no one makes it through an entire blog entry, or because no one has an opinion, or because no one has an index finger with which to click their mouse button? Most of all, of course, what I'd really like to see are comments. The most interesting comment I've gotten in the last two and half years is from my friend Ken, correcting an error. Hi Ho.

Somewhere in the back of their mind I think every blogger wants to be the next “Daily Kos,” or Huffington Post. They want to pretend that they'll be recognized as the next great writer and thinker, heralded far and wide both for the quality of their ideas and the quality of their prose. With approximately 6 people reading my blog, and none of them offering any feedback whatsoever, it certainly feels like an exercise in futility – shouting out into some black empty void.

I wonder if it's time to plant potatoes.

Lessons

The most important lessons in life I learned from my dog:

#2 - When you get something really delicious, take it and run away. This is a lesson I would like to teach to everyone standing in front of me at a buffet.

#1 - When your loved one comes home, drop whatever you are doing, no matter how important, or interesting, or delicious, and run to greet them as though you haven't seen them for years, even though it might only have been 5 minutes.

Mitzvah

In Hebrew there is a word "mitzvah.” A mitzvah is literally a commandment – specifically one of the 613 commandments in the Torah, plus an additional seven added later. But the term "mitzvah" is also often used to refer to any good deed. I recently attended a bat mitzvah (the ceremony of coming of age of a Jewish girl,) during which the Rabbi talked about the Tzedakah, which can be roughly translated as “charity.” According to the Talmud, "Tzedakah and acts of kindness are the equivalent of all the mitzvot of the Torah" (Jerusalem Talmud, Pe'ah 1:1.) Specifically, the rabbi spoke of Maimonides’ laws concerning charity and the hierarchy of charitable giving (Maimonides was a Jewish philosopher of the 12th Century – See Maimonides Mishne Torah of 1180.)

In very abbreviated form, from lowest to highest, Maimonides said the eight degrees of giving are:

8) The lowest level is that of charity which is given reluctantly.

7) The next degree is that of charity which is given graciously, but where the amount that is given is less than "fitting."

6) Next is charity that is given, but only after the recipient asks for it.

5) Better still is charity that is given before the recipient asks for it.

4) A step above is charity in which the recipient knows from whom he is receiving the gift, but the giver doesn't know to whom he is giving.

3) Next, says Maimonides, is the case in which the giver knows to whom he is giving, but the recipient does not know from whence the gift came. (I find this to be a fascinating distinction.)

2) Second to the top is the gift in which the giver does not know to whom he is giving and the recipient is also ignorant of the source of the gift.

1) Maimonides says that the highest degree of charity is that in which a giver gives to someone in need the means to support themselves (e.g. employment, a loan to start a business, tuition for school, and apprenticeship, land on which to farm, etc.)

This highest degree of giving reminds me of the adage "give a man a fish and he eats for a day, teach a man to fish and he'll eat for a lifetime."

Sitting in the congregation at the bat mitzvah I was reminded of a lesson I learned years earlier at religious school. The teacher told us a story. I will attempt to repeat it here from my faded memory. No doubt it exists somewhere on the web. It may even be a famous parable. Please feel free to point out the source in a comment.

There was a small village, with some dozens of people. It was a large enough village to have people of a variety of ages, to have a handful of shops, a small hospital, and a small school, but small enough that everyone knew everyone else. Among the stores in the town there was a shoe maker. The cobbler had learned the shoe-making craft from his father, who had learned it from his father before him, and so on. He had lived in the village all his life. And he was known for being quite stingy. Being the only cobbler around, everyone bought their shoes from him, so it was a good business but he lived very simply. Behind his back, some people would grumble about his wealth and his stinginess.

Eventually the cobbler died. Some months later a crack developed in the wall of the hospital, requiring repair. But there was no money to fix the wall of the hospital. The townspeople all asked "why isn't there any money to fix the wall? The hospital has always been repaired in the past." The answer, it turned out, known only to the chief of the hospital, was that whenever the hospital needed repair the cobbler had given the money for the repairs. Later, the new school year began at the village’s school. The students, who had been used to receiving supplies from the school at the beginning of each year were told that there were no supplies – that they had to go out and get them themselves. It seems that each year, just before the beginning of school, boxes of supplies had been delivered. No one had known from whence they came, but after the old cobbler died, the boxes of supplies didn't appear. Over the years after the cobbler's death it became clear that any time the streets needed repair, or a poor child needed new shoes, or disaster or misfortune struck, the cobbler had taken care of it, quietly, behind the scenes, in secret.

