One Entrecote To Go, Easy On The

( The author is an editor for the Advocate.)

I.

"Food is more important than poetry."

Although I know I am taking unfair advantage of its implication. I attribute to Auden's statement a judgment of food based on more than biological necessity. Auden, surely, is also speaking of the aesthetic possibility of gastronomy; of the question of choice in selecting food: of color and texture: of the chromatic and compositional problems of preparing a meal, of arranging a plate. Auden's statement betrays an artist's eye for the forms of the physical world as well as a sensitive palate.

What is concealed in the quote is an exaltation of food as a visual, tactile, plastic, colorful art form. However, because food is also so functional, its aesthetic qualities are often overlooked. Edibility, food's singular characteristic which tends to divert our attention from its artistic nature, is precisely the element which makes it a unique, almost complete, art form.

Edibility. In the end, we consume the creation, take it into our own body. Its edibility not only brings us closer to the work by eliminating the awkward distances between, for instance, the painter and viewer or poet and reader, but the ability to internalize the object (the meal) places us in a position to be seriously, viscerally, even gastro-intestinally affected by it.

Imagine crumpling up the pages of The Wasteland into small paper balls which, when digested with all of its allusions, might produce cramps as a sign of incomprehensibility or, on the other hand, that satiety which designates good literature. Unfortunately, most of our reactions are not formed so spontaneously. We are kept from many objects of art by our own intellectual apparatuses and insistence on explaining the complexities of creation. It has become harder and harder for us to be intimate with art. When we look at a painting, even the closest scrutiny may leave us cold. Something as small as a stuffed nose may keep us from enjoying a trip to the museum. For irrelevant reasons, the impact of a whole gallery of paintings may elude us. We can envision ourselves, under certain circumstances, mistaking a bad poem for a much better one. Yet I doubt sincerely whether the most severe stultification of the senses would prevent one from protesting an indisputably bad meal.

Far more immovable than physical and temperamental obstacles to the apprehension of most art forms, excluding food, is our own intellect. In literature, art, and to a lesser extent music, the reacting human mind, even at its peaks of receptiveness, often confuses intellectual and emotive responses.

Take Icarus by Breughel, for example (Auden did). Do we like it for its mythological content or for its rendering of the scene, or for what mixture of the two? Do we like it because we are able to tell our museum date some background information or because there is something ineffably beautiful about the green waves? Our familiarity with Art History or Edith Hamilton's Greck. Mythology may get in the way of our aesthetic vision.

The Emotive/Aesthetic vs, the Intellectual Academic

Our ability to extricate the emotive/aesthetic from the intellectual/academic response is hampered particularly in dealing with literature. Needless to say, the aesthetician is today almost dispensable, even obsolete, in the verbal disciplines. Critic W. K. Wimsatt states rather bluntly: "The intellectual character of language makes literature difficult for the aesthetician." If this point needs elaboration, simply look at some college students' textual analyses to see how many are technicians for whom a judgment of taste or pure form requires non-analytic tools we have forgotten how to use.

Instilled by our education with a reverence for content before form, we tend to confront even the most visual, affective arts with an analytic mentality. For months after Picasso's enigmatic fifty-foot sculpture was uncovered in a downtown Chicago plaza, discussion centered frantically on whether it was a woman, a dog, or a bird. Newspapers covered the controversy greedily and people who finally felt they had identified it were at last able to react. When Dylan Thomas spoke at MIT in 1953, his lyrically eccentric speech was met with silence by an audience of what must have been tightlipped students and professors who seemed incredulous that the talk was witty, ingenious blasphemy-and nothing more. The misdirected arguments over the nouvelle vague in cinema, for a last example, almost constitute an affront to the cinematic art. It is no wonder some of us cannot distinguish between a Smoky Link and a knish.

From the Mind/Eye to the Eye/Nose/Stomach/Soul

Yet happily, most of us can, for food is one of the only arts which we don't, and can't, overintellectualize. Because we transfer our reactive mechanism from the mind/eye to the eye/nose/stomach/soul, our appreciation of the art is neither diminished by an inferior education nor a weak mind. There is room for the neophyte gourmet, the connoisseur, the glutton, the macrobiotic, the fat and the lean.

