On to other things! I've been watching some minds fail rather spectacularly to meet lately, and got to wondering why that was. I decided after some thought that at least one of the parties had reached a sort of fundamental opinion--something that simply couldn't be disbelieved because it was one of the first principles of their thought. I suppose that good philosophers, at least since Descartes, try not to let these have their way, but I was never much good at philosophy anyway. It did get me thinking about what my own first principles were, however.

I was also at the time thinking about this post at Querencia, and musing on those really excellent joyous evenings referenced. This in turn took my mind back to any number of meals. In Paris, mussels in beer. A tiny vegetarian Indian restaurant, rolling up neat spheres of lentils. Santa Fe, eating out at 315 with Peculiar, starting with Gruet Blanc de Noir, working our way through a bottle of Beaujolais as I ate tuna that had only just met the grill for a moment (I'm sorry, Peculiar, but I can't remember what you had!), duck confit, and finishing with a really excellent creme brulee (hey Ari, what did you decide about who had the best? 'Cause my vote remains 315) and hot, sweet espresso. Steak Dunigan at the Pink, many many times (sometimes even paying for it!). Actually, a number of things at the Pink: lamb chops, very rare, with butter melting on top of them; Chilean sea bass crusted in walnuts; Armando's personal salsa ("Don't cry, primo; be a man"); Brandy Alexanders on the boss's dime; Ladera '01 merlot, a bottle of which I chose as a parting gift over Dom Perignon, and have never regretted doing so; hell, popcorn and gin and tonic at the end of a shift.

I could go on like this for hours. In fact, I'm going to. My wife makes chocolate chips cookies the size of my hand, full of dark chocolate chips, walnuts, and oatmeal. In the mornings I get up and have two eggs from my chickens. My eggs are not regular eggs. Regular eggs explode in my hands now when I try to crack them, so used am I to the thick shells of real eggs. And my yolks stand up almost hemispherical, and the deep orange of Betelgeuse. In France when I was there the summer after I graduated from high school, I would drink kirs after riding from town to town on my bicycle, and they still taste like Provence to me. At Steve and Libby's, eating lamb stew with garlic yogurt on top.

Reminiscing further, I found that all the most enjoyable moments in my life had a really, really good meal within twenty-four hours of them. Even as a kid I liked the idea of eating with friends. The saddest part of Wind in the Willows was always when Mole realized that he didn't have anything to feed Rat; the only redeeming feature of the execrable Redwall books was the description of the feasts. I always thought that drowning in malmsey sounded like a sensible way to go. Reading M. F. K. Fisher or Brillat-Savarin or Dumas' cookbook always cheers me up. One of my favorite conversation topics is last meals, planning them course by course (champagne to start and finish, of course). Contrariwise, the nadir was also the time when I lived on Snickers bars I got from the vending machine at 3:00 am, when I could be sure that no one else was around.

At a recent job interview, I was bs'ing about how much I liked feeding people. It's only now that I realize that it's true. When things are bad, I want to eat, and when other people are having trouble, I want to feed them. I told this to a psychology major who responded that I had confused food and love. This is utter nonsense (I am in no danger of eating my wife or son). Food makes things better. Things are always worse on an empty stomach; only after a seriously good meal, and some good drink, and good company, is life manageable.

Which is why efforts to take away food always piss me off. From NYC's ban on transfats ("The hardest one for us was the croissant. We replaced butter with palm oil. From my perspective it’s not a croissant any more. It’s lost all its lamination and flavor.") to attempts to reinstate Prohibition--apparently thinking that this time we'll get it right, which reminds me of John Keynes comment on Betram Russell: "on the one hand he believed that all the problems of the world stemmed from conducting human affairs in a most irrational way; on the other hand that the solution was simple, since all we had to do was to behave rationally" to efforts to reduce agriculture in America to a mono-culture of Large White Turkeys and shit-fed chickens, all in a greasy HFC sauce--it all makes me angry all out of proportion with the actual danger. Food is not something I can be rational about, since to me it is connected so vitally with existence as human beings. You are what you eat, they say, and I think we are how we eat, too. We eat fast these days, and poorly, and alone. Food should be something that people gather around, prepare together, eat lots of, and so should drink (my beer comes on well; so does my kombucha). It's no accident that breaking bread and drinking wine together is a sacrament.

So, apparently one of my first principles is that there is nothing on Earth that cannot be fixed with good food, good drink, and good company. I suppose I should hope for something more spiritual, or philosophically unassailable ("Something's going to happen"? "Cogito ergo sum"?), but this is up with what I came. At least I'm in good company: "If you offer Plato a dish of figs, he will take them all."

UPDATE: I forgot the best story! When I was between two and three years, my parents were celebrating Christmas Eve by cooking lobster in their apartment. They had put me to bed, but I woke up and toddled out to the kitchen. They gave me a little taste, and then sent me back to my room. At the kitchen door I turned around.

"I'm coming back for a snack later," I said. "And it better be lobster."