Or maybe have at it, I’m not your mother.

Okay … ready?

Rand’s pandemic hobby has been cooking.

PUT THAT SHOE DOWN, WE DO NOT THROW THINGS.

Look, I know, I know. This is the last thing that you need to hear about childless couple who normally travels but is now stuck in their home for a year. Ideally, you would like to be reading about how one of us snapped and cannibalized the other, or that we’re at least starting to grate on one another’s nerves. And while we occasionally had moments like that (sometimes the cannibalization and the nerve-grating happened simultaneously as evidenced by the photo below) for the most part we just sort of … got along.

Look, we had the occasional fight, we occasionally had to go for a walk because the other was just “a lot right now”, but for the most part, things were okay, and I think a big part of that had to do, I am realizing now, with my husband making sure I was regularly fed and hydrated.

So maybe his pandemic hobby was neutralizing the fine middle-aged cannibal in the house. I still think it was a win-win. In the before times, dinner parties were our thing, that obnoxious pastime of people in their late 30s and beyond, bottles of wine and trays of charcuterie, mains and passed sides, me bringing out dessert and him pulling out bottles of scotch. It felt effortless and second-nature, was what we did, having people over and cooking for them, or going out to a restaurant with friends. At the start of a given week Rand would remind me of who we had dinner with in the days to come. Inevitably we’d have plans for at least four or five of the nights, more if we were on the road.

There was a novelty, early in the pandemic when it was just the two of the us (“We are eating in front of the TV!” “We are cooking just for ourselves!” “Our President is actively trying to kill us all!”), and we leaned into it because everything else was just too sad and scary to consider. After a while, Rand needed bigger challenges, and he started delving into new recipes. We watched Midnight Diner, a relaxing and hard-to-classify show that takes place in, obviously, a diner, a small one in Tokyo. He missed travel, he became wistful about our trip to Japan. He bought himself a donabe pot and temporarily lost his mind.

This was not the end of it. It rarely is with Rand. In the words of that fallen star, he’s always got to be starting something. He will roll out fresh pasta like he learned to do in Bologna.

At least once a month he will roast giant marrow bones and make a pot of stock, tossing in an entire chicken. He uses it to make risotto, and when his grandfather was fully vaccinated we had him over to help.

He makes me steaks and soups and pastas. He garnishes and composes and fries and braises and grills and simmers.

I have spent years writing about our travels, felt like our lives were an open book, hell, even wrote the damn book, but I’ve been tweeting out these photos, and it’s felt like opening people up to our home. The responses are occasionally overly-scrutinizing (people seem obsessed about the quantity of food that we cook, which feels inappropriate at best), but for the most part, lovely.

Keep posting your dude cooking. It’s my favorite activity and your evangelizing is helping to normalize it. Dual knife blocks is a nice touch.

— Gregg McLennan (@Strayarc) April 10, 2021

I love his aprons!

— Mary Swift (@swiftlytweet) April 10, 2021

Need that in my belly STAT

— One Fresh Pillow (@OneFreshPillow) April 11, 2021

Your husband really twinkles

— Colominipiccolominipiccolominipiccolominipiccolomi (@MavetyStreet) April 5, 2021

Still, when online abusers are particularly active in my thread, they attack my husband’s masculinity specifically because he cooks for me.

They tell me to enjoy it, because he’s going to inevitably leave me (for a man, because they need to add homophobia to it).

Man this long con of his is loooooooong. pic.twitter.com/TpCZH2OeVD

— Geraldine (@everywhereist) March 21, 2021

“Why are they so invested in you leaving me?” I ask.

“Because if you are loved and happy, what does that say about their lives?”

There is something else, too. Something less personal. Professional chefs are often male. As a society, we’re comfortable with men cooking in that context – doing so as a job, in command of a restaurant. But a man cooking at home is occupying a space that we often expect women to – one of a caretaker. He is taking on invisible labor that we are used to dismissing. And in doing so, forcing misogynists into an uncomfortable reckoning: domestic work is important, valuable, and hard.

I tell him I can cook, or that we can get take-out, and sometimes he takes me up on the offer. I occasionally make dessert. If I’m quick enough, I can get the dishes done before he has a chance.

