The siege has been on so long, it is no longer front-page news, barely news at all. Every commentator in the world has already weighed in, and, nothing having changed for the better part of a decade, the world has, quite reasonably, moved on. Olympics have come and gone, and we no longer send athletes (we were known for water polo), since even if they were able to slip out and get there, how could they compete against those who are well rested and fueled, mitochondria rippling in their cells?
But you have to imagine Vassilonia before this siege laid waste to us. When you look at us now, skin-and-bone strays, you’d hardly know how cherubic and jaunty we were once. God, we relished nothing more than walking off our meals in the fading of daylight. To walk through the city during its heyday was to navigate a thick, aromatic fog, the very air a front of flavor punctured by pungent crosscurrents—“Ah,” you’d say, “Galvin is jacketing his prawns in shiitake again. . or is that Devon experimenting with saffron? Both?” You’d bump into someone you knew and all would belch, one at a time like cars at a four-way stop, and they’d try to guess what the others had eaten — such were good manners, then. People were innocent, dressed differently (rounded, flaps and slits to aerate, exuding formality even on days off). An unfathomable gulf divides us from that time, makes it so hard to believe that people were people then, moving about in three robust dimensions with vivacity, coughing and wheezing, chortling and flirting and kissing and eating above all, eating and eating and eating, doing so with the greatest conviction, with vigor and savoir faire and newlywed lust lavished on food rather than flesh: At the morning’s first, semiconscious stirring, they ate, midmorning ate again, midday and midafternoon, twice in the evening, inventing names for meals—argent, vespens, efferzeti—mixing and matching dishes from far-flung corners of the globe, things too loosely assembled to be called dishes, flinging spices blindly into the waiting maws of pots, sometimes checking the label afterward, the stovetop a welter of activity, a percussive clamor, the cook whistling or gossiping all the while — unthinking, careless, saucy. They needed no justification for their indulgence; food was the cornerstone of Vassilonian existence. Our existence — I remind myself, “this people” was me.
Even in the thick of company, though, I always ate alone. Part of me, at least, was inveterately, metaphysically alone.
It started, Vassilonia, as a faceless, generic city, a seat of colorless commerce and bleak industry. It was during a precipitous downturn in the economy that the restaurateurs, calling themselves “The Fearless Nine,” banded together and formed a coalition, deciding that it would no longer be feasible for people to eat out in the foreseeable future unless urgent measures were taken. Led by the mustachioed visionary Antonio Corrido, they vowed that rather than shutting down or waylaying pedestrians with pleading offers of cheap meals, they’d feed everyone as long as they were able through the crisis. After all, people had to eat, and why not well? They gambled rightly — the dollar may have been worthless paper, but that summer and fall the earth yielded up a particularly bountiful growing season, and there was a general sense of ebullience. Soon the number of restaurants had doubled to eighteen, and not long after that there were dozens, as people caught on to the fact that the industry could somehow remain just slightly to the side of the mainstream economy, which itself was already starting to recuperate.
An ethos began to take hold with unspoken rules. Don’t try to compete with your neighbor — don’t try to one-up him on his most popular dishes, steal her secret recipes, mimic their decor. Be different, strive for uniqueness, and eventually people will line up at your door. If offered the choice between Cerignolas and Luganos, it is human nature to choose one type of olive on Monday and another on Tuesday, but if faced with seven brands of Kalamata, they’ll gravitate toward one jar and cling to it. Hence, you had to be nonredundant. This ensured that you could get not only Chinese but also Mandarin, Szechuan, Guayadongian; not just Indian but Navratan, Gujarati; not merely Moroccan but that indigenous to the town of Tafroute; the cuisines of Tasmania, Ganzoneer, Tibet, Raedmeon, Argentina, El Salvador, Vitamora, and Morrisania were all readily available.
Moreover, you would not eat, yourself, at your own establishment except on rare occasions. No, you had to go out, sample the city’s wares, pump money and life into the economy, or else you were thought stingy, provincial, haughty. What little money you’d save by remaining in your own dining room would pale next to the loss in reputation. The phrase “eating at home” in the vernacular came to refer to masturbation.
And you could always tell a Vassilonian by his or her conversation above all. They were perpetually talking about food, reminiscing about a great meal — never about whatever they were eating at that moment, no matter how splendid, aromatic, and memorable it was. That would be for another day, another meal. Facial expressions, little gasps of delight would have to suffice to compliment the chef, who, after all, might not even be there — he might have already slipped out to eat at another establishment, replaced by the next shift. Always, the conversation at the table revolved around great meals of the past. It was only in this contrast — between what was now being eaten and what they’d eaten in the past — that they made sense of taste, for flavor, it was assumed, only existed as a set of contrasts. Trying to describe what was right now on your tongue was like trying to cup the present in your hands — invariably it would slip through the fingers. Certainly there were philosophers who offered alternative theories — that, for instance, our brains were equipped with a universal template that enabled them to assemble complex flavors from simpler, more elemental ones without any effort or training. Still, the theory of contrasts predominated, maybe because people were by then so attached to the delectation of endlessly sifting and comparing their experiences.
Were we fat? We were by no means a lean people. Yet I’d wager we were in no worse shape than many others who ate with far less frequency. What we consumed was fresh, chewed with vigor and aplomb, every bite maximized. To this day, I can’t eat rapidly without the chastising voices of an older generation—“Slowly, slowly”—echoing in my ears, as if presaging a day when food would become so scarce that it would become necessary to eat at escargotian paces.
When I first heard the term foodie, I laughed. Were we not all “foodies”? Equally amusing is the nation that chooses the “melting pot” as a metaphor; over the ensuing decades, Vassilonia leveled all of its nondescript office buildings and replaced them with giant replicas of pots and pans, bringing forth a magnificent skyline, with its crown jewels, the Collander Building and, of course, the Pepper Mill, whose luminous glow at sunset I won’t deign to describe. Of course, all are gone now, scrapped for weaponry or, more recently, rusted over and mottled with verdigris, dark domes where scrawny dogs take refuge.
Where, you ask, did we get all of our ingredients to make such copious servings? From near and far away; nothing was actually grown in Vassilonia, and for this oversight no one can take responsibility but ourselves. You have to understand that our tourist trade was off the charts — even lodgings, aside from the homes of residents, fell outside city limits, there being so little room to spare. Yes, there were businesses that weren’t restaurants, but all converged in one way or another around food. Clothing boutiques were geared around dressing for a particular cuisine — you could don authentic garb from any culture, or pair an outfit with your food (a delightful striped marzipan dress), or simply “dress for a mess,” as we put it. And I must say our red-light district was far more risqué than anything you have elsewhere, whipped cream and chocolate fudge being fine but rather blah when you can find yourself glazed in amandine, or sprinkled with lemon-infused coconut shavings, pepper-cantaloupe chutney, and beyond.