The Rake Magazine

Author: Ann Bauer

  • The Rise of the Mighty Euro

    Perhaps I’m the only one who wasn’t paying attention to the complications caused by the European Union. But I’ll admit, I’m surprised.

    When we booked our trip to Italy — after receving an unexpected bequest from my husband’s mother — the euro (which had been under a dollar not long before) was trading at about $1.20. By the time we boarded our plane last week, it was $1.55 and rising steadily, which meant we could no longer afford the trip we had planned.

    John and I reassessed quickly, eliminating one city and several amenities. The best solution would have been to shorten the trip by two days, thereby cutting out two hotel stays and several meals, but Northwest would have charged us so dearly to make the change, we would have netted a loss. So we forged ahead, eating dinner roughly half the nights in our rooms rather than a restaurant, which in this country certainly is no hardship. . . .

    In fact, we had some really lovely meals: fresh bread; prosciutto from the local alimentari; a delicious sharp, soft cheese called tallegio; and the best oranges (nearly all Italian oranges are of what we Americans call the "blood" variety, with bright red fruit) I have ever tasted in my life. In addition, each night we would open a bottle of some local wine that we purchased for about €3.50, or $5.

    After a time, John and I began competing in the markets of Italy, a how low can you go sort of game, where each of us would try to find a bottle of something both cheap and remarkable. The best was a Sasso Alto Montepulciano d’Abruzzo 2006 for €2.59 (around $3.90) that we found in a dingy, back-street supermarket in Florence. It was rich and satisfying, a cherry red wine with lots of blackberry and vanilla and dark Tuscan earth. Not complex, but perfect for our middle-of-the-bed picnics. And I have no doubt that when we look back on this trip in the decades to come, it will be those nights we remember most fondly. Food and wine in a small hotel room, oranges so juicy we needed towels to keep the quilt clean, the sounds of city life coming from the darkened porthole window overhead.

    Still, we did a fair amount of grumbling at first about how the cost of the euro was eating into our precious vacation fund. The more we tried to economize, however — e.g. ordering primi plates and house wine in restaurants rather than three courses with expensive bottles, as tourists who came before us have routinely done — the more irritated our hosts became. And it wasn’t only us. I could watch the animosity play out between other Americans and our Italian hosts. There has always, I suspect, existed a battle between merchants and travelers: they rely on us financially but resent us for trampling through their country and neglecting to learn their language; we want to take advantage of everything they know and have and sell, yet resent the prices they charge.

    In the wake of the European Union and the euro, everything relationship-wise has worsened. Tourists feel cheated even before they land in Florence or Venice or Rome. And businesspeople in this country (where employment owes a whopping 67% to the service and tourism industries) are seeing crowds thin and people spend less. So they’re reasonably defensive and upset.

    I thought this was the end of the story — a cultural war that waxes and wanes and happens to be in a peak phase right now — but last night I had a converation that broadened my understanding. We had stopped in a coffee bar and struck up a halting, broken conversation with a very genial barista. At one point, I asked if conversion to the euro had been difficult — meaning, mostly, whether it was tough to recognize the new coins and bills.

    But he took it another way entirely.

    "Terrible," he told us (and I’m paraphrasing, because some of this was communicated with hand gestures). "Everything in Italy costs twice as much as it did when we had lire."

    It turns out [and you probably already know this] that economically powerful countries such as France and Sweden drew in less well-off ones — including Italy and Spain — forcing everyone to adhere to a standard currency that allowed the wealthier Europeans to maintain their quality of life while the poor wound up spending 75-100% more for essentials, such as food, cigarettes (hey, they seem to be essential here. . . .), and gasoline.

    The barista explained all this while tossing a 50-cent coin in the air. He looked simply resigned. As for me, I left the coffee bar far less inclined to complain about my lean vacation funds. Also grateful on behalf of working-class Italian people that at least, they need pay only €2.59 for a very good bottle of wine.

  • The Bread Wars of Orvieto

    I spent my 42nd birthday on a motorcycle, riding through the hills of Umbria and stopping for a late lunch in a beautiful little village called Orvieto. It was, from beginning to end, magnificent.