The message that the teacher was giving us was the message of the third level in Maimonides hierarchy. I always had a lot of trouble with that story. I find it both touching and bothersome. I'm troubled by the notion that this man who was in fact so giving, was so dedicated to the idea of giving in secret that he was perceived in life as stingy. I don't think it's incompatible to give in secret, but also be perceived as kind and generous. I cant help wondering, wouldn't it have been better for the cobbler to have said, "I have performed a mitzvah, and you should too"? Might his giving in public have made others generous as well? If he had inspired a community of giving, there might have been a generation of donors in place to pick up where he left off. I don't have answers, but, I find this to be a thought-provoking story; it has stayed with me all my life.

The main point of my writing about this now, however, is that I think we have a moment in time where the cobbler mustn't work in secret, where he mustn't allow himself to be perceived as stingy if he is not stingy. We have a moment in time now where the leaders of this nation must be aware of the generosity of its citizens. I am convinced that Maimonides highest degree of giving is truly the highest mitzvah. But today, and maybe only just for today, the second-highest mitzvah must be to give charity, but also to give to the world the story of the rationale for the gift. The gift alone is no longer enough.

I look forward to your thoughts.

Professor

I took Introduction to Macroeconomics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst over 25 years ago. More importantly, the class was offered at 8AM. That meant that I slept through most of the lectures. So I was more than a little nervous that I may have made some embarrassing errors in yesterday's blog. I asked a friend of mine who is a professor of economics at a major university to read the posting and let me know if I had gotten it right. Turns out I did. I guess somnambulistic learning actually works.

His message, in addition to confirming my analysis, added some valuable insights. Though he has asked to remain anonymous, he has given me permission to publish his reply here. It follows:

[Your blog entry] is well written and economically sound. Your discussion of the marginal propensity to consume (MPC) is exactly on point. Of course, it is not the preferred option to raise taxes in a deep recession; ideally, we want all citizens to spend more money to get things moving again. But we also have public debts to pay, and we might even want to tax one group to redistribute to another (i.e., taxing a group with low MPC to redistribute to a group with higher MPC). If our fiscal health were otherwise robust, however, it would have been reasonable to extend the Bush tax cuts for another year or two. 

But our fiscal health is anything but robust. We have a large structural deficit at the moment, in substantial part (but not entirely) due to the Bush tax cuts, enacted as we commenced a full decade of war. Even with the economy going full bore, current tax rates are not sufficiently high to cover government obligations. 

Surely our successful friends, who no doubt made their money in business, understand that a business cannot continue to run negative balance sheets forever; eventually it will feel the icy fingers of the invisible hand clutching at its throat. Why don't these individuals want to apply similar logic to government spending? Sure, the U.S. Government won't go out of business. But some years from now, it will be forced to pay off its debt by heavily taxing younger workers, slashing promised benefits, and/or running high rates of inflation to reduce its real debt. All of these are less palatable and more painful than raising taxes a bit now on citizens with low MPC and low marginal utility of income. 

Editorially speaking, my strong impression is that the key political advocates for cutting taxes (e.g., House and Senate Republicans and the think tanks that supply their talking points) understand all of the above; they don't for the most part genuinely believe that cutting taxes for top earners raises net tax revenue or greatly stimulates the economy. Their goal, rather, is to keep the government in a perpetual state of deficit so that it's almost impossible to expand the scope of government. This is the so called "starve the beast" strategy. Well-meaning people can certainly have a principled argument about whether the government is too big, too small, or just the right size. But using disingenuous arguments that “taxing the rich hurts all of us” to keep the beast in a perpetual state of starvation is not a principled way to have this discussion. 

Multiplier

[Postscript: My concept about encouraging people to donate their tax breaks did not catch on.  The site I created is gone. Sigh.]

