This is a fact.
She’ll be cooler.
He’ll dress better.
You might think you have it all lined up because of that vintage teak Garrard turntable sitting over on your Kofod Larsen sideboard. But while she plays with her handmade wooden blocks on your great grandmother’s Amish quilt, and you’re humming along to Ben Webster growling Old Folks on actual vinyl, she’s really thinking to herself, somewhere in the recesses of her pre-verbal brain, that Mumford & Sons is just a bunch of old fogies, and Dock Boggs is truly the real thing.
Everyone else is just so derivative.
And if you are, like me, a member of the modern day cooking-obsessed, and you’re lucky enough to live in a dreamy place like Marfa or Silver Lake or Hudson or Brooklyn or Portland, where creative people seem to perfectly curate every aspect of their lives; if your child has spent his formative years watching you fill dozens of vintage Weck canning jars on that paint-chipped rickety pine table in your slope-floored Red Hook kitchen, your black Henry Kissinger plastic glasses smeared with the blood of ten pounds of locally-sourced Meteor cherries; if she grows up drinking raw milk out of a glass bottle delivered to your house along with that recycled cardboard box stamped with the letters C.S.A; if he understands that a handful of mealy worm casings tossed into the air like New Year’s confetti will bring an entire flock of chickens — all of whom he knows on a first name basis — running back to their coop from the slip of property between your house and your neighbor’s, where the birds gorge themselves on grubs and bugs and crickets; if they grow up this way, this way — this life — will be their normal. Consider yourself lucky. Because you are. At least for the time being.
But eventually, they’ll tire of it, as children do. They’ll rebel. They’ll forge new paths, leaving you and your vintage Doc Martens and your CSA share and your cool, curated, modern rusticity scratching your head and wondering exactly where you went wrong.
And honestly, that’s okay.
Unless it isn’t.
We live reactionary lives; we’re in constant motion. Nothing stays. So what’s next?
Newton’s Laws of Motion state that every action has a reaction. Think about it: we watch movies about World War II all the time on television. There’s always a bridge over a river being blown up, and some doe-eyed Greer Garson waiting at home for her soldier at the front. In real life my uncle, a captain in the Army Corps of Engineers, wrote letters home in code to my aunt — his new wife — to let her know exactly where he was: a mention of Chanel Number 5 meant that they were five miles west of the Germans, who had been pushed east after the Allied Landings. I’m not sure I know how she survived every minute of every day. One afternoon, when my mother, a young child, was home sick in her tiny Williamsburg Brooklyn bedroom, she heard screaming coming from the downstairs apartment; my grandmother flew out the door to find their neighbor hysterical. She had just received a telegram about her son, from the War Department. That’s not a movie; that’s real life. That was what happened, day in and day out.
When the war was over and my uncle returned home, he and my aunt did what pretty much every American did, if they could; they cleaned up the horror and the mess — the not knowing and the telegrams — and they fashioned tidy, neat, hyper-controlled, lily-white lives around themselves, called the Fifties. Ten years later, students marched in the streets, protesting a different kind of war, along with the Safe Establishment that their parents had created. Hair was long. Sex and music and “health food” and the promise of peace, love, and Tang was everywhere, until the 70s, when it was just about sex and disco. Tang became Hawaiian Punch, which the astronauts, to my knowledge, did not drink. In the 80s, sex became dangerous, music became prefabricated and synthesized, and the brown and stodgy “health food” of the 60s and 70s became tall and architectural and twee. In the 90s, food sailed over the cliff of utter ridiculousness, and kids began going off to cooking school because chefs were now rock stars who knew how to infuse housemade Twinkies with Mexican vanilla foam that miraculously exploded like Pop Rocks when you bit into them.
And now, we’re at the place where CSAs — once a way to not only have a kitchen full of fresh, local vegetables for a week but also to support the farmers who grew them — are trendy and cool; there’s a certain wonderfully studied grubbiness to city kids who spend their summers up to their knees in compost, learning how to grow and care for the glorious, often heirloom vegetables that will show up in their neighbor’ share boxes every week. Over the course of their summer break from college, these kids will learn that the best thing to do to fresh, local vegetables is as little as possible. Maybe the concept of culinary simplicity will stick; maybe, somewhere in their brains, they’ll realize that simple, thoughtful growing and eating isn’t actually a trend — like housemade Twinkies that explode like Pop Rocks — but just a smart, tender, and dare I say kinder way of living.
Those of us who live this way are stuck in it; we’re food fogies. Living this way is who we are, the way living in conservative and tidy 1950s suburbia was who my uncle was, and what my city-bound father frantically aspired to. Anything else feels wrongheaded, and obsequiously excessive, and entitled. We’ve stepped off the speeding treadmill of Too Much Too Big Too Fancy and have fashioned safe, curated culinary lives for ourselves, just like my uncle did after the war was over. Curation is a good thing: it means that we’re paying attention. It’s wonderful that we’re now floating through our lives with so much care and focus on the things around us. But, like everything else, I worry that it will change, and not for the better.
So what comes next? How will the children around us respond to the curated world in which they now live? What direction will they rebel in? What will be their hip? Last August, Susan and I attended a “medical vegan” Farms2Forks Immersion; the radical vegan dietician Jeff Novick recounted becoming a vegetarian as a teenager, because his father was a butcher. It was an act of rebellion, he said. Our baby goddaughter — I love her so much that I turn to jelly when I see her — has been raised in a non-hysterical culinary home where her parents have pretty much always made her food from scratch: she loves vegetables. She’s now eating kale chips. She eats everything. She’s neither fussy nor plagued by food sensitivities; not a preservative passes her lips. She’s not yet two, of course, so this could change. (Even Fanny Singer, Alice Waters’ daughter, once confessed to trying McDonald’s fries.) What will she do when she wants to rebel? How will she — along with all the other kids I know, including the two young daughters of my vegetarian artist friend and his Brown University professor wife; and the sudden passel of babies born to my food writer friends including Tara and Molly — rebel?
What will be their fabulous?