    Famous mostly for Classico, a distinctive white wine blend, Orvieto is slanted straight up and home to a remarkable cathedral that has striped stone walls and streaked, marbleized stained glass, and a chapel with the entire book of Revelations depicted in glorious paintings by Luca Signorelli. John and I stopped briefly but had only a few minutes to look. Then we found Ristorante Antica Cantina, a savory-smelling little trattoria, where we ate homemade pasta with ragu and truffles — one of the best simple meals I’ve ever had.

    We left Rome the next day, bound for Florence, and decided to take the train directly back to Orvieto. We wanted to spend a full hour or two in the cathedral. And lunch had been so spectacular, we were both anxious to try dinner there.

    But the train to Orvieto was a bit late [where IS Mussolini these days?] and by the time we got in, bought a bottle of Classico for €3.50 (a little over $5), and found a nice hotel, we were beat. Also just a tad over budget. We’re taking a beating on the dollar-euro exchange rate, of course. And well. . . .there is all this wine and food to experience. . . .

    So we sat in the hotel room, drinking the entire bottle which was crisp and semi-sweet and full of tropical fruit: banana, kiwi, and lime. Then, for the sake of ease and because we’d so loved it, we headed back to Antica Cantina, anxious — cost be damned — to see what the full dinner menu would bring.

    We walked in right past the owner, who had served us the day before. He scowled — a large, bearded man, rather like Stromboli in Pinnochio — and we assumed it had nothing to do with us. We sat. A waiter came to take our drink order. And when he brought us the tiny half-flask we had asked for (mostly out of politeness, because we’d had enough wine), he also set down a bread basket. That’s when I realized I was really hungry, queasy almost, and had had a bit too much Classico on an empty stomach.

    So, I reached for a slice of bread and asked for some olive oil. . . .

    Utter mayhem ensued. The owner was sitting at a neighboring table, drinking himself (who knows how heavily?). He heard my request, jumped out of his seat, bolted to our table and said, "Order now!"

    I explained in my five words of acquired Italian that I needed just a moment to consult the phrase book, that we’d been in for lunch the day before — didn’t he recall? — and would like to try something else. But the menu was all in Italian and difficult to parse.

    He heard all this (or not), and raised his voice this time: "You order NOW!"

    He was not in the business of bread, he went on. He was in the business of bruschetta and pasta and zuppa. He pointed to the piece of bread out of which I’d taken a bite, leaned down into my face and screamed, "YOU ORDER NOW!!!"

    Well, we did. John and I ordered exactly the same dishes we’d had the day before, down to the mixed salad. Five minutes later, our meal was literally thrown on the table in front of us. We ate like prisoners being watched. And the moment we’d put our forks down, the dishes were cleared and a check slammed onto the table along with a pen.

    I take from this experience three things: One, that I did not do my homework properly. I made a cultural gaffe in asking for olive oil before ordering my meal, and for this I feel sincerely stupid. Two, that the tourism industry is suffering from the exchange rate that has us — and nearly every other American tourist — discussing finances before they sit down to a European meal.

    And three? That there is a completely insane restaurateur running loose on the streets of Orvieto.

  • Eating Christians

    I have learned many things after only two days in Rome.

    I have learned, for instance, that I, who think of myself as a forthright women — pushy, even — have nothing on the people here who will grab a stranger’s arm and lead her into a restaurant or insist on turning heat on in her hotel room when it is already 80 degrees.

    I have learned that the most average table-quality olive oil here makes the stuff we’re buying back home (even the really, really pricey bottles at boutique gourmet shops) seem thin and tasteless. Here, the olio is viscous and green, with a sweet, nutty flavor — one that reminds you an olive is a fruit, and not a vegetable as our guidebook said.

    I have learned yet again (because I’ve visited Europe before and had this exact experience) that the coffee on the continent is vastly superior to everything we have in the States. In fact, these tiny cups of rich, dense, foamy liquid don’t even seem related to oily American espresso and this time, I’m certain I’ve been ruined for Caribou and Starbucks forever.