Last night I had dinner at a fantastic restaurant with two wonderful friends, whom I will call Dick and Jane. The launching of my new website, DonateYourTaxBreak, was very much on my mind, so of course I brought it up. Dick is a very smart guy, so I wanted his feedback. But he is also an anti-tax libertarian, going so far as to say that he has more in common with the Tea Party than with Democrats. When I told him about the website and my ideas for it, he said, "During a recession is exactly the wrong time to increase taxes on the people who create jobs in this country." He waved his hand, taking in the entire restaurant, saying, "look at all the people we are employing: everyone in the kitchen, the wait staff, the farmers who grow the food, the truckers who ship it here, and on and on." The point of the evening was to have a terrific meal and enjoy each other's company, so we agreed to drop the subject and move on to other things.

He's right of course. Wealthy people do create jobs. But he's only correct to a point. Yes, we spent money hand over fist at that restaurant, which no doubt benefited the local economy. But later in the conversation, Dick and Jane regaled me with their plans for a vacation they will take later in the year - traveling through Europe, Russia, and Asia. Do I believe that Dick and Jane deserve the wealth they have accumulated? Absolutely! Do I believe that they have worked hard, risked much, invested wisely, scrimped and saved, and benefited the economy throughout their lives by their actions and their taxpaying? Without a doubt! Do I believe that they deserve the right to spend that money on a fine dinner, or a vacation spent in far-flung parts of the world? Again, I say yes, and yes.

But did Dick and Jane need to have the Bush tax cuts extended in order to eat at that restaurant? No. Were they waiting to plan their trip until they knew the fate of the tax bill? No, they've been planning this trip for months. Did the passage of the tax bill impact their travel plans in anyway? None that I'm aware of. Without the tax cut, would they have needed to choose between a fine dinner and a vacation? Not at all. Will their trip through Europe, Russia, and Asia, benefit the American economy or American workers in any way? Almost not at all. Dick and Jane's favorite airline is British Airways. So the only benefit that will accrue to this nation from their travels are a few fees paid by British Airways to domestic airports for takeoff and landing privileges, a taxi ride to and from the airport, and perhaps a coffee or a doughnut while waiting for their flight to depart.

How will Dick and Jane use their tax savings? I don't know. But I can tell you what I would have done with my tax savings had I not pledged it to charity. I would have done the same thing in 2011 that I have done for the past ten years. I would've put it in my bank’s “high yield” savings account, currently earning a whopping 0.5%. What would my bank have done with it? I don't know. Maybe they would have lent it to people wanting to purchase homes. Maybe they would have lent it to small businesses wanting to expand. Or maybe they would have used it to purchase larger and larger holdings in Chinese banks, as Bank of America did with a healthy chunk of the billions it received from the TARP program.

My money wouldn't have sat at the bank earning a measly 0.5% forever. When time allowed I would have surveyed the world of investments available to me and moved a portion of my cash into something with better prospects. I can't say what exactly, but I keep my money in a highly diversified portfolio. Since I'm being so honest, possibly more honest than I should, I will tell you that my money is invested in a combination of domestic stocks and bonds, foreign stocks and bonds, precious metals (held both here and abroad), and foreign currencies. Money saved from paying my taxes would no doubt have been split among those various groups of investments, though the advisers I listen to most often are currently bearish on the US dollar, so it's likely that I would overweight the placement of that money into foreign stocks, bonds and currencies, benefiting the United States not at all. Therein lays the problem.

