Eat sardines at the beach or in the woods
For understandable reasons, columns, blogs, and newsletters about food largely focus on what to eat and how to prepare it. This Azerbaijani tin of skate in garlic is great, the writer writes. Have it gently nested in arugula. I enjoy reading things written in this line, and writing in it, but as I was eating some tinned fish the other day it occurred to me just how much it misses the where. Consider the hot dog: Prepared in my kitchen, it’s a bleak thing to eat, redolent of grim necessity, poor choices, and anxiously-awaited spousal judgment. The exact same one prepared the exact same way in a public park is a princely meal, all crisp snap and tender yielding; a much worse one steamed in a metal box at a baseball game is a kingly one. The difference is the where.
When I think about the tins I’ve enjoyed most, I don’t think about the ones that were objectively best, but about moments. I for instance vividly remember being the barely employed parent of a young child, very much counting every dollar, sitting in the dining room of a run-down Hyde Park apartment idly tapping my foot on a fixture under the table that had been put there so that the residents could summon a maid to bring in the next course, and enjoying some Bela-Olhão sardines with mustard and onion on a really good everything bagel. I was thinking about how nice it was to be able to have something excellent, even though I couldn’t afford extravagant things. The tin was irrelevant; as far as what I was eating went, I cared, as someone who grew up in New York, about having found a place in Chicago that made a really good bagel. What mattered was that at a moment when I was scared of the future, and more than that scared for my family, and more than that scared that I’d consigned them to a horrible future for doing nothing worse than being my family, I appreciated things—I was in a lovely if slightly shabby apartment in one of the most beautiful neighborhoods in America, with my beautiful family somewhere off in another room, enjoying a lunch that wouldn’t have been appreciably better if I’d had a hundred times more money to spend on it than I did.
Years later, I was sitting on a bench in French Creek State Park, 50 or so miles outside Philadelphia. My family and I were prospering and thriving, but I didn’t know the city—to which we’d moved to further prosper and thrive—or the region at all, and I was getting to know both by riding my bicycle everywhere, something that can be very frightening on unfamiliar rural roads, especially when the roads at times open out into big multilane roads fronting proto-exurban expansions. I had a Chicago-friendly single-speed bicycle at the time, loaded down with gear for an overnight camping trip and completely inadequately geared for some of the short, sharp, brutal hills at the very end of the trip. (I was also completely inadequately prepared, having lived in Chicago for so long, for any climb steeper than an overpass.) While some pearl couscous was cooking in a camping mug over a pocket stove, I chopped a shallot and a pepper, and dumped them and a tin of some kind of sardines in when the couscous was done. My thighs were shot from the climbs and, while I know this is not how things work, I could feel the protein going straight to them; it was as satisfying a meal as I’ve ever had, and at that precise moment, appreciating the varied topography of Eastern Pennsylvania and how easy the country was to get out to from the middle of the city relative to how easy it is from the middle of New York and Chicago, where I’d lived most of my life, I started to think things might work out okay for me, which they more than have.
I didn’t have any big epiphany this weekend, when I took the photo atop this newsletter on an island where I went camping with family. We set up a tent on the beach after seeing some wild horses and when it made sense, I took a book I’ve been working my way through forever out closer to the shore along with a tin of Bela-Olhão sardines and a box of Triscuits, and sat there reading the book and cutting chunks of the sardines out with a knife that means a lot to me because it used to belong to a family member who’s passed and heaping them, using the sharp end of the knife, on the crackers and enjoying the salty air and the fog and feeling, for the first time in a while, genuinely relaxed. I got up in the middle of the night and walked along the dunes and took this photo, which isn’t great but made me appreciate that the surveillance gadget I carry around with me can take a picture that does a functional job showing what I was seeing under nothing but moonlight, something many and perhaps most of the great photographers who have ever lived would have considered a miracle:
I increasingly think that min-maxing is a more operant and dominant metaphor for everything that’s horrifying about American life than most people realize. It comes from role-playing games, in the course of which you assign points to the various traits your character can have; if you play the game in a clever and efficient way you allocate the points such that the character is useless in areas you don’t care about and highly skilled in ones you do. (This can apply to things like cycling, where you can think about ratios of energy yield to weight even while just spinning out to a state park and end up eating weird science products that taste like car tires in the middle of and after your ride rather than just carrying and eating some food and enjoying it.) If you were to min-max tinned fish, you would get the maximum quality for the minimum payout, eating the best food the best way while spending the least on it, and you’d be missing the point, which really has nothing to do with what you’re eating. I have no idea what you have going on right now, but I hope you have time—or can make time—to get out to a beach, or a forest, or a quiet part of your place, and have a moment you just enjoy and appreciate.