    I have learned to my chagrin that every other civilized person on the planet — including the kid we stopped on the street to ask for directions to the train station and the elderly man who was mopping the floor in the Pantheon this morning — knows several languages, including mine. I am traveling, for that matter, with a husband who knows three and is able to communicate with the majority of those few who haven’t learned English by slipping into Spanish. While my paltry smattering of poorly pronounced French has been useless.

    But put all that aside.

    My single greatest learning experience to date came this morning, when my husband and I walked from our hotel four miles, across the Tiber River, to the Vatican and beheld a spectacle unlike any I have ever seen. It was Disneyland with Jesus, a vast, commercial enterprise with men hawking knock-off purses and jewelry at the entrance and enormous screens showing video of the current pope. Were I a Catholic, I would be furious, ashamed, moved to convert to Islam. My mother is Catholic and I was positively aggrieved on her behalf. We declined the opportunity to pay €25 euro apiece to tour this “holy” place, tripped over the hordes of beggars who lay crouched in what I think of as a yogic child’s pose, rattling their shorn-off McDonald’s cups for coins. It was sobering to me, the streams of people wearing crosses who appeared to be gleaning something spiritual from the circus of cotton candy vendors, plastic pietas, and St. Francis on a stick.

    We walked away quiet, sickened, not in the mood for lunch. Our next destination was the Coliseum, which took us through the Ghetto, Rome’s Jewish section (which was lovely and quiet and completely devoid of hotdog vendors, kosher or otherwise), and the ancient ruins. Finally we came to the Coliseum, a blackened and broken stone structure, and sat in a park across the street.

    “So this was the place where they had, what?” I asked John (who, by the way, won the trivia contest on the plane on the way over; so I count on him to know all things).

    “Oh, you know, there were gladiators, and lions eating Christians,” he said.

    Well, of course, I’d heard this, but I hadn’t really thought of it. And I have to admit, his saying this really brightened my day. Eating Christians! Now I’m not saying all Christians deserve to be eaten. But I really do think that carefully employed, this practice would solve a lot of problems. There are droves of people pimping the Vatican, and hordes of others brainlessly buying it. Most of them are Christians. And I say, by getting the Coliseum in working order again and feeding a few of them to the lions, we might be able to put a stop to a lot of needless evil. Plus, it would thin out the crowds around Rome.

    Which would mean — here’s the real beauty part — that I wouldn’t have to stand in line so long for my coffee.

     

  • Jet Lagged and Loving It

    We arrived in Rome yesterday around 2 p.m. This after 18 straight hours of travel, consisting of two hours in the MSP airport (who knew we’d whip through security in 30 seconds?), eight hours on the flight to Amsterdam, four hours in Schipol, and another hour 58 minutes in the air.

    I don’t sleep on planes [I can barely sleep in beds, for Christ’s sake!]. My head was still stuck back home: Did our son make it to school? Was anyone feeding the cat? Had our daughter had anything new pierced in the scant day since we left? Weary and worried, I found Rome formidable.

    Everything sounds and smells different here. The streets are made of cobblestone, which gives the rain a darker odor and car tires a hollow bumping beat. There are throngs of people snaking down narrow alleyways, flashing neon Farmacia signs, tiny stores selling €200 shoes.

    Around 5 p.m., I felt irrationally daunted. Strung out, stupid, and desperately in need of a drink. Still unshowered and in our two-day-old clothes, John and I went to a supermercato called Sma. It was under a furniture store, accessible only through a subway-like set of stairs. The aisles were crazy — some straight, others curling, with no pattern at all — but in the back of the store (or maybe it was the left in the front), there was a small wine section. We sifted through the bottles, mostly Italian, a few French.

    There were rows of a Barbera d’Alba 2006 from the Cooperativa FRA Produttori for €4.99 each, plus one dusty, scuffed bottle of 2005 marked one Euro less. It had to be a mistake, I told John. Throughout Europe, 2005 was the best year in decades. There was no way we could buy this wine for the equivalent of $6. But when we went to the cashier, she rang up the Barbera d’Alba for exactly €3.99.

    I don’t know that any wine has ever tasted so good to me. Fruity and musty with a little bit of the dark, rocky rain I’d been smelling all afternoon. The day softened into evening. We drank the entire bottle in our room at the Hotel Italia, then fell asleep — blissfully — for a little over 11 hours. And when we woke up this morning, the sun was out and everything was new.