You may be surprised to know that it is a problem that economists have studied, analyzed, debated, written about, and taught to students for a long, long, time. It's nothing new. It's not remarkable. Yet our politicians and our media act as though this whole body of economic theory doesn't exist. Economists speak of "the multiplier process,” and the “velocity of money." There are some rather technical discussions of these subjects on Wikipedia. You can also read about it on a variety of other websites, and in virtually any book on introductory macroeconomics. [OK, all you economists out there – please don’t jump all over me. I am intentionally oversimplifying to get a point across. I am not teaching freshman Macro 101.] The basic idea is this: if you give one dollar to a man who has no money, he will immediately run out and spend it. He will buy food, he will buy clothing, he will buy shelter, and yes, he might buy alcohol, drugs, and cigarettes. Regardless, he will spend it ASAP. Economists would say that his “marginal propensity to consume” is high. Moreover, he will spend locally. In fact, he will spend it very, very, locally. The money will go to a local grocer, food purveyor, clothing store, landlord, etc. These local business are likely to turn around and spend that dollar very quickly and very locally too. They will buy provisions from their local suppliers; they will pay employees; and so forth. Those suppliers having been paid will purchase more supplies from their sources. The employees will spend their pay checks, quickly and locally, on, you guessed it, food, clothing, and shelter. On and on, the money will circulate at high velocity among those with a high marginal propensity to consume. Eventually the velocity will slow down. Bits and pieces of that dollar will go to pay foreign suppliers or investors, or will end up in the hands of those with a low marginal propensity to consume, amongst them banks and wealthy investors that own local businesses (directly or indirectly,) who won't rush to re-invest it or spend it.

It is this multiplier process that is such a problem in times of inflation. When there is inflation we want to decrease the money supply, so that there is less money "chasing" the same quantity of goods. When money is “multiplied” by circulating at high velocity, it has the same impact as increasing the money supply - it drives up prices, making inflationary conditions worse. But in a recession, you want people spending money. After 9/11, George W. Bush told us that it was our patriotic duty to go out and spend. We have all heard time and time again that it is the consumer that created the prosperity of the 90’s, and it is consumer spending that will lift us out of our current economic doldrums. So why is it that smart people like my friends Dick and Jane, and most of the Republicans in Congress [yes, though it may not always seem that way, most of them are in fact intelligent people,] are so hell-bent on giving money to those least likely to spend it, instead of people who will spend it as fast as possible and as locally as possible?

Of course I know the answer. Politics. Congressional Republicans’ constituents are wealthy. These Senators and Representatives believe that the only way to retain their jobs is to buy the votes and support of their constituents. Somehow it does not occur to them that we are not stupid, callous, and egocentric. They do not see that we are not motivated solely by greed. They do not understand that we value our brothers and sisters. They cannot conceive that we cherish a strong country - a country with a strong economy; a country with well-educated citizens; a country with healthy citizens; a country with happy citizens; a country united by common ideals and goals, rather than a country divided by mistrust and greed and hatred, need and desire and pain.

I have never met any Senator, Governor, or President of the United States, either past or current. I don't know how to get this message to them except by standing up, holding up my hand, and saying "Look! Look over here! Look at me! I don't want this! I don't want what you're doing! I don't want what you're doing in my name!" If I stand up, throwing my hands in the air, jumping up and down all alone, at best they will look at me and laugh. But what if we all stand up? What if we all raise our hands, and say, "No. This isn't acceptable. This isn't acceptable at all. This isn’t acceptable in my name. This isn’t acceptable in our names?" If we all stand up, if we all raise our hands, if we all demand to be counted, maybe we can return to caring, and kindness, and can sleep at night knowing that our good fortune is not someone else’s misfortune.

Amen.

Embarrassment

[Postscript: My concept about encouraging people to donate their tax breaks did not catch on.  The site I created is gone. Sigh.]

It is embarrassing to have so much at a time when so many have so little. But it is doubly embarrassing to have representatives whom I did not choose, and whom I do not like, fight vigorously for my right to have even more, leaving those at the bottom ever more impoverished.

I watched in horror as the tax cut extension bill was debated last month. The "jewel" of the tax package was retention of 35% as the top tax bracket, temporarily suspending it from returning to its prior 39.5%. In the process of winning this 4.5% break on income over a quarter of a million dollars, the Republicans embarrassed themselves, and they embarrassed those of us who have been fortunate enough, industrious enough, and thrifty enough to become wealthy. In addition, they have exacerbated the looming debt which threatens the economic recovery and long-term economic stability of this country.

More than anything it was the vigor with which they pursued this goal that left me so disturbed. The Republican’s rhetoric suggested that if the wealthy in America were to kitty up 4.5% of their incomes over a quarter of a million dollars the nation would grind to a halt; rivers would flow backwards; cows would stop giving milk; the ghosts of Marx and Lenin and Trotsky and Stalin would rise from their graves and descend upon these United States plunging our nation into a new dark ages. Meanwhile as they so pontificated, children in this very nation went to sleep hungry and young men and women lost their lives in foreign wars while committing ordered atrocities in the name of our morality and our way of life.

