Fear of Food

Moments like these are why you program pizza places into the cell phone’s speed dial: he waiter, looking altogether too pleased with himself, puts down a small pale plate. There’s some kind of sauce that looks a bit like an oil slick, but that’s not the scary part.

I have to ask exactly what the scary part is.

“A foie gras lollipop,” the waiter says.

Clearly I’m a poltroon for not knowing this already. Clearly I’m a poltroon—what a lovely word that is, one that really should make it back into daily vocabulary—for not knowing that somewhere on a farm in a country where they smoke Gitaines and take themselves way too seriously, men are force feeding ducks and geese, and these birds are giving up their very lives for—

foie gras lollipops.

Thought two that’s a little alarming about this: clearly, there’s a store somewhere that sells sticks for foie gras lollipops. Last month, while in Vuntut, we were telling stupid camper stories, and the winner would have been “then she asked where she could buy sticks for roasting marshmallows,” except we all knew you could buy that very thing.

It is the kind of knowledge that keeps me from sleeping well, along with the simple, ugly fact that before I went to Vuntut, I went out and bought fleece pants, in Arizona, when it was 116 degrees out, and it only took me one phone call to find a place that sold them.

Over the past week, I’ve been in Vegas at the annual convention of the Society of American Travel Writers. It’s the first time I’ve gone out to play this particular round of reindeer games, and it was more than a little interesting. Met some really nice people, and best of all, people who understood the complaints of this job. As anybody with any job, we have a lot of complaints. Slow pay, poor pay, the search for a laundromat with instructions you can figure out, the increasing incivility of air travel.

But face it, if I tell the average cubicle worker that I’m writing up two pieces on the Arctic and doing research for a story on the Canary Islands, all they’re going to do is concentrate on what seems like a large amount of money for each word written, and the fact that I’m just back from the arctic and headed for the Canaries. All that looks good from a cubicle.

But does the foie gras lollipop? This is the fourth meal in a row we’ve been offered foie gras. Maybe more, I don’t know, I skipped breakfast the past couple days, so maybe it’s been six meals in a row. Maybe I missed foie gras french toast, or foie gras waffles, or orange foie gras juice.

The other three meals, though, the foie gras just came in a big chunk. And foie gras is like the cherry on top of a sundae in a certain respect, in that, if you don’t like it, if that red color makes you a little queasy, there’s always someone else around who loves the things.

Here’s my big complaint about the job: meals that last five hours. Only twice can I think of times I didn’t mind, and that was because of company, not the food.

Now, I respect the fact that a good chef is an artist, but if it’s taking forty minutes between courses, we either need more hands working in the kitchen or we need to rethink what’s being served up, before we’re offered foie gras-flavored Captain Crunch.

So here’s about all I’ve learned from yet another week of too much food, prepared too fussily, with too many ingredients thrown in just for show: foie gras shovels onto other plates quite easily.

When I come to that realization, I figure out what the stick is really for.