  • Faking It

    It seems every time you pick up a newspaper, someone new is issuing a mea culpa for having written, published, or promoted a completely fake memoir. Starting with Rigoberta Menchu, back in the ’90s, then continuing through James Frey and his Million Little Pieces to the middle-aged woman who wrote about being a male teen prostitute named JT LeRoy.

    This week, we have Margaret Seltzer, who wrote under the pen name Margaret [Peggy] B. Jones and sold a true-to-life book called Love & Consequences. It took her three years to pen this memoir about her young life as a girl gang banger in south Los Angeles and her subsequent salvation at the hands of an African-American foster mother she called Big Mom. Only upon publication, it turned out Seltzer actually grew up in tony Sherman Oaks, CA, and she lived with her own biological parents (and the sister who ratted her out) until leaving for an expensive private school.

    What’s interesting about this story — to me, at least — is that Seltzer/Jones editor, Sarah McGrath, was MY editor, back when she was at Scribner and I was at work on my first novel, which we nicknamed Wild Ride. Sarah was a marvelous editor: dedicated, respectful, a real champion. There were times I thought she believed in my book more than I did. And I can easily see how a woman so enthusiastic about the art of the written word could get taken in.

    But what does this have to do with food, you’re asking? Well, funny thing. . . .

    Around the same time Love & Consequences was being recalled, a chef named Robert Irvine, host of the Food Network’s Dinner Impossible, was busted as well.

    It seems Irvine lied on his official resume, saying he’d cooked for President Bush and Princess Diana and somewhere along the line been knighted by the queen. He did none of these things. Nor did he graduate from the University of Leeds.

    What he did was star in a successful television show for more than a year — a program that one reviewer said was like James Bond meets MacGyver — serving impromptu gourmet meals to hundreds of people. He was entertaining and the food was good.

    So what, I ask, does his past have to do with it?

    Did he lie? Well, of course he did. Let’s take a look at YOUR official resume, check the grade point average you listed, the dates of employment for that managerial job you actually held for only two and a half months while your boss was out dead.

    And, to come full circle, I’m not sure why readers are so terribly upset about the memoir, either. (McGrath’s publishing house, Penguin, has not only recalled all copies in bookstores, they’ve even offered a refund to anyone who bought the book.) Jones apparently wrote a fabulous book, one that New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani called "humane and deeply affecting." Well, isn’t it still. . . .true to life or not?

    I’m puzzled, you see, by the point of all these recriminations. It would appear to me that Seltzer was being paid to tell a good story and Irvine to cook great meals. Each did exactly as she or he was assigned. And, yes, greased their reputations along the way. But given they showed real talent — producing work that other people benefited from and enjoyed — I would ask: What’s the real harm?

  • Going to the Dogs

    I’m typically leery of wines with cute, punny, or outrageous names. Goats do Roam. The Unbearable Lightness of Riesling. Fat Bastard. They’re all truly dreadful. So I was expecting little when I uncorked the Rosenblum Cellars Côte du Bone Roan 2005 from Chateau La Paws.

    Here’s a surprise: I loved it. And that was before I found out that a large percentage of the profits from this wine go to benefit Paws for a Cause, a nonprofit operating in all 50 states that trains service dogs for people with disabilities.

    First, the wine. It’s a big, lusty, Parker-ish red made of Carignane, Syrah, Zinfandel, and Mourvedre. Nothing subtle here. There’s tons of brilliant fruit — mostly cherry, currant, and plum — with a weighty infusion of oak, pepper, and allspice.

    Yet, it’s smooth. Unlike a lot of the California wines, this one doesn’t slap you around. It lies neatly in the glass — viscous but still — and bursts into the mouth but finishes clean. The 14.9% alcohol can be a bit overpowering. But it won’t leave you thirsty for days, the way tannic Cabs from Napa sometimes do.

    Add to that the service aspect, and there could be no better reason for spending $13.99 on a bottle of wine. Winemaker Kent Rosenblum is a veterinarian by training, and in February 2008 he donated more than $43,000 in proceeds from Côte du Bone Roan and Côte du Bone Blanc to Paws for a Cause, to help train assistance dogs for people with disabilities, including hearing loss, cerebral palsy, muscular dystrophy, and spinal cord injuries.

