Roy Blount - Save room for pie: food songs and chewy ruminations

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For Joan.

Mmmmm- m.

Good food is real, its healthy, its produced sustainably, its fair and its affordable.

MARK BITTMAN , The New York Times

He had heard the roots tearing as he eased a carrot out of the ground.

EDWARD ST. AUBYN , Bad News

If youre going to have fried chicken, have fried chicken.

MICHELLE OBAMAS MOM

The reader will find scattered through the text of this book, like lovely flecks of onion in the meat loaf, a number of inserts: tiny bits of verse, brief personal anecdotes, and what appear to be news items. Most of the news items are ones I composed, over the years, for the Bluff the Listener segment of National Public Radios Wait Wait Dont Tell Me! , on which I appear frequently as a panelist. Four of these are versions of items that actually appeared in the news. ( Want to guess? Then dont read the next sentence. ) These four involve pie throwing in Canada, the dairy herds of Cuba, copper wires up your nose, and Christ in jeans and T-shirt. If you were a caller on the show and picked one of those items to be real, you would have won Carl Kasells voice on your answering machine. All the other items are fictional. If you picked any of those ( really? ), I apologize. The other parts of this book (with a few, I think, obvious exceptions) strive to be factual. Many of them started out as columns for Garden & Gun magazine. RB

My wife, Joan, and I live partly in rural western Massachusetts, where one minute people are discussing the different tastes of bear (very strong) and woodchuckI guess you dont ever want to try muskrat, though people doand the next minute the topic turns to whether turmeric has to be organic. Just the other night in the midst of a hearty meal, we were Googling to see how much more nutritious sesame seeds are with the hulls on than with them off. Not a simple matter, because while the hulls do have food value they also containnever mind. I try to keep things light by asking how many sesame seeds you should take daily. But these are, after all, matters of life and death.

Speaking of which, I heard the other day that Google has a task force working on an end to death. Not Googles death, peoples. If eternal life is anything like teen sex (probably not, come to think of it), it will no doubt come along too late for me. But lets say I get the message, through Gmail: Hooray, immortality is here! Click for two weeks free. And I dont reply right away. Google, again: Grateful? No? What else do you want?

Here is my response: Mashed potatoes with that. And gravy.

Because there will be a catch. To live forever, Ill have to give up food, except for Googruel or Gvittles or whatever theyre going to call the only sustenance you can live on forever. Maybe something virtual, you dont even get to chew. And Ill have to think long and hard.

Everybody has their own ideas of paradise. Ours is very traditional, says Philo Merriday, resident manager of a motel and theme park outside Gatlinburg, Tennessee, known as Heaven on Earth. According to a review this week on FamilyDestinations.com (three stars out of five), Heaven on Earth strives to give guests a foretaste of glory divine. Instead of a pool, Heaven on Earth has a clouda gauzy expanse that the reviewer, after lying on it in a long white gown, found relaxing. Harp music is piped in, and guests are encouraged to play along on instruments provided on a basis of first come, first served. Attendants passing out complimentary ambrosia and angel food cake are not winged but are otherwise celestially attired, and guests may experience sensations of flying by hooking up to cables on a loop around the complex. No religious services are held. Were nondenominational, says Merriday. Anyway, church in heaven would be gilding the lily. We want you to feel that youre there .

I grew up on food, among people who were devoted to the joy of getting plenty of it. Some years ago, I visited Mel Blount, the great Pittsburgh Steeler cornerback, on his family farm in Vidalia, Georgia, and wrote this:

Keep em fed, Mels father used to say about his offspring. Keep em fed and theyll work. Theyre still workingfor instance, tossing a crop of fifty- or sixty-pound watermelons along a family bucket-brigade line (And you cant stop) to load them into a truck. And every time I walked into Mels mothers house, she, Alice Blountat 9:00 a.m., 11:30 a.m., 4:30 p.m., or 9:30 p.m.she was putting fried chicken, stewed chicken, butter beans, soupy white lima beans, grits, gravy, corn bread, rice, mashed potatoes, thick-sliced bacon, collard greens, biscuits, ham, black-eyed peas, sweet iced tea, and hot sauce onto the table and saying, Yall about let it get cold. When I start eating food like that, it takes me back to when I was fourteen, could eat steadily for hours with impunity, and figured Id be a sports immortal myself. Inside every thin Southern person is a fat person signaling to get out. Mine has partially emerged, as has Mels brother Bobbys. One night Bobby leaned back from the table, slapped his stomach proprietarily with both hands, and said, Roy, this is all the savings I got. Mel has had the football glory, but Bobby (who some say was the best athlete in the family) may well have had more food, and he seems pleased with his end of the deal.

If Google can arrange something like that in perpetuity, farm to table, Im in. Doesnt have to be soul food, as long as its good. In a lifetime of eating, I have savored Madhur Jaffreys home cooking, Donald Links prizewinning hot tamales (I was a judge), and an eight-course banquet in the Palace of Versailles. And see What We Ate in Japan.

As to healthful eating, I take a positive approach. When I hear that something I like is good for me or anyway better than something else (for instance, that Velveeta has more protein and fewer bad fats than many real cheeses, because it is largely whey), I say, Hey! Lets see if we have some in the fridge. (To mix with RO*TEL. I wouldnt eat Velveeta without mixing it with something containing an asterisk.) When I hear that something I like is not so good (for instance, that Velveeta is rich in sodium), I say, Let us not rush to judgment.

And there is room for positivity today. It may not last (remember when bread, with gluten , was the staff of life?), but lately I have heard good things, from authorities recognized by my wife, about watermelon, avocado, egg yolk, cane syrup, okra, lard, oysters, beef (if raised right), whiskey, hot peppers, coffee, (dark) chocolate, butter!

Butter! Not margarine, no, ptooey , and none of your quasi-buttery spreads, but actual, cow-given butter:

Bananas are yellow in their season.

Butter is always. And better on peas, on

Toast, on corn bread, on corn on the cob.

A baked potato begins to throb

With life, with juice when butter melts

Down, down into each crevice and

Oh! Nothing elts

Melts the way butter melts.

Truer words were never uttered:

Anything good is better buttered.

But we cant be complacent about food. As we learn from the media that mice dont really like cheese, milk doesnt suit cats, elephants arent partial to peanuts (I worked with one, though, who loved M&Ms), dogs shouldnt be given bones (unless theyre raw, and who keeps raw bones around?), and bananas (as we know them outside the rain forest) are bad for monkeys, we realize that our timeworn conceptions need to be shaken up. You know the expression acquired taste? Its a sneer, is what it is. I once heard George Will, on television, refer to Michael Jackson (his music I mean) as an acquired taste. Michael Jackson? Moonwalking? (Walking backwards forwards, as someone described it, or maybe the other way around.) Either you cant help deriving at least some fleeting enjoyment from that weird little dervishs work, or you can be determined not to: acquired distaste. In todays changing food environment, youre crazy not to acquire tastes. I have gone so far as to acquire one for kale.