essays
The Four Courses of the Apocalypse
by Joyce E. Chaplin
May 3, 2020
Joyce E. Chaplin (PhD and MA Johns Hopkins, BA Northwestern) is the James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History at Harvard University. You can find her on Twitter here.
In our state of emergency, most Americans want to taste deliverance when they eat. Their wish is important. Humans mask their bare need to eat with culture: customs about when food can be taken, manners for how to consume it, equipment to prepare and serve it correctly, and shibboleths to restrict what can be eaten in the first place. Stockpiling, ordering take-out, gardening, pickling, cooking, baking—by expressing food preferences in a pandemic, US citizens demonstrate what they hope for and fear. What follows is a four-course menu based on popular quarantine options, all of them revealing that Americans hanker after normality. But what is normal? Life before COVID-19 had serious problems. #AloneTogether is a hopeful tag for social distancing. When we’re all, by definition, stress eating in various states of aloneness, are we also sustaining a United States that must, now and in the future, somehow hang together?
We’ll start our meal with sourdough. On Twitter, ongoing convo about bubbly mothers is not about extroverted female parents. Mothers (or starters) are thick, fermented cultures of lactobacilli that, instead of baker’s yeast, leaven sourdough. Carefully cultivated, in jar or crock or Tupperware, starters look like loose, frothy dough. You measure some out for a bake, then tenderly feed the remainder some flour and water. True sourdough is vegan and is one of the world’s oldest foods, with each lactobacillus strain native to a specific place on Earth.
Sourdough is undeniably American. It was the sturdy fare of many a young man (or woman) who followed the call to go west, to wherever the urban supply line of brewer’s yeast gave out, whenever baking powder wasn’t yet commercially available. In Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books, sourdough biscuits are the daily bread. Gold miners ate those biscuits, too, also sourdough flapjacks, fixed from treasured starters. Boudin Bakery claims (credibly) to be the longest continuously operating business in San Francisco. It was founded in 1849, when a Frenchman opened a commercial bakery, using a Forty-Niner’s sourdough mother, which the company says it’s tended ever since. (Bite into Boudin and you’re chewing on something roughly 170 years old.) Onward the bubbly mothers went, to the Klondike, site of the next gold rush. The “Sourdoughs,” as Alaska miners were called, are commemorated in Charlie Chaplin’s Gold Rush (1925). This is the movie in which the Little Tramp and his cabin mate, snowbound together (sound familiar?), get so hungry that Chaplin’s character boils and dines on his boot, and then his roomie seeks to dine on him.
Alas, it’s this vignette, with one starved Sourdough hallucinating that the other is a tasty chicken and chasing him with an axe, that I cannot forget amid the pleasant twittering about rustic boules. What do people think they’re doing when they bake bread at home, one loaf at a time, or even two by two, as if handily adapting ancient divine advice for surviving an impending disaster? Historically, people didn’t do that. Baking whole loaves of bread consumes lots of fuel. The ancient Near East, ancestral land of small-grains like wheat and bread baked from them, lost most of its trees in ancient times—Lebanon and Egypt once had forests of cedar and pine. As timber dwindled, firing an oven got expensive. Quick-cooking flatbreads were what people made at home. In the tree-depleted old world, commercial bakers had to figure the cost of fuel into baking multiple loaves of bread in a large oven. For a fee, a baker might make room for household loaves, or even other cooking, for people who couldn’t afford much fuel. One way or another, it could take a village to bake a loaf of bread. In North America, however, settlers found plentiful wood—great for baking—until they cleared the woodlands nearest the settlements. At that point, they needed a Monsieur Boudin to bake them something other than quick pancakes.
I don’t think most of social media’s sourdough bakers know that their re-enactment of American pioneer autonomy defies a bigger history in which daily bread evoked connection to others, if not dependence on them.
Frankly, American sourdough smells like settler-colonialism, a fragrance of biscuits and flapjacks rising above the log cabins and mining camps that steadily eroded Indigenous land rights while cutting down trees on those lands.
It’s a myth that pioneering individuals or families settled the West—the federal government did that, through policies that favored the spread of white population. The ability to own and maintain a freestanding household (with an oven) is still a legacy of US racial and class privileges.