“Still – think how devastated I’d be if you left. I wouldn’t see it coming,” I say.

“Neither of us would.”

“No one was more surprised than us!”

I tease him that the worst part would be that I’d have to cook for myself, and he tells me that he could still come over and cook for me.

“And we could still make out?”

“Definitely.”

Maybe, I suggest tentatively, it would be best if he didn’t leave me in the first place. And he agrees that maybe that’s the best way to go. I mean, think about how brilliant and devastating this ruse will be if it goes on for another fifty years and then it ends.

It’ll be just heartbreaking.

I’m angry that he wasn’t found guilty on all the charges.

And at the same time, I can’t believe he was found guilty at all.

As I try to process that news I find myself writing this post, which, as ridiculous as it may sound, is about meatballs. Jesus H. Christ. Meatballs. I don’t know what to do when reality borders parody. I suppose we just lean into it.

Last week, Mike Bloomberg, the former Mayor of New York currently seeking the Democratic nomination for President, took part in his first televised debate. The other candidates, but mostly Elizabeth Warren, Valkyrie warrior and Themysciran Queen, brought up his racist Stop-and-Frisk policy (which actually fucking lowered the graduation rates of black high schoolers where it was enacted. IT LOWERED GRADUATION RATES.), his history of calling women horrific names (like “horse-faced lesbians”), and the NDAs he made women sign in order to quash allegations of sexual harassment. None of this has stopped Bloomberg from running for office. None of it has kept him from the debate stage.

It feels like a weird rerun. The competent woman going after the racist, sexist billionaire, those of us cheering her on wondering if it’ll amount to anything, and fearing that once again, it won’t.

And once again, I find myself making a recipe. Because hours before that debate, Mike Bloomberg’s team – who have spent more than $400 million on campaign ads (because in America wealth doesn’t simply buy you healthcare and criminal immunity) but also political office – released a recipe for meatballs.

Meatballs.

Cool. No one has learned anything.

This recipe looks like trash.

I’m obviously going to make it.

Let’s ignore the image of the meatballs, on which someone has superimposed Bloomberg’s face, staring at us, his eyes seemingly screaming, “EAT ME.” Let us ignore the fact that the balls are doused in a red sauce, which is entirely absent from the recipe itself. Let’s ignore the fact that, according to one of his employees, Bloomberg once said “I’d like to do that piece of meat” when referring to a woman in his office.

We’re going to pretend these things are normal behavior from a man running for President, because, hell, they sort of are.

And now this man, who is literally a BILLIONAIRE, had his presidential campaign team release a recipe that doesn’t work, presumably to illustrate just how immune he is to the consequences of his actions, big or small.

The second ingredient listed is ground veal. Because that’s the sort of humane recipe component that you’d expect from a man who doesn’t think twice about telling the women in his sales department to blow a male employee as a wedding gift.

Do you know what normal, everyday grocery stores don’t carry? Ground fucking veal. Rand and I went to four different grocery stores looking for ground up baby cows that probably died of loneliness and came up empty. And you know what? Veal is too fucking lean for meatballs, anyway. But of course I still looked.

We went down the ingredient list. The recipe calls for 2 cups of stale Italian bread, crumbled, but the only bread I had was a thing beyond stale. It was so old that we should have rightfully thrown it away, but there’s no such thing as too old when you’re a man running for the office of President.

Rand grated it, and it was so brittle that it flew everywhere, but hey, that’s fine! Make a mess! Maybe someone else will clean it up. (As soon as Stop-and-Frisk ended under Mayor de Blasio, crime rates fell. It’s almost like the policy did the opposite thing it was supposed to do.)

The recipe says to combine the meats in a large bowl, then add garlic, eggs, cheese, parsley, an unspecified amount of salt and pepper, and … provolone and pepperoni?

Get your friend to help. Pay her for her work in meatballs as a metaphor for the under-compensation of women everywhere.

Wait, what?

Those two things weren’t on the ingredient list. It’s like the top half of the recipe was forced to sign an NDA where it couldn’t mention the provolone and the pepperoni, and then the instructions just blurted them out.