It would be foolish to suggest that food can be interpreted and enjoyed equally by everyone; it does require a cultivation of the palate and, less frequently, a durability of the system. But certainly there are fewer obstacles to the attainment of delicate taste buds than there are in the way of good literary, musical, or artistic critical faculties.

And food, unlike all other arts, is close to completely investigable to all. We can press our thumb through the skin of an orange and break it apart; smell it, taste it, hear it, use it, squeeze it, chew it, digest it, decompose it, excrete it, put it against our foreheads on hot days and in our pockets on the way to a show. We possess it like no other art. Unlike other arts, it doesn't conceal its etymology quite as completely. The orange is non-figurative, non-metaphorical. The orange, as food, does not stand for something else except an orange and the nutrients it contains. It is its own metaphor.

The sooner we acknowledge that both the preparation and the consumption of food are legitimate art forms, the sooner we may ?? recapture the innocent and life-giving delights of cooking and eating.

II.

" That is a thing you can't get in a chophouse-I mean; a spiced beef in which the jelly does not taste of glue and the beef has caught the flavor of the carrot. "

Zum Zum is out; the Varsity Spa is in. Hostess cupcakes are out; green salads with minced clams are in. Eating with utensils is out; using hands and other foods to eat with is in. Spooning plain yogurt into half an avocado is in, as is wheat germ, which always has been: dining hall veal cutlets which look like wallets are out. Putting Wheatena in your mouth is out; putting it on your mouth is in.

Eating out is in; eating in is in. Eating your meal on the table is out; if circumstances permit, eating it on the floor is in. Eating in dim light is, and has been, preferable to eating it in strong light, but then eating it in the sunshine is better than in the dark. Rooms with white walls, starkly furnished, enhance a meal as does summer and, oddly, rooms crowded with small objects also create favorable at mospheres.

Ambience

The ambience you eat in, like the gallery, or the auditorium, or the special privacy you like to read in, is an inextricable part of the experience of eating. Ambience, even more than food itself, is cheap, obeying a peculiar law which says the earthiest, most honest atmospheres are found in some of the cheapest restaurants. Many people believe otherwise and pay for their innocence. Just as many artists and their agents capitalize on an easily influenced, indiscriminate public to sell at exorbitant prices undercooked works of art, so do many costly restaurants, dealing in an elegance disembodied from their product, victimize a public constantly confusing obsequious waiters with good food.

Ambience should never try to conceal the quality of the food, although it can enhance the enjoyment of a fair meal. Like Mt. Rushmore, a work of art whose significance and crafts-manship is somehow improved by its debt to the environment, many inexpensive restaurants overcome an unexceptional menu with an alchemizing atmosphere.

The art of food is a total effect, localizing itself in the stomach. We digest not only the dish but the feeling of being in the room and among the people around us. For this reason, if you're eating out inexpensively, I suggest a few places whose food, supplemented by an endearing sordidness, a stylized squalor, transcends its own mediocrity. When it comes to food, in the end, we must cherish this: The exotic synthesis of antiquity and modernity rather than the onanism of self-service chain stores and surgical cafeterias or the pandering of polished fancy restaurants.

A Few Obseure Places

Here then are a few perhaps obscure places whose food may resemble in its doubtful quality what we are accustomed to eating in the neighborhood but whose atmosphere proposes to save its kitchen from defamation. I don't pretend these places are real eating experiences, but they do constitute a first step toward being one with your dinner, and away from the perils of careless consumption which most of us don't recognize.

Start with the Harvard Garden Grill which is right on the Square. Perhaps its proximity to the redoubtable and elegant Waldorf Cafeteria, where each entering customer is mechanically served with a numbered cardboard canape, has thrown it in a dimmer light than it deserves. The Grill, which is no Charley's Kitchen and won't always serve minors, has four things which make it, and all respectable American bars, substantial. It has a television above the bar. It has a lot of those cardboard placards above the mirror above the bar to which are stapled things like Bromo, Cheez-its, crackers and tins of sardines, and Hav-A-Hanks. Third, the Harvard Garden Grill has a lot of woodwork and darkened wooden booths which is very nice. Last, it has big waitresses who look as if they only missed their rightful occupation and ended up, instead, arguing the accurate ages of their customers. Drinks are cheap, as in 15c beers, and the sandwiches are disgraceful. One refreshing aspect is that there are never many students there, although a juke box with Al Martino records stands in the corner. When you go, look up at the old colonial white plaster ceiling, the same you'll find above you in Durgin Park, which needs no introduction although its Indian Pudding, a substance which must be eaten for its texture if not taste, merits another notice.