    This organization even has a "seizure response" program that teaches dogs to recognize seizures and protect their owners from the attendant dangers, such as falling and choking.

    It is a rather odd thing, I think, that service animals are so universally effective. There could be no more visible cue to a person’s disability than the presence of a dog with a brightly-colored coat and stiff, tented harness. But the marriage of wise canine and frail human somehow promotes an unassailable dignity for both.

    I can think of no better way to spend my wine budget. And in this case, the drink itself is of quality, even apart from the good that it does.

  • The Tao of Puerh

    I’ve been hanging out lately at a great little place called Fireroast Mountain Cafe, which besides having wonderful soups, sandwiches, and pastries, serves a perfectly brewed cup of Puerh, which is a rare and wonderful thing.

    A fermented tea that contains microbes — like yogurt of kefir —Puerh has an earthy, amber, slightly caramel flavor. Perfect with a touch of honey. And according to experts going back to the Eastern Han Dynasty, it offers a myriad of health benefits, too. Puerh is said to cleanse the blood and aid in digestion, lowering LDL cholesterol, canceling out the effects of alcohol, and boosting the metabolism. Some people even claim it helps them feel better immediately after a heavy, greasy meal, acting as both fat blocker and antacid.

    I have no idea if any of this is true. What I do know is that Puerh makes me feel good, and it’s rich enough to be a decent substitute for that cup of espresso I crave around 2 o’clock every afternoon.

    The key to making this and other varieties of tea, however, is to get the water temperature and ratio of leaves just right. Black tea, for instance, should be made with water that’s just off the boil and steeped for five minutes; green with water that’s about 10 degrees cooler — e.g. the stuff that comes out of those red-spigoted hot water taps — and steeped for no more than three.

    Puerh, on the other hand, cannot be overcooked. You make it with water that’s at a roiling boil and let it steep forever. . . .10 minutes or so. The key is to use only a teaspoon of leaves, or it can become overpoweringly thick.

    I’ve looked for this tea on the shelves of every grocery store I’ve visited for the past month, but it’s simply not available. Lunds carries everything from infused green to Indian chai to maté, but there is, apparently, only a very small retail market for Puerh. The only place in town I’ve found to buy it in bulk is Tea Source.

    I’m generally unimpressed by the studies touting the health benefits of various foods. But evidence that goes back 2,200 years will tend to sway me. And just to test the veracity of the claims, I recently consumed a large and meaty meal, then drank a cup of carefully prepared Puerh. And while I doubt it completely eliminated the roasted pork, brie, dark chocolate, and heavy cream from my system, I must say, I went to bed feeling amazingly good.

    Those ancient Chinese emperors? I think they were onto something.

  • Hot Stupid Foreign Nannies

    It started like this:

    My 13-year-old daughter walked into a room where I was reading and my husband was opening a bottle of wine (which she would tell you is what we’re always doing, except when we’re working or yelling at her) and said, "You remember when I went to Karl and Julia’s when I was in third grade and their nanny let us slide down that huge dirt hill all afternoon and you got really mad because it was so dirty and dangerous?"

    "Yes," I said, without raising my head.

    "And you remember how you said she was stupid because we could have gotten trapped under the falling dirt and suffocated?"

    "Yes." This time I looked up at my daughter who is powerful and beautiful and full of metal: braces and piercings and rings.

    "She was from Iceland, right? The nanny?"

    "Yes." I was waiting for the point, which is almost always your best bet with a teenager. Assuming can be a minefield.

    "So, I don’t get it. What’s the deal with that?" She was looking perturbed, squinching up her nose.

    "What?" I asked.

    "Hot stupid foreign nannies. That’s what all men want: a hot, stupid, foreign nanny. Why is that?"

    I turned to my husband — poor guy — who was coming with the wine. "That’s what you want?" I said.

    "What?" He hadn’t been listening. He’d probably been pondering string theory or thinking about our taxes. Some ridiculous thing like that.