And at that point, dear readers, I realized how fucking tired I was. Tired of listening to rich, powerful men tell me how things are, when I know they’re wrong. And Bloomberg’s recipe is so very wrong that it doesn’t even make sense. A lot of the time, we just have to go along with it, because when everyone keeps legitimizing someone, when everyone keeps insisting that this person obviously knows what they’re doing, you start to think that maybe you’re the one who doesn’t know how to make meatballs, even though you’ve known since you were small, since before you knew the English word for meatballs.

Oh my god, even these analogies are stupid. I hate all of this. I’m not going to complain about the unexpected glory of my career, but what does it say about the world that I can make a name for myself critiquing the recipes of sexual harassing dipshits? THIS SHOULD NOT BE ANYONE’S JOB. THIS IS FUCKING RIDICULOUS. But here I am, making another fucking shit recipe because Mike Bloomberg has enough money to buy a metric ton of memes and commercials that play every 45 seconds in the hopes we’ll forget that he’s a racist sexist asshole.

“Hand me an onion,” I told my husband.

“Is there an onion in the recipe?”

“No.”

“Okay.”

I asked for more garlic. Rand suggested we throw in another egg, so we did. And more parsley. And a splash of milk.

Rand threw salt in – grains falling from his fingers like sand. He knew exactly how much to add. There are no shortcuts to that – it’s something that comes from experience, from making a recipe so many times you don’t even think twice about something as critical as salt.

And god, it’s so nice to know I can trust him with things like that. Things that seem small but are so, so important.

“This is going to be the best thing to come out of Bloomberg’s candidacy,” he said, smiling.

He made a red sauce – the one absent from the recipe – slow-cooking an entire half onion and whole cloves of garlic in tomato sauce until they fell apart. He broiled the meatballs instead of baking them, so the tops got crisp and brown,  and he swept up the crumbs from the bread he’d grated. I thought about what it means to have a partner who make things easier. Who cooks for you and runs to the grocery store when you are too tired and who cleans up the kitchen and reminds you, time and again, that everything he has is yours, too.

My mother ate dinner with us. When we told her what recipe we’d started with, she almost walked away from the table, hands fluttering up, the sort of indignation that can only happen if your mother is Italian and she’s been offended both culinarily and politically.

“It’s okay,” I said, handing her a plate. “We didn’t follow the recipe.”

Sometimes, you just can’t.

Big thanks to our friend B for taking many of the pictures in this post. <3

Which is to say: we start believing our own hype. And for a writer, truly, what greater madness is there than believing in yourself? Don’t get me wrong: I’m still a neurotic bundle of frayed nerves, unsure of my own role in the grand scheme of things, powered mostly by nutritionally-devoid snacks that have come to replace meals. I am basically a frittering raccoon poorly masquerading in an ill-fitting skin-suit.

But for a few ephemeral moments now and then I think that maybe I can do anything. It doesn’t last long, it’s wholly born of madness, it’s dependent upon the opinions of others (which is a whole other thing), and yet: it’s there.

It may very well be part of the human condition, these brief moments of self-permitted greatness. If we’re lucky enough, and privileged enough, we may even capitalize on those moments and share our work with others. My James Beard Award (yes, I am still talking about it, shut up) is a symptom, but not the cause. For a second, I was delusional enough to think that my work deserved something. You all were a big part of me thinking that.

In those narrow windows of time where we are invincible, we can do amazing things. I’ve baked layer cakes and used a pressure washer to clean my deck and started writing countless books (I even finished one.)

And one time, I made Cadbury Creme Egg mayonnaise. This was, to be fair, a … less amazing achievement than the other things. But it happened during one of those brief moments when I was invincible, and so that seems miraculous enough in and of itself.

It was Chuck Wendig who put the damn concoction into my head several months ago, when he tweeted about it. I happened to be flying through London at the time, and I spent my layover in Heathrow walking from shop to shop in search of the creme egg mayo, to the horror of several Duty Free workers.

I couldn’t find it anywhere, and felt that strange mix of both relief and disappointment that follows when a delightfully bad idea never comes to fruition. But then I won a damn James Beard Award. And that shit does not happen to frittering raccoons without them having to pay a karmic debt to the universe. I figured I had to make homemade Cadbury Creme Egg Mayo as some sort of penance to Julia Child and the gods of cooking.

