Save Me the Plums - Ruth Reichl Page 0,65
he had no interest in free trips or luxury junkets. First he turned down an all-expenses-paid voyage to a boozy gathering of malt lovers in Scotland. He scoffed at our offer to explore la dolce vita in Rome. The Oxford Symposium on Food held no appeal for him. We came up with dozens of suggestions; David Foster Wallace always said no.
Then Jocelyn suggested sending him to the Maine Lobster Festival. I was skeptical. “Can you see DFW at a place whose official theme is ‘Lighthouses, Laughter, and Lobster’? Not exactly up his alley.”
“I read somewhere that his mother’s from Maine,” Jocelyn persisted.
“Worth a try,” I said. “But he’s sure to turn us down again.”
Getting DFW to say yes was only the first hurdle. On day one Jocelyn reported, “The airline lost his luggage. And he’s not happy about it.” Still, we had no idea how many hurdles lay ahead.
Wallace took to calling late at night, leaving long, rambling messages on Jocelyn’s answering machine. “Do you think he calls then so he doesn’t have to speak with a living person?” I inquired.
“Probably. But I love getting his messages. They’re hilarious. I can’t wait to read the piece.”
Everyone in the office knew when the article arrived, because Jocelyn’s laughter echoed down the hall. Still, when she came into my office clutching the hefty manuscript, her voice was not exactly filled with laughter and lighthouses.
“It’s here!” She handed me the pile of paper.
“Were we expecting ten thousand words?” The manuscript was even heavier than it looked.
“It’s DFW.” Jocelyn’s voice was oddly flat, as if she was trying to camouflage her emotions. She was, I thought, probably unaware that we’d all heard her laughter. “He does what he does.” It was clear, from her demeanor, that something was wrong with the piece. She pointed at the pages. “You’d better read it for yourself.”
Perusing the first page, I began to laugh; at his best David Foster Wallace is wonderfully funny, and this was a gem. He began by offering up the tangled history of Maine and lobsters. He discussed hard-shell lobsters and soft ones, noting that the festival was prepared to offer you a lobster dinner for little more than a meal at McDonald’s. There was one snarky aside in which he opined that the editor of another epicurean magazine, who’d labeled this “one of the best food-themed festivals in the world,” might not have spent much time sampling its delights, but he glided gracefully on to note that because lobsters are still living when they go into the pot, they are the freshest food there is.
Here he paused to consider a question. “Is it all right,” he asked, “to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure?” Soon he was delving into the science of pain and the ethics of death, an unstoppable torrent of words that went on for pages. At one point he referenced the infamous Nazi doctor Josef Mengele. At another he noted, “It appears to me unlikely that many readers of Gourmet wish to…be queried about the morality of their eating habits in the pages of a culinary monthly.”
“Thanks,” I muttered, as Wallace proceeded to question said morality for a few thousand more words, moving from lobsters to the entire animal kingdom. Would future men, he wondered, someday look back at our eating habits in much the same way we view ancient Aztec sacrifices? He ended by asking this: “After all, isn’t being extra aware and attentive and thoughtful about one’s food and its overall context part of what distinguishes a real gourmet? Or is all the gourmet’s extra attention and sensibility just supposed to be aesthetic, gustatory?”
It was masterfully done, and for a long moment I sat at my desk, looking down at the pages with admiration and loathing. DFW had seen the mantra I’d been mouthing and raised me. He’d appropriated what was once a cute Annie Hall moment and turned it into an exercise in bioethics; nobody who read the piece could ever casually toss a live lobster into a pot again. But this was not just about lobsters; DFW was demanding that each reader examine his conscience and consider the ethics of eating.
How many people were going to take this kindly? Not many, I imagined; most were going to find it offensive. Thousands would cancel their subscriptions, and I would lose my job. It would be foolish to print this. But how could I not? I looked down at that brilliant, difficult