The Man Who Ate Everything (4 page)

Subsistence, I am happy to report, is not much of a problem for me these days either. I could probably subsist for a decade or
more on the food energy I have thriftily wrapped around various parts of my body. And even in the past, when straitened circumstances forced me to live at the subsistence level regarding clothing, home appliances, and sports equipment, I have always been willing to devote more of my resources to food than have any of the people around me. I called the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The average American household spends $30,487 a year on everything, of which it allocates a pitiful 8.9 percent to food eaten at home and 5.4 percent to food eaten in restaurants. In telling contrast, I have spent between 30 and 100 percent of my income on food every year since I became an adult. Except for those few blissful days when I lived on the miraculous peanut-butter diet.

One day I nearly dropped a bowl of oyster stuffing when I read with disbelief and disappointment that the average American family spent only $2.59 a person on Thanksgiving dinner in 1991, down from $2.89 the year before, an undeniable sign of the decay of family and national values under two successive Republican administrations. To be precise, I did not actually read that the average American family spent only $2.59 a person on Thanksgiving dinner. That’s what the National Turkey Federation press release wanted me to think I had read. The press release really said that a complete Thanksgiving dinner for ten
need cost
only $2.59 a person, considering how inexpensive turkey is. They’re right about turkey. I called the Department of Agriculture. Turkey is the cheapest form of animal protein you can readily buy, or at least it was in June 1991. Three ounces of lean, cooked turkey flesh cost 42 cents; three ounces of cooked T-bone steak were $2.35. The protein in beans is much cheaper, but the USDA’s 1991 list of “meat alternatives” left out beans. Incredibly, no one in or out of the government knows how much the average American family
did
spend on its average Thanksgiving dinner. I called everybody.

The government does know that the average American household consists of one and six-tenths adults, seven-tenths of a child, and three-tenths of an elderly person (for a total of two and
six-tenths humans), who collectively spend $4,271 a year on food, both in and out of the house. That comes to $4.50 a person a day, or $1.50 a meal. My disbelief at hearing these numbers cannot be entirely blamed on my own gluttonous nature. The French and the Japanese are happy to spend twice as much for their exquisite food. We, the richest country in the world, have simply chosen to scrimp. Among the wealthy countries, only the British spend much less than we do. This says volumes to me.

It seems obvious that the only way to spend as little as $4.50 a day on food is to eat nearly every meal at home. To test this proposition, I took out my 1993 edition of the
Zagat New York City Restaurant Survey,
checked off the ten cheapest restaurants, and began to eat my way through them. If you’ve never dined at the Wall Street branch of McDonald’s at 160 Broadway, just two blocks north of Trinity Church, you have a treat in store. It is a soaring two-story space with marble tables, an electronic stock ticker, a pianist at an ebony baby grand, a doorman, and a hostess in a curvy lavender suit. The back half of the ground floor is a traditional McDonald’s counter and kitchen, and the menu and prices are just what you would hope. Nonetheless, my discreetly spiced Mighty Wings, my order of excellent fries, and my Diet Coke totaled $5.34 with tax, effortlessly busting the $4.50 average daily food budget of the average American. I could, I suppose, have ordered much less food and sat there all day like several other patrons who, I surmised from their multiple layers of clothing, were homeless. Our bilingual (English-Spanish) hostess guided them to a warm seat upstairs where the staff would bother them less, and together, underneath the Golden Arches, we enjoyed the pianist’s witty rendition of “There Will Never Be Another You.”