Maybe, at this point, you’d like a drink with your meal? Lots of other people are having one, or three. The marketing research firm Nielsen found that, compared to a year ago, March 2020 showed a 75 perecent increase in spirits sold, a 66 percent increase in wine sales, 42 percent for beer, and a spike of 243 percent in online alcohol sales generally. (March 2020 cannabis sales also soared in states where it’s legal to buy.)
That’s self-medicating to the point of disaster. An editorial in the Boston Globe pleaded for a ban on alcohol sales during the emergency shutdown, pointing out booze’s role in rising rates of domestic abuse. Under quarantine, vulnerable individuals are miserably close to abusers and distanced from helpers. The nuclear family was supposed to have been cleansed of the worst residues of ancient patriarchal rights. We’re now engaged in a painful test of how much of that work was done. Post-quarantine rates of divorce, (re)marriage, and births will reveal collective confidence, or not, in the American nuclear family, temporarily returned, as it has been, to a state of snowbound homesteading.
Take cheer, for the moment, in our second course, crab rangoon. Aggregate Uber Eats data about early-April deliveries identified this as the nation’s third most popular dish, trailing french fries and pad thai. What is it? Bits of crab (or imitation crab) and seasonings are blended into cream cheese. Dollops of the tangy mass are wrapped in wonton pastry, then deep fried. The crisp bundles are typically served with a sweet dipping sauce. If you think this sounds like bar food, you’re right. Crab Rangoon seems to have been invented at Trader Vic’s, the post-World-War II tiki bar that also claims to have invented the mai tai. Crab rangoon has no connection to Yangon in Myanmar. The fried parcels belong to the chop-suey canon of Chinese-American foods, the knowingly false concoctions that mingle something authentically Asian (like wonton pastry) with some kind of Americana (“Philadelphia” cream cheese), often featuring an expensive treat, like crab.
Is this cultural appropriation? Maybe. Though it was Chinese immigrants themselves who shrewdly sold chop suey to white customers to ensure their grandchildren would never have to work in restaurants. Are crab rangoons culinary abominations? Well, what isn’t? It’s not as if ballpark beer and hotdogs greatly resemble the lager and wurst homesick German immigrants tried to recreate in the United States. Let’s give chop suey and crab rangoon the benefit of the doubt, regarding them as gateway dishes for the timid Euro-American palate. Without those dubious chimeras, would pad thai have become the second most ordered thing on Uber Eats in 2020?
The Uber data proves another of crab rangoon’s essential qualities: it’s not home-cooking; food service workers make it. When it arrives with its jewel-tone dipping sauce, it’s proof that you didn’t have to cook. Even if you buy frozen crab rangoon, somebody else got it ready for you to heat up. For this second course in our pandemic dinner, it still takes a village. One commentator on the Uber Eats data wondered (with studied innocence) what chicken tikka masala and “crag [sic] Rangoon” could possibly be? Sadly, some Americans don’t enjoy any Asian cuisine. (Perhaps they also call COVID-19 the “kung flu.”) The “crag” for crab was probably just a typo, b and g are neighbors on the keyboard, after all. But that mistake conceals the dish’s inherent sociability. No one orders crab rangoon from a distant crag where they can’t get a phone signal. Just remember: if you order anything, add a tip. Everyone in food service is tired, underpaid, and risking infection.
I hope you’re not full, because here comes the main course and it’s Spam. This is neither home-made nor ordered from a restaurant. Each can of Spam yields a dense, pink, rounded-edge oblong that can be sliced or diced, then baked, fried, or microwaved. It predates the microwave, invented in 1937 by the Hormel Company to sell pork shoulder during the Great Depresssion. “Spam” vaguely promised shoppers some nice spiced ham. Spam hit the big-time during World War II, when the US government bought it in bulk to feed servicemen. It remains popular on Pacific islands, including Hawai’i, that have had large US military bases.
Spam is newly coveted because it’s shelf stable, a prepper protein the Greatest Generation bequeathed to us. It joins several related revivals. Backyard gardening and home canning are also on the rise, just as victory gardens and adaptation to food rationing supported war efforts in the early twentieth century. It must be said, however, that today’s prepping also descends from the bleaker survivalism of the Cold War. In the 1950s and 1960s, Spam-stocked bomb shelters were not so much parts of a collective program to defeat the enemy as they were ways to outsurvive one’s neighbors. Nicely browned, Spam has a crisp keep-calm-and-carry on quality. But also a Dr. Strangelove sizzle.
