Years ago, when I was writing about a wave of immigrant violence in France, a higher-up in the housing authority of a provincial city took me on a tour of some slum projects. Alphonse was his name. He was the directeur de régie de gestion, which, as best I could translate, meant “director of the directorate of direction.” His job seemed to involve lecturing journalists about food.
Standing in the middle of a parking lot where the cars were still smoldering from the previous night’s riots, I asked Alphonse how he maintained his optimism about immigration when half the neighborhood’s natives had fled. “I eat couscous for dinner every night!” he said perkily. To a similar question about boarded-up shops he replied, “Have you ever had a Turkish pizza?” To me it sounded like a non sequitur. To him it was a logical argument. His city was better because it was more diverse. And food was the only kind of diversity poor Alphonse understood.
Alphonse’s view carried the day. We all came to accept national decay as a price worth paying for varied cuisine. Not anymore! Donald Trump has promised to Make America Great Again. Fine by me. But the risk is he’ll take us back too far. Some morning we’ll wake up and find the country is so great, we can’t keep the food down.
How far can we afford to turn back the clock? Let’s start with two years. Back in 2015 I had never heard of poké or—I will admit it—larb. I like ’em, but I could do without ’em.
Five years ago, I thought kombucha was what politically correct people called Cambodia and that bibimbap was what Charlie Parker played while chain-smokers with black turtlenecks and goatees snapped their fingers and said, “Yeah, man! Crazy! Go, cat, go!” Already we are getting into foods I would miss, and we haven’t even time-traveled our way out of the Obama administration. Apparently we have a lot of good food to give up before we’re truly great.
So let’s go back 20 years, to 1997. That gets us back into the American Century. It’s a boom economy, and communism’s still dead. No one has heard of al Qaeda except a couple of doofuses at the Brookings Institution. There is a smell of greatness in the air. There is also the smell of really good Mexican food. Nonetheless there would be big sacrifices in that department if we had to go back 20 years. Mexicans had not yet been induced to share their best stuff. Soft flour tortillas and white cotija cheese were not yet available outside of the barrio. The word “taco” retained its age-old North American definition: last week’s hamburger meat, slow-fried, with red powder shaken on it, in a folded cracker. “Sorry, guys, I was exhausted,” your mother says as she throws it on the table.
Go back further, to 1987. It’s Morning in America. Unfortunately you can’t wake up this morning because there’s no such thing as espresso. At least not outside of New York, Seattle, Cambridge, and Miami (where people back then referred to standard American coffee as jugo de paraguas, or “umbrella juice”). Excuse me? You want a croissant with your coffee? Whyn’cha go to effin’ France! Leggo my Eggo!
This is getting a tad too “great” for me, but let’s go years back, back to the Carter administration in 1977. No one has ever heard of sushi, except Japanese people—and you’d no sooner buy food from them than you would a car. Hamachi? Whassat? Japanese for Hamburger Helper? The country is still too great for that.
And a funny thing happens as we go back in time. We don’t think about food so much. Somehow, the country manages to produce a surprising number of interesting things to eat. American businessmen have been hunting down the tastier, more portable, and therefore more retailable items from the second-string cuisines of Europe—Jarlsberg cheese from Norway, Yago’s sangría from Franco’s Spain, Mateus rosé from Salazar’s Portugal, not to mention Swiss fondue in all its varieties. (I can think of three.) Add those to the foods invented by large bureaucracies under pressure of warfare (Spam) or the space program (Tang), and what do you call it? Tell you what I call it, I call it a cornucopia.
To play it safe, though, we could go back further than that. Back to the bitterly cold winter of 1945, when the Allied armies stood at the edge of the Rhine, before a devastated landscape of collapsed bridges, shattered villages, and charred forests. Mortars boomed in the hills and the acrid smell of diesel was in the air. Eisenhower turned to Patton, and do you know what he said?
Neither do I. But I’ll tell you one thing he didn’t say. He didn’t say, “You know, George, there’s something almost impudent about this Pinot Grigio, with its notes of honeysuckle and cinnamon and that beguiling elderberry finish.”