Two blocks from Durgin Park (on Haymarket Square) is Mondo's, a sober truck stop with a great juke. Tucked inconspicuously between two blackened buildings, it's relatively simple, except for its one charmingly vulgar extravagance. On the most prominent wall hangs an immense oil painting of a nude with crimson lipstick, enormous entrees, and a torso elongated beyond the elasticity of the human anatomy. The obvious, but affable errors in the painting speak well for Mondo's as a restaurant. It gets away with a great deal because it's a truck stop and people there wear white socks and don't pretend to have memorized Lowell's For The Union Dead. The roast beef, taking its cue from Durgin Park, is good and plentiful. So is Fried Clams. And Spaghetti.

Back in Cambridge, there is a spot that approaches the interest of a cultural museum. The Varsity Spa, located where Mt. Atiourn and Mass Ave converge, stays open only until three-thirty but is open to visitors from near dawn until then. The window sills are caked with dust and old boxes of Nabisco crackers: one wall of shelves is lined with random canned goods from previous decades. The Coca-Cola dispenser on the counter is a nostalgic relic-one of the old red shiny rounded numbers which looks like a Packard's back fender. The man and the wife who run it are friendly beyond normal courtesy and will happily make you almost any kind of American sandwich. I like the Varsity Spa and Spas like it the way some people like movies from the forties featuring men in zoot suits and pointed shoes. Freaks and Derelicts served, liquor and bratwurst are not.

Legal Seafoods in Inman Square is important because it serves fresh fish, although sometimes the interior tries too hard to approximate a picnic area. In the North End of Boston, try the Cafe Sicilia which serves dimes-pastry with orange and green frosting and coffee. Tony's, nearby, has no menu. Tony just gets up in the morning and makes something. Carmela of Lowell House says: "Tony's particular about boys" styles. If he doesn't like it, he says he'll pin it up on the wall." That's not the only thing Tony doesn't like. If you don't finish what he serves you, he throws it at you. A little girl, maybe his daughter, comes around with pictures of people who don't eat their food. If you don't finish yours, she comes back, takes your photo with an Instamatic and then you get shown around.

If you're hungry and it's the middle of the night, pay a visit to Kim Toy Lunch at Beach and Tyler St. in Chinatown. It's better than Dino's pizza place, a couple of blocks away on Washington St., because it stays open all night too but has edible food. Kim Toy has a good Won Ton soup, but fails to make good boiled rice. The clientele is shady at late hours, mostly killers and high school sharks, but the area is well protected.

Natural Places

Alfred Jarry, the French madman, once said that "If we must have murders, it's better that they should be works of art." It may be suspected from the preceding observations that I'm subscribing to a similar ethos by suggesting that if we must eat awful food, it should be artfully awful food and served in artful surroundings. To escape this charge gracefully. I must simply say that it's a start in learning to respect food and our own bodies by respecting where we eat it. We forget that food comes mostly from the earth, from natural life, and that it should be eaten in natural places, restaurants true to themselves and true to their customers, not extracted from some entrepreneur's mind or plastiform mold.

Perhaps the best example of a true restaurant is the only macrobiotic one in Boston, Sana? Restaurant at 272a Newbury St. Whether you are a macrobiotic or not, you must try it. My stomach, acclimated to the wide range of food in the Cambridge area, had no trouble even with the dark green sea life served in what appeared to be its own water. The rice, vegetables (fresh, sauteed, and tempuraed), and grains are all organic. The menu includes whole dinners as well as many good invididual dishes like buckwheat noodles, miso soup, hi? jicki beans, fresh fish, and organic desserts. You can sit at a wooden table, furnished with soy sauce and sesame salt, or at the counter where service is quicker. For a bit over a dollar you can eat a healthy untainted meal. Open all week.

Food As Food

Once we begin to respect where and what we eat, macrobiotic and other restaurants which care about the quality of their food will proliferate. Eventually, we will begin to prepare it ourselves. We will find that the biological and aesthetic aspects of food are inseparable. Learn to treat food as food and not as if it were a suppository. We don't eat food simply to kill an appetite or so it can leave our bodies. We eat it for what it does while it's still there.