“If at the end of each person’s life, he were to be presented with the living spectacle of all that he had [eaten] in order to stay alive, he might well feel horrified by the living energy he had ingested. The horizon of a gourmet, of even the average person, would be taken up with hundreds of chickens, flocks of lambs and sheep, a small herd of steers, sties full of pigs and rivers of fish … To paraphrase Elias Canetti, each organism raises its head over a field of corpses and declares life good.”
From Escape from Evil by Ernest Becker
I was sitting on my porch when a bird — a Carolina wren, I believe — landed in a tree a few feet away from where I was perched.
As I watched the bird cavorting among bright green leaves, I considered its predicament.
All the wren knows is hunger — the relentless craving to fill its belly with bugs, beetles, and bees — and the innate desire to mate.
Just change the bugs and bees to burgers and beans, and you’ve described the human predicament as well.
Of course, the bird doesn’t have to worry about all the things human beings worry over, like running out of toilet paper. Birds know instinctively that there are hundreds of recently washed automobiles parked beneath trees all over Lake Country.
I don’t know what the wren had for dinner, but I do know where it wound up.
Maybe when you hear the wren’s familiar “teakettle, teakettle, teakettle” song, he’s comparing the taste of spiders in Greene County with spiders in Putnam County in the same way humans compare Italian restaurants on either side of the lake on social media, especially on Nextdoor.
Me, I’m a huge fan of Italian-American food.
When I was a child, my Southern mother — a cornbread expert — made spaghetti sauce from scratch, but I wouldn’t eat it. While she and my dad ate the homemade spaghetti, which an Italian might have called “Army noodles with ketchup,”* I ate Franco-American spaghetti from a can (don’t ask me how the French got involved in all this).
The Campbell's Company bought Franco-American, which invented SpaghettiOs, but Campbell’s still puts a tiny Franco-American logo on the can. Corporate recognition like that gives me hope for the future.
If you’re ever shopping at Publix and hear someone on aisle six singing about spaghetti, it might be me.
“The neat round spaghetti you can eat with a spoon. Uh-oh, SpaghettiOs. The greatest invention since the napkin.”
As someone who has actually eaten at Italian restaurants in actual Italy, I feel like I can speak to this topic with some authority.
I visited the Mediterranean many years ago and found myself in the Italian region of Apulia. If the shape of Italy resembles a boot, Apulia is the heel of it.
The ship I was traveling on anchored out in the Gulf of Taranto, and a group of us boarded a small boat called “The Captain’s Launch,” which took us to the city of Taranto itself, where we had the best pizza ever prepared by humans.
I have since learned that a flatbread called panis focacius was probably the precursor to pizza, but I’m glad they later settled on the word pizza, because panis focacius sounds rather obscene to an English speaker.
The Italians in that Taranto pizza parlor were spectacular, hovering over us like we were their long-lost American cousins. They kept the pizza coming, and nobody ever wanted for beer or wine.
We asked for pepperoni, but what we got was something that looked like slivers of dried green peppers.
Squisito!!!
I have since learned that what Americans call pepperoni, some Italians call salame picante (spicy salami), or at least that’s what AI says.
I enjoyed myself so much I considered staying and changing my name to Tommaso Michele (pronounced mee-KEH-leh) Piedra. All I needed to do to fit in as an Italian was learn to talk with my hands a little better.
Selah… or an intermezzo if you’re Italian.
*Frank Perconte, played by James Madio, says this in Band of Brothers: “Episode One, Currahee,” when referring to spaghetti served to American troops.