I couldn't stand it. I couldn't stand it any longer. A friend of mine recently said to me "if you're not part of the solution, then you're part of the problem." I remember at the time I told her, "Don’t be ridiculous." But here I am, unable to be idle, as Republicans in Congress put words in my mouth, claiming that I am so callous and so greedy, that without 4.5% of my income above a quarter of a million dollars I would curl up, shrivel up, and blow away.

I have today launched a new website: DonateYourTaxBreak a site whose intention is to publicly declare that those of us who have been most fortunate, do truly care about those who are least fortunate. It is barely up and running, just a shell of what I hope to create. I hope you will take a moment to look at the site and let me know what you think. More importantly I hope you'll return later when it is up and running, and if you are among the fortunate few in this country, that you will join me in pledging your unnecessary, unrequested, and undesired tax break to charities benefiting this great nation’s poor and underprivileged.

Worldview

At the most recent Key West Literary Seminar there was a panel of cookbook writers who spoke about their process in writing cookbooks. At the end there was a question-and-answer period during which I asked if they thought about who their reader was and what they expected that their reader knew. To frame my question I referred back to Apicius (the world's earliest cookbook) in which many of the recipes consist of nothing but a list of ingredients, others give directions that are very vague. The author of Apicius assumed that the reader would know what to do with those ingredients. Recipes in 19th-century cookbooks would give a set of ingredients and describe the techniques that were significant to that recipe, but would often conclude with something like "cook in the usual way.”

The first person on the panel basically blew off my question. She said that she assumes her reader knows nothing. If I had been in a pushy mood (and if I still had the microphone,) I could have challenged her on that saying, "That's not true at all! You assume that your reader knows quite a bit: You assume that your reader knows how to read! You assume that your reader knows the difference between a pot and pan; that they either own teaspoons and tablespoons, or are at least aware of their relative sizes; that they know what part of a chicken is the "breast" (chickens have breasts???); and so on." In her defense, she had spoken earlier about the great lengths she goes to writing about the recipe, testing her recipes, and providing photographs to make sure the reader understands not only what the recipe should look and taste like, but also what its context is in her culture.

To my great pleasure, Michael Ruhlman, who was on the panel, took up my question saying, "wait, that's an important question." A brief conversation among the panelists did ensue, considering the roles of different kinds of cookbooks aimed at novices versus experts, as well as primers that give the beginner a fundamental set of basic cooking knowledge. One panelist pointed out that in the introduction to Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Julia states, "stand facing the stove.”

As a culinary historian who spends his time reading old cookbooks, the question of who the reader is, and who the author thought the reader would be, is a vital component of understanding the book. In the earliest days of the publishing of cookbooks it is not clear that the author was writing for someone who was going to cook from the recipes. Those that could read, and those that could afford to purchase books, probably had someone who cooked for them. Those who cooked had neither the ability to read nor access to books. Some of the earliest cookbooks were guides to all domestic tasks, written by a master or gentlemen of the house for his wife or for his head servant. Over time as literacy became more widespread, professional chefs began writing cookbooks for each other. Later still, cookbook authors saw themselves as educators, providing guides for those that they presumed didn't know how to cook it all. Some of the most famous of these books, such as Fannie Farmer’s The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, were written by people who instructed at or had started cooking schools – intending the books to be used either by their students or by those not fortunate enough to be able to attend their school.

My favorite piece of text in any cookbook is found in the introduction to the first edition of The Picayune's Creole Cookbook, dated 1901:

Time was when the question of a Creole Cook Book would have been, as far as New Orleans is concerned, as useless an addition to our local literature as it is now a necessity, for the Creole negro cooks of nearly two hundred years ago, carefully instructed and directed by their white Creole mistresses, who received their inheritance of gastronomic lore from France, where the art of good cooking first had birth, faithfully transmitted their knowledge to their progeny… But the civil war (sic), with its vast upheavals of social conditions, wrought great changes in the household economy of New Orleans, as it did throughout the South; here, as elsewhere, she who had ruled as the mistress of yesterday became her own cook of today… the only remedy for this state of things is for the ladies of the present day to do as their grandmothers did, acquaint themselves thoroughly with the art of cooking in all its important and minutest details, and learn how to properly apply them.