Three of New York City’s cheapest restaurants are called the Original California Taqueria; all are in Brooklyn Heights or Park Slope, and two appear to be owned by the same person. A convenient F train whisked us nearly door-to-door to 341 Seventh Avenue in Park Slope, where a fresh and pungent interpretation
of East Los Angeles cuisine, an attractive and friendly ambience, and a boldly painted mural that incongruously included the Golden Gate Bridge awaited us. We exceeded $4.50 apiece by only 12 cents, ignoring the $3.00 for round-trip transportation. If my wife’s tostada was not quite enough for a day’s ration, my ample
plattio,
which included a beef taco, guacamole, beans, and rice, more than made up for it. Of all the restaurants I visited, only at the Original California Taqueria could I buy something approaching a balanced diet with my limited funds. To celebrate this achievement and our unaccustomed sojourn in Brooklyn, we returned to the F train and rode it to the very last stop, in Coney Island, where close by the desolate ruins of Luna Park and its famous Parachute Jump, and two blocks from the original Nathan’s, still stands Totonno Pizzeria Napolitano, historically one of the most important restaurants in America. (Totonno, with its coal oven and thickly painted pressed-tin walls and ceiling, opened in 1924, making it the second-oldest surviving pizzeria in this country.) Though Totonno is unjustly listed by Zagat as only the thirty-sixth-best bang for the buck in New York City, a small pizza with a remarkable crust covered by nothing but handmade mozzarella and a sauce of imported canned tomatoes—all unchanged from the founder’s original recipe—cost us only slightly more than the following day’s entire $9 food budget for two.

At Gray’s Papaya and Papaya King the customer can easily stop short of $4.50 by ordering two first-rate beef frankfurters (70 cents apiece at Gray’s, more at Papaya King) or one chicken fajita (only at Papaya King) and one large fresh pineapple juice ($1.75). For a more varied diet I journeyed to Amir’s Falafel near the Columbia University campus and to the Cupcake Cafe on Ninth Avenue. Perhaps because I relished the food at both addresses, I failed to keep the tab under $4.50. Next time I will try harder. But dining at New York City’s ten cheapest restaurants merely confirmed that eating out is extremely difficult on the average American daily food budget of $4.50. And on a subsistence diet, you simply cannot leave your own kitchen.

M. F. K. Fisher wrote
How to Cook a Wolf
in 1942 to help Americans eat well in a time of scarcity and rationing. A chapter called “How to Keep Alive” was directed to her least affluent readers and gave Fisher’s formula for what she called Sludge, a mixture of grain and ground meat and vegetables that she created as “a streamlined answer to the pressing problem of how to exist the best possible way for the least amount of money.” I had always wanted to try the recipe.

“The first thing to do, if you have absolutely no money, is to borrow some,” she begins. “Fifty cents will be enough, and should last you from three days to a week, depending on how luxurious are your tastes. [Here Fisher veers off into a species of coyness that makes her recipe very difficult to replicate today.] Buy about 15 cents’ worth of ground beef from a reputable butcher… . Buy about 10 cents’ worth of ground whole-grain cereal. Almost any large grocery carries it in bulk. It is brownish in color, coarsely mealy in texture, and has a pleasant smell of nuts and starch. Spend the rest of your money on vegetables… . Get one bunch of carrots, two onions, some celery, and … a small head of cabbage. Grind [the vegetables] all into the pot. Break up the meat into the pot. Cover the thing with what seems too much water.”

You simmer this mixture for an hour, add the grain, cook slowly for another two hours, and let it cool. The most delicious way to eat it, Fisher writes, is by taking some slices of the solidified mass and frying them like scrapple.

“Shame on you, Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher,” I muttered under my breath as I scoured the supermarket, trying to shop for her recipe. “Why couldn’t you have given the quantities in weight or volume?” I had already called the Commerce Department. From 1942 to 1992, the overall consumer price index increased 8.8 times, while food prices increased 9.5 times. I could have tracked down the price of ground beef in 1942, and celery and onions, but I had no way of identifying what kind of whole grain Fisher had in mind. So I threw up my hands, multiplied all
her numbers by 9.5, and filled up my shopping cart with $1.43 worth of ground beef (thirteen ounces on super-special sale), 95 cents of Wheatena (just a half pound), and $2.37 of onions, celery, carrots, and cabbage, nearly a pound of each. Can you believe that celery costs nearly as much as beef?

I browned the meat first, ground up the vegetables in my food processor, added some canned tomato puree, salt, and pepper for additional flavor, grew thoroughly fed up with Fisher’s instruction to “cover the thing with what seems too much water,” covered the thing with too much water, and then had to let it boil down for the next five hours. The finished Sludge was an appetizing brown and tasted inoffensive (more onions and tomatoes would have helped), and I let it cool and solidify in a large baking pan. The recipe yielded ten very generous half-pound portions (I was in charge of portion control), one for lunch, one for dinner, and a half portion for breakfast for the next four days. Total cost was $5.25, including the tomato puree, salt, and pepper. Cost per day was $1.31. Add 30 cents for coffee and a little orange juice in the morning, and subsistence comes to $1.61 a day. Just compare that with $1.70 a day for eight peanut-butter sandwiches and four glasses of reconstituted milk—not counting the 20 extra cents for a deluxe vitamin pill.