Spam sales are part of pandemic enthusiasm for animal products, even those produced from factory farms—even though we should know better. Spam is a branded product. People have heard of it even if they’ve never eaten it. It’s the antithesis of farm-to-table, also of vegetarianism or veganism. It’s not just processed food, but highly processed—and cruelly so. Spam is extracted from hogs, a highly sentient and social species. They are bred in metal cages with concrete floors and slaughtered on an industrial scale. Producing protein this way is inhumane and environmentally unsustainable. And yet meat is a high priority for many Americans. On April 28th, President Trump signed an executive order to declare meat processing plants “critical infrastructure.” He is indifferent to the hogs, and to the meat-industry workers who now cannot practice social distancing. Who cares about them? Recent analysis of the most-Googled recipes in each US state showed that iterations of hamburger or ground beef were the top choice in twelve states, chicken in five, pork in three more—twenty of our fifty states seek animal flesh. But whatever industrial meat’s current merits as comfort-food, we cannot plan to subsist on it in the decades to come.
Time for dessert? Maybe you’re trying to avoid “the COVID 15,” the fifteen extra pounds stress-eating is packing around some self quarantiners. How about a healthy orange? Fruit isn’t a bad choice. Even grapes or apples, which are little more than bags of fructose and water, with trace vitamins, are better than actual candy.
But, first, give thanks to the people who pick your fruit and to the natural world that makes all food possible. Agricultural piece workers have unenviable jobs that poorly match the attractive pyramids of bounty in the produce section. This isn’t one of those (vanishingly rare) problems that the pandemic has made better. Most US farm workers are undocumented migrants, to whom many labor regulations never apply. They are now, in the pandemic, categorized as “essential workers,” out of concern to maintain the food supply. But this means the workers can’t stay home, either to recuperate if they’re sick or avoid people they know are infected—and those two factors feed on each other, even out in the fresh air of a field of antioxidant-rich strawberries. If we want to continue to enjoy berries or oranges, we’ll need to reconsider the compromised labor conditions for agricultural workers in an increasingly exclusionist United States.
Also, whether we want to think about it right now or not, climate change is threatening most crops, including those, like citrus, that are Goldilocks-picky about their temperature and rainfall.
Now, back to those antioxidants. Many fruits (and vegetables) have super-nutritional qualities. These are critical for maintaining health. Your body will disintegrate from scurvy if you cease to ingest Vitamin C; the known range of vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, and micro-nutrients have similar prophylactic functions. Together, they boost the immune system’s defense against infections, including COVID-19.
But fruit alone doesn’t ward off contagious diseases. We also need immunizations, which shield individuals from horrors like smallpox while giving populations the herd immunity that prevents outbreaks of measles, whooping cough, and the like. Anti-vaxxers, the people who think inoculating children creates autism, preach instead the efficacy of diet. In parallel, right-wing survivalists are peddling pandemic decoctions of colloidal silver. Silver has antibacterial properties; these have no effect on viruses like COVID-19, however. Nor will an orange a day truly keep the doctor away. If anti-vaxxing survives the pandemic, can anything kill it? More to the point, if civic intelligence about science could also be described in terms of herd immunity, at what point might we be collectively doomed by the ignorance of a minority?
I offer a fortune cookie at meal’s end. And the fortune reads:
Eat wisely—#AloneTogether is forever.
essays
My Friendship with Sakhi Gulestan
by Andrew Person
April 22, 2018
When I first introduced myself to Sakhi Gulestan, my interests were strictly commercial. My Army buddy Eric and I picked up some handmade Persian carpets in Afghanistan and I was looking around for a good market to sell them. On the way to work, I noticed Sakhi had middle-eastern looking carpets for sale at his stand above the Q Street exit of Dupont Circle.
Sakhi and I chatted a while about the carpet business. He said his carpets were from Afghanistan, and that he was from Afghanistan, so we began a longer conversation than I expected. Sakhi looked as if he had recently arrived from some remote part of Afghanistan. His weathered face and beard reminded me of many villagers I had met during my tour. After sharing a bit of our life story with each other and throwing out a few phrases I remembered in Pashto, I asked him whether he knew of a place where one could buy naswar, a type of tobacco I had seen in Afghanistan. He said he’d track some down for me. And so began our friendship.