I keep returning to this quote because I think it beautifully illustrates the reasons why cookbooks were written, as well as the reasons why cookbooks weren't written. Those that could read didn't cook, and those that cooked didn't read. Further, it shows so clearly the way changes in social structure, and historical events, change this equation. I have significantly edited the above paragraph for brevity. The original betrays significant racism. This too provides an important window into the worldview that created The Picayune's Creole Cook Book.

I appreciate the fact that Michael Ruhlman picked up on the larger meaning of my question, and I love the fact that culinary historians are being accepted as social scientists that can provide a new view into the motivations of the past.

Understanding

At the 2011 Key West Literary Seminar, David Mas Masumoto did something rather unusual during his talk. He handed out index cards to the audience, asking us to write the following at the top of our card, "I lost my food virginity when…" He then gave us a few minutes to write our story. Afterwards, some people read theirs aloud. Finally, he asked us to trade our cards with the people sitting next to us. It was a very interesting exercise. Here, then, is what I wrote:

It was my mother's birthday. She had made dinner for the family as she always did, but since it was her own birthday she had cooked a particularly special meal. She asked my father to get a bottle of wine from the cellar. This was unusual. Though there were cases of wine in the basement, my parents rarely drank any alcohol at all. They only had wine with dinner once or twice a year. My father went downstairs, returning with a bottle of Château Latour that had been laying there for some 20 or 30 years waiting for a "special occasion." This was to be its day.

There was a wine glass at my place, but when my father tilted the bottle to pour for me I declined because I didn't like wine. My mother said, "No, honey, you really have to try this." But I had never liked the Boone’s Farm, Gallo, or Manischewitz wines that I had tasted, so I refused. "No, no, you must try this," she said. So I accepted a tiny pour and tasted it. And then I understood.

Magic

To my great surprise I have found that I love growing tubers. The old standbys such as carrots, onions, garlic, and shallots, as well as ultra-obscure newcomers to the American farm-plot such as Oca (Oxalis tuberosa,) and Yacon (Polymnia sonchifolia) aka Bolivian Sunroot. But of all the tubers, my favorite to grow is the "humble" potato.

I could hardly be more surprised than you are. The joy I feel from growing potatoes is remarkable. You take a plot of earth - it needn't be particularly good earth, but it helps if it drains reasonably well and is friable. You make a hole. Into the hole you put what is referred to as a "seed potato" - either a small potato, or a piece cut from a larger potato. Then you cover it over and go away. After some time a few shoots emerge from the ground. The potato plant is a pleasant color of green, but otherwise quite unspectacular. If would be easy to walk past them without a glance. Vaguely vine-like green shoots coming up from the ground, supporting a modest number of leaves of a moderate size. Over time the plant may put on flowers, or maybe not. If it does, they will be insignificant little white flowers with no particular scent. Truly the potato plant is almost completely ignorable.

Then, one day, for no apparent reason the plant will start to wilt. Its leaves turn yellow then brown, but wont necessarily fall from the stalks. Soon they too will wither and the whole plant will collapse. You kneel at the base of the fallen greens, shove your hands into the soil, and immediately meet resistance. The ground is full of what seem to be rocks. But they are not rocks - they are potatos. The ground is full of food. It was laying there, completely hidden, just inches below the surface. Beautiful jewels of food, hidden in the ground. Below a particularly vigorous plant there may be so many that some are pushed up above the soil into the air - an amazing gift. When I see such a gem, I feel like a diamond miner who stumbles on a huge stone that is simply laying on the ground waiting to be picked up.

I fill my basket, return to the house, and pour them into the sink to rinse off the clods of dirt that have stuck to them, revealing shining skins encasing pods of starch. They are pink, and burgundy, and yellow. They are bumpy or smooth, creased, folded, crooked, round, oblong, with immaculate virgin coats or studded with eyes.

There was food in the ground. I put my hands in the earth, and there was food there. Magic.