Did I even have mayo in the house? No, of course not. Mayo is the chosen condiment of demons and the GOP. At this point, I should have given up, but I was temporarily capable of great things so I had to make candy mayonnaise I heard about on the internet. Obviously.

I decided to make mayo from scratch.

If you are drunk on your own elevated feelings of self-worth and feel like you need to make a novelty condiment in order to pay a karmic debt to the gods of food writing, well … here is what you will need to make Cadbury Creme Egg mayonnaise at home:

• one Cadbury cream egg
• one chicken egg
• a total disregard for the culinary achievements of the last 500 years
• canola oil
• the intoxicating thought that maybe, just maybe, you are fucking amazing
• a pinch of salt

You will also need an electric mixer.

This was about to become increasingly difficult because – and I am still unclear on how this happened – someone recently, and presumably accidentally, destroyed my electric mixer by dunking it in water after a dinner party. I figured that someone either dropped it into a sinkful of water without telling me (which feels off-brand for my friends) or someone dunked my electric mixer in water in an effort to clean it because they were drunk (which feels super on-brand for my friends).

So I was left with the task of making mayonnaise – an effort which absolutely requires an electric mixer – without one.

I started by beating an egg with my immersion blender, but that didn’t really work because the whole thing was too shallow, so I switched to my food processor.  I added some oil, and that did a wonderful job of making whatever the hell this is:

Awful? Yes. Possibly becoming sentient and plotting to murder me? Yes. But not technically mayonnaise.

I poured it all out into a bowl and beat the damn thing by hand, which is something that my electric mixer could have done had someone not dunked the damn thing in water. (Okay, but seriously, the thing had an electric cord, why would you wash that? I swear to god some of my friends are either aliens or time travelers and our 21st century human ways are just confusing to them.)

At some point, it held together in a gloopy, pus-like blob that feeds on the nightmares of children.

I HAD MADE MAYONNAISE.

Now I just had to add this thing.

For the record, cutting open a Cadbury creme egg is supremely satisfying.

I scooped out the insides of a Cadbury creme egg and mixed them into the mayo. (Note: it should look like the by-product of a pulmonary infection.)

Then I chopped up the chocolate shell and threw that in along with some salt. The addition of the sugar and chocolate meant that mayo started to break down a little bit and lose consistency. But I was undeterred. There was no reality in which this wasn’t going to work. Because I could – for a little while at least, do anything. And I’d decided that I was going to do this.

The result was … runny mayonnaise with chocolate pieces in it and the occasional chunk of fondant.

I had to try it, right? I mean, I couldn’t go through all the trouble and then not taste it, right? Did I mention it was first thing in the morning? And that this was technically breakfast? A meal which does not – at least in my house – regularly include mayonnaise or Cadbury creme eggs but does apparently include terrible judgement?

I made a GIF of my reaction since there are moments for which words fail us.

If you are wondering what it tasted like … it was like someone mixed a Cadbury creme egg into a bunch of mayonnaise. And honestly it was both repellent but … weirdly compelling?

Like when you taste something terrible and your first impulse is to share it with someone else? It was that. This entire product’s tagline could have been, “Ew, gross, try this.” Of course, there’s only one other person who screwed up badly enough in a past life that they now have to live with me in this one.

If I ever make this face around you, run.

As soon as Rand came downstairs I shoved the bowl in his face because I didn’t want to be the only one to experience this culinary atrocity. I would later tell friends about this experience and I wanted someone to corroborate my story.

Also, my sincere apologies to my husband for putting a photo of him in his pjs with morning hair on the internet but really, he knew I was a goblin when he married me.

Here’s a video of his reaction, in which I asked him how he felt about this whole thing:

Yes, the results were terrible. But they were exactly what I’d set out to make, in that brief window of time when anything was possible. Perhaps I’d squandered my invincibility this time. Perhaps my temporary superpowers went to waste. But I figured I owed the universe something, to say thank you for thinking that maybe this frittering raccoon was good enough.

The artist contemplating a second taste.

And honestly? The stuff wasn’t all that bad.