    "A hot stupid foreign nanny. All men want them. You’re a man. So by the transitive property. . . ." (He’s a mathematician, so I’ll often throw in some irrelevant proof and use it incorrectly, though he’s usually kind enough not to point this out.)

    "Women, too, Mom," my daughter broke in. "Now be fair. Older women just want hot, stupid, Brazilian pool boys."

    "But we don’t even have a pool," I said.

    "What was the question?" my husband asked, putting on his glasses as if this might help.

    "Never mind," the teenager said, rolling her eyes. "I’m going to bed."

    Which is too bad, because she brought up an important point. What is the deal with hot, stupid, foreign nannies and the men who love them? Also, what’s the deal with George Bush, whom I heard on the radio just the other day, talking about how we’re not in a recession — it’s a "slowdown" — when about a third of the people I know have lost their jobs, which feels pretty damn recessed to me?

    About that recession (sorry, "slowdown"), why is it that some of the restaurants and bars and coffeehouses I visit are like tombs, echoing and about to shut down for lack of human traffic, while others are booming — same as always, it seems — filled to bursting by people waving money who can’t wait to get in? It seems strange, but there are few places in the middle, only those on the verge of bankruptcy and those where a spontaneous late-planner still cannot get in.

    What’s the deal with Earl Grey Tea, which is full of overpowering, flowery bergamot, but ubiquitous? Why is the social service system hemorrhaging while we spend millions on a Middle Eastern war? How come we keep driving so much no matter how high the price of gas? And why aren’t more people excited (and thankful) that the writer’s union is back to work?

    Most important, what possessed anyone to bottle the swill called Old Moon Zinfandel? Granted, it was inexpensive — I bought it myself, for $6 — but a lot of good wines are these days. There are decent $5 Chiantis and passable $7 Bordeaux. This Zin, on the other hand, is vile stuff.

    It was just after my daughter departed that my husband handed me a glass. I took a sip and then another, because I couldn’t believe anything called "wine" could possibly taste so bad. It was not just flat, but sinister, containing a dead, clayey flavor I imagined turned my tongue a grayish-brown.

    So horrible was this wine, just those two swallows left me sickened for the rest of the night. I was up late, drinking lemon water, trying to get the stench out of my mouth and pondering the problem of Stupid Hot Foreign Nannies. The question, of course: What to tell the beautiful girl when she awakened. Because when you’re 13 — and when you’re 41, it seems — the world just makes no sense.

  • Mystic Lake Casino: Gorge and Gamble, But Do It Dry

    It struck me as inconsistent when I discovered this:

    You can gamble away everything you have at Mystic Lake Casino. Your savings, your kids’ college funds, the church collection you were supposed to deposit.

    You can eat 10,000 calories in a single sitting at the Mystic Lake buffet for the nominal price of $9.95.

    But you cannot drink wine, beer, or any other kind of alcohol on the premises.

    Part of me admires and stands behind this policy: Alcohol has devastated the American Indian population — those, putatively, who own and run Mystic Lake — from the day it was introduced. They are a race of people whose bodies do not produce alcohol dehydrogenase, the enzyme that breaks down alcohol so it can be metabolized by the liver. Lack of this substance, paradoxically, not only causes an extreme physical allergy to alcohol, it seems to trigger an unstoppable craving as well. Though I might argue that rich food and fiscal mismanagement have done a great deal of damage to the Indian community as well.

    Why, you may be wondering, am I so interested in the policies at Mystic Lake? Well, I’m so glad you asked. It’s a complicated story but if you’ll indulge me for a few moments, I hope you’ll find it’s worth your time.

    First, I should cop to the fact that I’m 100 percent against state-sanctioned gambling no matter what the proceeds are used to fund. I believe deeply that the Minnesota state lottery is nothing but a tax on the poor who will inevitably donate their money when a prize is at stake. Here’s why.

    It isn’t that they’re careless or stupid or unaware of the odds. It’s that the amount at stake actually has far more value to someone who is making minimum wage than it does to, say, me. There’s a slim chance that I will earn a million dollars: I could sell a book that’s made into a movie that busts all the box office records and results in a an enormous payout. I know; it’s unlikely, but it could happen. For someone who is working two jobs, each part-time and without health insurance, at $7.50 an hour, paying for childcare, rent, and upkeep on a perpetually broken-down car, there is no chance. Zero. If they want to make it out of this endless cycle of poverty, buying a lottery ticket is the only way to go.

