gleaming monster of a truck would slowly make its way down the winding and meandering gravel road, the driver in a blue uniform with a name patch sewed on his breast pocket and a blue Sysco trucker’s hat, taking his time. This would not be a good place for an eighteen-wheeler to get stuck in a ditch. The counselor girls in their pajama bottoms and the counselor guys in their Greenpeace T-shirts paused their hackey-sack games and made a human chain from the back of the truck to the kitchen where they good-naturedly hauled in the huge weekly order and stacked it.
The produce came from a local organic operation out of Amherst. Their truck was a battered mustard yellow panel truck with a big butternut squash logo on the sides, and the drivers were all good-looking and polite and incredibly friendly guys in dungarees who had quite possibly just graduated, not in traditional cap and gown but in Birkenstocks with a bell-ringing ritual, from my alma mater, Hampshire College.
Kids don’t eat vegetables but I bought them the best anyway. I had accepted the logistical fate of ordering meat and dairy and dry goods from Sysco when I understood that being on a hundred wooded acres out in the pine forests of western Massachusetts took me off the delivery routes of better purveyors. But I couldn’t bring myself to buy vegetables from them, too.
Many of these kids had suspicious food allergies that I had to carefully work around. At the beginning of every session, I passed around a survey to all the bunks—Birch through Willow, boys and girls—and asked each child to alert us to any special dietary needs, any allergies or diabetes or issues around food. Every year for the four years that I was the chef at this camp, there would be one boy with a very serious peanut allergy, who really would swell up and die if I carelessly used the same spoon at the make-your-own-sundae bar for jimmies as I had used for peanuts, while every session I had no fewer than sixteen girls with “allergies” to dairy and wheat—cheese and bread basically—but also to garlic, eggplant, corn, and nuts. They had cleverly developed “allergies,” I believe, to the foods they had seen their own mothers fearing and loathing as diet fads passed through their homes. I could’ve strangled their mothers for saddling these girls with the idea that food is an enemy—some of them only eight years old and already weird about wanting a piece of bread—and I would’ve liked to bludgeon them, too, for forcing me to participate in their young daughters’ fucked-up relationship with food. I was obliged to attend to the allergies. For the first time in probably the entire decade that had passed since I had seen or spoken to my own mother, I thought warm and grateful thoughts about her. She instilled in us nothing but a total and unconditional pleasure in food and eating.
There were a couple of girls at this camp, however, who were quite different. And many nights during dinner these sisters would come up to the huge open kitchen window—the pass-through—where we the kitchen crew served out platter after unbreakable melamine platter of pale, bland, innocuous, and inoffensive foods to the kids assigned as that night’s table waiters and then stood there waiting to refill their family-style platters with “seconds.” These girls would come up to the window and ask, politely, for “the balsamic vinegar, please.” Oh, little Emma! With her chubby cheeks and some braided thing around her wrist that she had made that afternoon in the crafts barn—I could’ve kissed her every evening for appreciating the food and even daring me to make it a little more “adult” at every meal. Those kinds of kids can be obnoxious, too, I admit, with their oversophisticated tastes, turning up their noses at good old fried chicken, claiming to prefer “a paillard, quickly sautéed,” and insisting on extra virgin olive oil. That kind of cultivated taste could be sort of unbearable in an eight year old, but not this girl. She was pleased to please me, almost aware of how charming she was, in her little way, asking for Parmesan cheese, or fresh black pepper. But most of the one hundred or so kids ate like pigs—and just as fast and just as loud, and made big gruesome messes of their meals by pouring milk into their food and stirring it around giggling uncontrollably while their counselor pretended