From then on we spoke every time I walked by his little table on my way to and from work. Often we just exchanged a few words because I was in a rush. Sometimes we’d talk a little longer. As I passed by Sakhi’s stand I was always amazed at the variety of different goods he would sell. When it was cold, he’d have a huge stock of winter gloves, hats, and ear muffs. On a rainy day, he’d have tons of umbrellas. On Valentine’s Day, he had a huge pile of roses. Sakhi was a well known figure in the neighborhood and somebody would always be taking to him.
If Sakhi wasn’t tending his stand, he was feeding the birds. He’d collect old bread from nearby bread stores, put it in a bucket with some water and distribute the mush carefully at a row of nearby bushes. Sakhi was always in motion. Occasionally he’d be injured, he had a crutch he’d walk with sometimes—but nothing would slow him down. He was a bundle of energy that never seemed to tire.
After a few conversations I realized Sakhi was homeless. He lived in a truck parked near Dupont circle and paid the parking lot owner for the space he parked in. He kept all of his wares in the back of the truck and loaded and unloaded his stand each night.
On one afternoon in early November I invited Sakhi to join my girlfriend, her mom and a few other friends for Thanksgiving dinner at my girlfriend’s apartment. He accepted right away and said that he had lived in the United States for 20 years and that this was his first invitation to a Thanksgiving dinner. He asked for my phone number and the address so he could get in touch for the details.
Life was hectic then and Thanksgiving Day snuck up quickly. I hadn’t heard from Sakhi in about a week. As we put the finishing touches on Thanksgiving dinner I thought that he might not show up after all. Then, my phone rang. Sakhi said he was on his way but needed help finding the place. I told him I’d be waiting for him outside on 16th street to flag him down.
It was an incredibly windy day. I stood outside wondering what I had gotten everyone into. I had a good feeling about Sakhi but I didn’t know him that well. Then Sakhi walked around the corner. The wind was howling that day. He was fighting to push a huge cart full of black plastic bags down the street toward me. The gusts of wind almost knocked him and his cart over.
I helped Sakhi bring his things up the stairs into the apartment. After I made a round of introductions Sakhi got right to work. He started unloading his cart. He had stacks of bread, pies, boxes of chocolates, and spices. We couldn’t believe how much stuff he had with him and how much he wanted to leave with us. He even brought hats and other gifts for everyone. Then he walked right into the kitchen, turned the stove top on, burned some incense and said a blessing. He explained what he was doing but it was tough to understand. He spoke broken English and often mumbled.
We all sat down for dinner and Sakhi only ate a little bit. He was clearly watching what he ate very carefully and meanwhile was telling stories about what it was like to live on the streets of DC. He said the city –even in Dupont circle—was very dangerous at night and that the police wouldn’t help him much. Thieves had broken into his truck before and stolen some of the few things he owned. He said he was looking around for a place to live but that the security deposit was tough to come up with.
After about an hour Sakhi said he was ready to go. We were all sad to see him leave—and were surprised that he left far more food with us than he had eaten.
That winter, I grew amazed at how tough Sakhi was. Winters are cold in Washington--especially when you sleep in your truck. He assured me that he was warm enough at night. His only complaint was that it was a chore for him to find a place for his religious washings. He was also spending a lot of money on gas to keep him warm at night. Occasionally he’d mention that he had been looking at nearby apartments but didn’t seem particularly focused on it. It was something he’d mention in passing.
One day, Sakhi asked whether I had a day free to take him to a doctor’s visit. We decided on the upcoming Saturday. That day I pulled up to Dupont Circle and he was busy as always; loading things into his van, letting me know he’d be a couple more minutes, feeding the birds, etc. After a while another friend of his arrived and he introduced himself as Idris. He was dressed in designer clothes, his hair was slicked back and he chain smoked expensive cigarettes. Idris and I spoke a while as Sakhi continued with his chores. An hour after I arrived I wondered when the hell we were going to get going with this doctors visit!
Then Sakhi said that he had to take some vegetables out to some friends in Virginia and started loading bags of produce, plants, and other odds and ends into the back of my car. I never really had a chance to figure out what our plan was so I just went with it. After we helped Sakhi load my trunk and the back seats with all kinds of different stuff, we hit the road. Idris told me where to go.