    About Indian gaming, I’m fiercely ambivalent. It provides a viable form of entertainment for people who willingly drive miles and miles to seek it out. And casinos certainly have raised the standard of living for people once confined to impoverished reservations. Still, honestly, I find the whole business loathsome and dangerous and downright sad.

    So it perplexes me that certain older people I know think Mystic Lake is a great place to pass their golden years, playing the slots and eating heaps of seafood and whipped cream cake. Their business, I’ve always told myself. What do I care if they spend their retirement income in such a ridiculous way?

    And I didn’t, in fact, until they involved my son.

    He turned 20 last week. He is no longer a child. But he is MY child, and he’s been through hell in the past two years. That he has autism is the least of his problems (in fact, quiet, shyness, and mathematical humor are among his most charming attributes). But beginning about a year and a half ago, he was put on atypical anti-psychotics by not one but three different psychiatrists. These drugs are the new panacea of modern medicine — also, coincidentally, the source of enormous kickbacks to doctors from the companies that make them. Ergo, they’re being dispensed like aspirin to a legion of non-psychotic individuals, including those with eating disorders, behavior issues, and benign neurological differences like my son’s.

    Here’s the problem. Atypical anti-psychotics block the brain’s dopamine receptors. Dopamine regulates a number of things, including movement, mood, sleep, cognition, and pleasure. It is the last that seems to be most problematic when you start messing with dopamine (or when it is naturally depleted, as in Parkinson’s Disease); without this hormone, the brain does not register the "reward" inherent in hedonistic activities such as eating, gambling, drinking, and having sex. So people who are dopamine-deficient engage in things that should make them experience pleasure. . . .yet they don’t. Which causes them to repeat those activities over and over — eating, drinking, gambling, fucking — in an attempt to achieve their rightful high.

    The result: My formerly sweet and guileless son came off a medication he never should have been prescribed in the first place shaky, moody, mean, sleep-disordered, slow to process, and a raging addict. To what? You name it. Pizza, Coca-Cola, cooking wine, card playing, shopping, and girls. In January, after weeks of trying to deal with this snarl of allopathic ills, my husband and I finally — reluctantly — consigned him to a treatment center where he could get the help we were unable to provide.

    I raged, sulked, and grieved. For weeks, I couldn’t eat, read, write, or sleep. Then, I noticed that though I was a mess, my son was actually getting better. We would visit and find him polite, clean, and neatly dressed. He’d be attending a group session, working a crossword puzzle, or sitting with a few other residents watching As Good As It Gets. He had begun to make good food choices and lose weight; he was talking about getting out and going back to school. The treatment actually seemed to be working. Until his birthday, that is.

    I got the call on Wednesday of last week. His grandparents, my former in-laws, had arrived the day before and signed my son out. Then they’d taken him to Mystic Lake, where they paid his way into the buffet then bellied him up to the tables and helped him mound food onto his plate. After three of four trips back, plus seven or eight sodas, they trooped out to the slot machines where my 76-year-old former father-in-law taught my son how to use the poker slots, gave him a pile of cash, and told him to go ahead and gamble until it was gone.

    Later, when they dropped him off at the treatment center, Grandma and Grandpa tucked a 7-pound cheesecake in with his birthday gifts, just for good measure.

    By the time I saw my son next, on Wednesday afternoon, he was sick, dumb, and dazed. Haltingly, he told the whole story to the counselors who reported to me that they were thinking of discharging him. Clearly we were not serious about seeking treatment, they said, if his relatives were going to take him on casino junkets. What’s more, it was illegal for a 20-year-old to gamble. Did I not understand that?

    "You’re right," I said. "I’m so sorry. Please don’t kick him out. I promise, it will never happen again." Though short of killing an elderly couple — which, don’t get me wrong, I would be very happy to do if I didn’t have two other kids to raise — I cannot think of a way to insure this is true.

