Writing about food: Jim Harrison, "The Raw and the Cooked, Adventures of a Roving Gourmand"

"I spent two weeks at the Rancho La Puerta health spa ... in order to quit smoking ... . Almost incidentally I lost seventeen pounds in two weeks. ... The menu was total vegetarian with fish twice a week. ... At the Rancho one day at lunch I told some ... ladies what I thought was a charming story of simple food. One August, years ago, I was wandering around the spacious property of a chateau up in Normandy, trying to work up a proper appetite for lunch. The land, owned by a friend, doubled as a horse farm and a vicious brood mare had tried to bite me, an act I rewarded with a stone sharply thrown against her ass. Two old men I hadn't seen laughed beneath a tree. I walked over and sat with them around a small fire. They were gardeners and it was their lunch hour, and on a flat stone they had made a small circle of hot coals. They had cored a half dozen big red tomatoes, stuffed them with softened cloves of garlic, and added a sprig of thyme, a basil leaf, and a couple of tablespoons of soft cheese. They roasted the tomatoes until they softened and the cheese melted. I ate one with a chunk of bread and healthy-sized swigs of a jug of red wine. ... A simple snack but indescribably delicious. I waited only a moment for the ladies' reaction. CHEESE, two of them hissed, CHEESE, as if I puked on their sprouts, and WINE! The upshot was that cheese was loaded with cholesterol and wine has an adverse effect on blood sugar.

"At dawn the next morning I decided to skip human life and spend the day in the mountains. ... I took my binoculars, an orange, a hard-boiled egg, and a one-once bottle of Tabasco for the egg. ... Four hours into the mountains I ate the egg and the orange with relish. ... Then out out of the chaparral appeared a tough, ragged-looking Mexican who asked me if I had anything to eat. I said no, wishing I had saved the orange. He smiled, bowed, and continued ... presumably toward the United States and the pursuit of happiness, including something to eat.

"I remembered, in my wandering starving artist years in the late 1950's, spending subway fare for a thirty-five-cent Italian-sausage sandwich and walking seventy blocks to work the next morning, eating free leftovers given to me by Babe and Louis at the Kettle of Fish bar, buying twenty-five-cent onion sandwiches on rye bread at McSorley's. I had wonderful meals working as a poetic busboy at the Prince Brothers Spaghetti House in Boston; I often devoured two fried eggs after Storyville, the best jazz club ever, closed at dawn. In the San Francisco area there were two-for-a-nickel oranges, the oddly delicious macaroni salad at the Coexistence Bagel Shop for a quarter, the splurge of an enormous fifty-cent bowl of pork and noodles in Chinatown. And let's not forget the desperation of eating ten-cent cafeteria bread and ketchup in Salt Lake City or the grapefruit given me by an old woman in the roadside dust near Fallon, Nevada."