Our first stop was an Afghan restaurant near Falls Church, Virginia. The restaurant owners greeted Sakhi as a VIP. Everyone stopped what they were doing—waiters, people in the back, everyone greeted Sakhi in a very respectful manner. They asked me, “how do you know Sakhi?” As if I had been let in on a very important secret. We ate lunch there and then drove to an Afghan market which could easily have been anywhere in central Asia. They sold tea, dried raisins, and other goods you wouldn’t find in the US. Once again, Sakhi received a VIP welcome from all those at the store. The manager came out of the back to speak with Sakhi for a while. I started to realize that Sakhi was regarded as a holy man by this Afghan community. His devotion to his faith and his simple way of life seemed to inspire a great deal of respect.
We stopped off at a couple more shops in the area and at that point I figured the hospital visit was off. Sakhi spoke at length with each of the shop owners and then at nightfall we decided it was time to head back to DC. We agreed that the hospital visit would wait until another day. I dropped Sakhi and Idris off back in Dupont Circle and drove home.
Later that week, I saw Sakhi a few times but was always in a hurry. Late in the week, I said hi but told him I was running late and couldn’t chat. He smiled and sent me off.
The next Saturday morning my phone rang. It was Idris. He said that he was sorry to have to tell me such terrible news, but that Sakhi was found dead in his truck the night before. He said he would meet me over in Dupont. I headed over immediately.
When I arrived in Dupont, Idris was speaking with a crying woman I’d never met before. She walked right up to me with teary eyes and said “are you Andrew? Sakhi said you were a good man. Thank you. I’m Sakhi’s wife.” Another young guy with a serious face introduced himself as Sakhi’s son. I had no idea that Sakhi had a family.
Everyone was discussing how we should deal with the situation. I was surprised to hear the police hadn’t been called yet. Sakhi was dead in the truck and we were discussing how to proceed. Sakhi’s wife was worried that once the authorities were involved that Sakhi wouldn’t receive the proper Islamic treatment. She was equally as concerned that if the nearby Mosque helped out that she would be excluded from his burial because she was a woman. So, she was a nervous wreck and naturally in shock from her loss.
As we were waiting for the police to arrive, Sakhi’s son had tracked down a group of Buddhist monks that were protesting nearby. They performed some sort of blessing near Sakhi’s truck and then left. It seemed an appropriate recognition that something huge had just happened.
Once the police arrived they questioned everyone and a cultural liaison started explaining how everything would be handled to Sakhi’s wife. An ambulance pulled up and Sakhi was placed into the back.
Idris and I started talking about how his funeral would be handled. We figured the Mosque would be the best place to start since they have funds to take care of such a situation. Idris and I drove over there to find out. Everyone at the mosque was heartbroken to hear of Sakhi’s death. Idris tracked down the right contact to arrange for Sakhi’s funeral.
On the way back from the Mosque Idris explained a bit of Sakhi’s family situation. The information came in bits and pieces…He had met his wife in Afghanistan and they both moved to the US over 20 years ago… his wife is American…They had kids… Sakhi and his wife lived separately…Sakhi had a strained relationship with his sons…etc.
After Sakhi had been taken away everyone was sort of wondering what should happen next. Sakhi’s wife and sons began clearing out his truck. Everyone agreed that we should make a little tribute to him the next day to let the community know that he had passed away.
The next morning we did just that. Idris brought a nice picture of Sakhi and we hooked it onto the tree near where Sakhi normally set up his stand. We had flowers on a table in front of the photo with a note that Sakhi had passed away. Sakhi’s son played the guitar and the rest of us just hung around. Hundreds of people stopped at his sign and you could see the expression on their face. They knew Sakhi and they were so sad to see he had died. Some left flowers at the table.
Sakhi’s funeral was set for a week later. Idris and I drove over together to a funeral home in DC and when we arrived, others had gathered to talk outside. When we went inside I saw Sakhi’s casket in the back and chairs set up nearby. Sakhi’s wife came storming down the stairs yelling that we should all get out and go home. She was escorted upstairs by some people I didn’t know and Sakhi’s sons urged us to stay.
The funeral was short. One of Sakhi’s sons said a few prayers and said some remarks about Sakhi. Everyone took turns passing a moment by his casket and before long we all said goodbye. When I shut my eyes to think about Sakhi I thought of a clutch of birds, fluttering out of a row of bushes into the sky.
Idris and I kept in touch for a while afterwards meeting up for dinner and hanging out on a few occasions—always talking about Sakhi. I really miss him. Idris has returned to Afghanistan and just called me and said he had big news for me. He said he’d email me. I can’t wait to find out what it is.