Whether Sludge or peanut-butter sandwiches with reconstituted dry milk are nutritionally complete, I cannot prove. I
subsisted on Sludge for nearly a day and then grew bored.
BUT
my health never flagged. I should also report that Fisher’s Sludge turned to complete mush whenever I tried to fry it up ir ample sweet butter, as she recommended, the only way I founc it palatable.

I briefly entertained the notion that I could solve my subsistence problems by doing all my shopping at Gourmet Garage, new outfit at 47 Wooster Street in the SoHo section of New Yor
k
City. Then I visited Gourmet Garage for the first time. The bargains were terrific.
Pied de mouton
mushrooms and yellow-footed chanterelles were being given away for $8.50 a pound, a 50 per-cent savings; Eli Zabar’s two-pound Manor House Loaf, sold by the baker himself at E.A.T. on Madison Avenue for $5.00, went for only $3.95 here; and free-range chickens cost only $2.85 a
pound.

When I came to a shelf holding rows of five-kilogram bags of basmati rice, my mind drifted back to an evening several months ago in a Moorish garden in the south of Spain. I was with the beautiful Indian actress and food
writer Madhur Jaffrey. The air
was soft with the scent of night-blooming jasmine. I leaned toward Madhur and whispered, “What brand of basmati rice would you recommend?”

“Tilda,” she replied. And now, months later, as if by divine intervention, I find Tilda on sale at Gourmet Garage for only two dollars a pound.

But no matter how hard I calculate, I can’t fit many
pieds de mouton
and yellow chanterelles into my low-cost cooking. And even at two dollars a pound, basmati rice runs four times as much as the regular long-grain American rice at my local A&P. When I lose interest in subsistence, I plan to shop at Gourmet Garage on an hourly basis.

The United States Department of Agriculture publishes a near-subsistence diet called the Thrifty Food Plan, calculates its cost every month, and uses this number to determine how many food stamps to issue to poor families so that they can cook and eat according to the Thrifty Food Plan. (That’s how it is supposed to
work; advocates for the poor argue that food-stamp allocations are insufficient for those following the Thrifty Food Plan.) Last October the cost was $49.40 a week for a family of two and $82.50 for a family of four. This comes to $3.53 a person a day for a family of two. The amazing thing to me is that the average American on his or her $4.50-a-day food budget spends only about 25 percent more than the cost of this subsistence diet!

I decided to follow the Thrifty Food Plan for a week and took the USD As booklet
Thrifty Meals for Two: Making Food Dollars Count
to the supermarket, reading it as I wandered the aisles. I will neither confirm nor deny whether or how often I cheated in the days that followed. Foodstamp recipients do not have a choice.

On Day One, the Thrifty Food Plan required me to eat a breakfast of toast, milk, cereal, and an orange. This fueled a long morning of planning and cooking. Many of the recipes in
Thrifty Meals for Two
are made from other recipes in
Thrifty Meals for Two,
so precise and long-range planning is vital. I began by creating six cups of Biscuit Mix (a homemade form of Bisquick, which would later grow into both Drop Biscuits and Peanut Butter Snack Loaf) and five cups of Pudding Mix (sugar, cornstarch, and nonfat dry milk to which I would later add cocoa and water to produce Chocolate Pudding). Then I began preparations for lunch by braising three turkey drumsticks in water in a covered pan, discarding the bones and skin, turning the flavored water into gravy, setting aside three ounces of the meat for lunch (I fortunately possess an expensive electronic scale), and saving the rest for Days Two and Three. Whereupon I baked a potato, cooked up some collard greens, made Drop Biscuits from my Biscuit Mix and a truly repulsive Chocolate Pudding from my Pudding Mix, and ate all but the Chocolate Pudding. Dinner was a bacon cheeseburger on a roll and a disappointing banana. But only an hour later snack time arrived—peanut butter on toast. I could hardly wait until morning.