The Illumination of Under the Fig Tree

And a reminder!

Pre-order Feast On Your Life for a daily reminder of the joy found in food!

***

Dear Tamar,

I am starting out my a culinary career in a time that seems plagued by restaurant closures and outings of so-called geniuses as abusive plagiarists. Recently, while trying to research whether or not I could legally obtain live crawfish in my state (I can’t) I ended up on a thread lamenting the state of a Michelin-star restaurant in my city that, ten years ago, invited diners to take shots with the head chef and now will only accept diner gifts of blue Gatorade. The culture has changed, the internet says. It’s no fun anymore.

I don’t feel like I’m missing out on the drug-fueled parties. But I do feel like there was a moment—just before I started—when innovation was rewarded, when family-run, immigrant-owned businesses were everywhere, when both fine dining and neighborhood haunts were fun and unique and could afford to stay open.

Now, I feel like there are simultaneously more transcendent dishes than I’ll ever be able to try, and more well-loved neighborhood establishments shutting their doors. I fear I’ll be seduced by algorithms while the restaurants I should be cooking in close and another Sweetgreen takes their place. Am I alive during a uniquely desperate moment for the restaurant industry, or does everyone feel like this at some point? What if Alinea closes before I can afford to eat there? What if I spend years saving money to eat at Alinea, and when I get there it’s just okay? How do I know what’s worth it? How do I cope?

-Under the Fig Tree

Dear Under the Fig Tree,

When I was a senior in college, my best friend—and the person with whom I opened a restaurant in my twenties—put on Dylan Thomas’s play for voices, Under Milk Wood. For a thousand reasons I can’t ever know, it was one of the most beautiful things I’d seen. What I do know: the night was right: warm and cool. I was about to graduate college: young and old. The actors were my friends and had never done a play they liked so much. The text is just off immediately comprehensible, barely poetry, and so completely poetry: my favorite kind.

I could not believe the beauty. I was proud of my friend. But I was mostly moved by the thing: the fitness of the show to its text and the engagement of all of these people of my age, and how the script had made them think about light on a stage, and movement and sound. Basically: my fellow-seniors had reached through the membrane that separates the daily from the holy, and I was there to see it.

Maybe you know the play well. I had never heard of it before that night. Here are the opening lines.

To begin at the beginning: It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters’-and-rabbits’ wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboatbobbing sea. The houses are blind as moles (though moles see fine to-night in the snouting, velvet dingles) or blind as Captain Cat there in the muffled middle by the pump and the town clock, the shops in mourning, the Welfare Hall in widows’ weeds. And all the people of the lulled and dumbfound town are sleeping now.

To me, that opening is an enticement to be enamored—of words, of visions, of symbols, of the everyday, of waking and sleeping, of the patterns of life. When my friend and I opened a restaurant—she did most of the opening; I joined her as co-chef and then executive chef—it was in the spirit of being enamored. We scoured our steel prep tables and unpacked cases of peppers in a state of what felt like boundless love, that felt like poetry in motion, that felt like Under Milk Wood.

What does this have to do with you, wondering if you’ve missed the boat? As I’m sure you’ve read a million times, each generation of humans possesses a bizarre combination of nostalgia and hubris. Things have always been better in the past, and are always better now than they’re about to be. In your letter, you describe your own experience of this human condition—which is no less true as successive generations experience it, and no less accurate for each successive description.

You describe other phenomena, too. You describe this moment in capitalism—felt existentially by the poorest people and only aesthetically by the richest. You describe the weird awful beautiful moment of choice, when you still have a chance to withdraw from your interest and reconsider it as your vocation. You have only the past and your instinct and your mentors to look to in order to decide: Is this my fig tree?

Back to Milk Wood. In which life is a pattern sweet and rhythmic enough to be a play in poetry. No restaurant job will bear any resemblance to it, but your engagement with what you do can. You don’t need answers before you make your next decision. You need only your love for the thing. Do you hear the specificity of “the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters’-and-rabbits’ wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboatbobbing sea.”? That is how close you must get to what you love. Any further is abstract and leaves too much space for perseveration.

It does not matter if it was better or worse. It does not matter. It has nothing to do with your life, your streets, your Milk Wood. What do you love in the fishboatbobbing sea? You mention the algorithm. What does that have to do with you? As much as you let it, I think. I don’t know if it was better or worse. I only know that abstraction yields stasis and specificity yields action.

Only you can hear the houses sleeping in the streets in the slow deep salt and silent black, bandaged night. Only you can see, in the blinded bedrooms, the coms. and petticoats over the chairs, the jugs and basins, the glasses of teeth, Thou Shalt Not on the wall, and the yellowing dickybird-watching pictures of the dead. Only you can hear and see, behind the eyes of the sleepers, the movements and countries and mazes and colours and dismays and rainbows and tunes and wishes and flight and fall and despairs and big seas of their dreams.

Dear cook, I hear your worry. I had similar worry when I was a young cook and I have different worry now. What can you do? You can notice what you love and pursue it. You can find a chef you admire and cook with her. You can choose and you can choose again. Talking about our shared love of cooking, I am pulled inexorably toward more poetry. Audre Lorde: The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives. Cook, look up at the leaves of your fig tree. Breathe in. Reach up and pick a fig. What will you do but take a bite?