    So about the alcohol. The fact is, I began to wonder: If his grandparents bought him a 14-course meal and an hour with the slots, did they perhaps treat him to a vodka gimlet, as well? That’s when I pulled up the Mystic Lake site and discovered there is no alcohol allowed on the premises. Goddamn lucky for us.

    I’ve already left a note telling staff at the treatment center never again to release my son to a quaint little gray-haired couple from Iowa. Now, I just have to make sure they didn’t stop by Schiek’s to treat h
    im to a lap dance on the way back from the casino, and I think — maybe, finally — I’ll have all the bases covered and be able to rest.

  • Lenny Russo on Why the Farm Bill Is All F*cked Up

    In an article about Charles Billington, a University of Minnesota endocrinologist who also happens to be one of the nation’s leading obesity researchers, I mention that when Billington himself dines out, he goes mostly to Heartland, the little storefront bistro on St. Clair Avenue in St. Paul.

    Why? Because Heartland’s gourmet Midwestern fare embodies just about every healthful practice he can name: the portions are appropriate; the food is wholesome, minimally processed, and varied; the slow-cooking methods tend to seal in nutrients (or leave them alone); and low-density foods such as vegetables often are the "star" of the meal.

    After talking to the doctor, I went to visit Lenny Russo, owner and head chef at Heartland, to tell him what Billington had told me. There was a pause. Then an evil grin.

    "Well, no shit," Russo says.

    For five years, including an 11-month stint at Cue, Russo’s been beating the drum for locally raised and grown food, refusing to serve anything (with the exceptions of coffee, chocolate, and some spices) from outside a 250-mile radius of the Twin Cities. You’ll get elk, rabbit, bullfrog legs, root vegetables, trout, berries, mushrooms, and wild rice at Heartland. You will never eat salmon, lobster, pineapple, or macadamia nuts there. This way, Russo provides patrons with food that’s fresher and closer to the source while supporting the region’s growers and small family farms.

    What’s more, everything he uses is produced according to organic or equivalent standards. In other words, Russo’s not so concerned about state certification; but he does care how the farmers treat their food. For instance, he won’t buy barn-fed beef.

    "They take a cow and pull it out of the pasture where it’s been grazing on grass so its flesh has a perfect balance of omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids," Russo explains. "Then they put it into a barn and feed it nothing but #2 corn and all the omega-3’s go away and what’s left is just a shitload of omega-6. Eating that kind of crap is what makes people unhealthy and fat."

    Russo admits, however, that only a small segment of the population can afford to eat at his restaurant, where dinner tabs run about $60 per. That’s why he’s involved in several initiatives devoted to making the food supply better, purer, and healthier for everyone.

    For the past year, Russo has been trying to establish a local food clearinghouse, where producers could bring their wares for sale to restaurants, grocery stores, and even private citizens. He supports family farmers and speaks and writes on the topic, preaching to people about the necessity of crop rotation and food-based growing. He was a vocal opponent of ethanol and commodity crops (particularly corn) long before the position was in vogue. And Russo is especially outspoken when it comes to policies that promote packaged, preservative-laden junk over whole foods.

    "People on the lower end of the economic ladder who don’t have transportation have certain limitations as to what they can buy," he says. "They’re going to the convenience store on the corner and filling up their shopping carts with piles of cheap calories produced with high-fructose corn syrup and a bunch of ingredients you’d have to be a food chemist to understand."

    It is, Russo believes, the fault of the government, and the Farm Bill in particular, that the economics of food has become so twisted and people are starving for nourishment inside bodies bloated with Twinkies, Doritos, and Coke.

    "If the federal government cared about people or the land, they wouldn’t force us into all this commercialized agriculture so our food gets all fucked up." Russo — the grandson of a New Jersey boxer who speaks like Winston Churchill with a little Chris Rock thrown in — leans his beefy forearms on the table and glares.

    "The farm bill is about who’s going to get a hand-out and that’s wrong. Supply side economics should not be about giving more money to the rich motherfuckers who already have enough. It should be about giving money to people on the lower end of the economic sector because they’re not going to invest it overseas, they’re going to spend it on clothes and food and pump it right back into the economy where it belongs."