P.S. – I’m not one to waste food. So here’s a tip: if you do decide to make this, note how much oil you are using. A lot of cakes require eggs and oil, and creating an emulsion with them beforehand doesn’t adversely impact a cake recipe.

I made this chocolate cake with the Cadbury creme egg mayo (I just subtracted 3 tablespoons of sugar from the recipe, which is roughly how much sugar is in one Cadbury egg. I don’t even know how that’s physically possible, but it’s true).

Consequently, Rand forgave me for making him a human guinea pig.

I should know by now that the universe gets drunk. This is a thing that happens. What I didn’t quite understand is how often the universe would hit the bottle, like, at 11am on a Monday.

As you might suspect, this honor, which I never, ever, I mean ever, imagined I would receive, has completely ruined me, and I have now become an untenable monster. I mean, even more so than before. When news of the nomination came in, I started laughing so manically that I broke down in tears, all of which deeply concerned my husband. It did not help that when he asked me what was wrong, my reply was, “THE COSMOS IS VERY INTOXICATED.”

Which is not a thing that normal people say.

I then proceeded to demand that he address me as “James Beard Award Nominated” and then my name, or whatever pet name he wished to bestow upon me. Being a long-suffering and obliging fool, he did precisely that, further destroying whatever humility I may have had. I told Rand that while I realize that this nomination is already a remarkable thing, I very much want to win for one very specific reason: I’m pretty sure the award is a round medal on a ribbon. Which means you can wear it to a fast food restaurant. While still in your pajamas. And when people ask what it is, you say that it is a James Beard Award for culinary excellence which you got because you were really mad at institutionalized sexism and also Mario Batali’s cinnamon rolls.

While I do not think that I will win (because I am hoping that someone will take the universe aside and say, “We need to talk about your drinking”), the nomination is an absurd honor unto itself, and I am abusing it to the fullest extent that I possibly can. Mostly by screaming it at my friends and loved ones when I want to win an argument. It is particularly useful when a friend is feeling down and needs a pick-up.

“Listen to me. You are wonderful.”

“Yeah, but-”

“NO, FUCKER, I HAVE A JAMES BEARD AWARD NOMINATION AND I THINK YOU ARE GREAT.”

Perhaps I have misunderstood the concept of tough love. I don’t really know.

I now feel uniquely qualified to weigh in on all culinary matters, both appetizing and nightmarish. So when Chuck Wendig (who is basically a real-life version of Wash from Firefly) tweeted that he wanted to try the gastronomical abomination that is Heinz’s creme egg flavored mayonnaise, I felt the need to comment.

Okay, somebody get me a jar of this. I’LL TRY IT AND REPORT BACK https://t.co/LD7j5RFoI0

— Chuck Wendig (@ChuckWendig) April 5, 2019

I have a layover in Heathrow in about 2 hours. Ew. I’ll see what I can do.

— Geraldine (@everywhereist) April 5, 2019

I think it’s only available at that pop-up!

— Chuck Wendig (@ChuckWendig) April 5, 2019

I thought that was just the free samples.

At any rate, Chuck, you may have to make your own.

— Geraldine (@everywhereist) April 5, 2019

oh no

— Chuck Wendig (@ChuckWendig) April 5, 2019

You will need:

Creme eggs
Mayo
A blender
A total disregard for the culinary advancements of the last 200 years
A spoon

— Geraldine (@everywhereist) April 5, 2019

BUT I AM NO ARTISTE

— Chuck Wendig (@ChuckWendig) April 5, 2019

Chuck, listen to me: I have a James Beard Award nomination and I am telling you that you have the capability to make this … substance.

— Geraldine (@everywhereist) April 5, 2019

is there a training montage

also one assumes there are… unholy ingredients

— Chuck Wendig (@ChuckWendig) April 5, 2019

At which point Lin-Manuel Miranda weighed in because Twitter.

pic.twitter.com/hwyquZ2b2Z

— Lin-Manuel Miranda (@Lin_Manuel) April 5, 2019

Anyway, I’m off to Heathrow and probably going to get myself banned from Duty Free for you, Chuck. You’re welcome.

— Geraldine (@everywhereist) April 5, 2019

Lin needs some too pic.twitter.com/poCzZG0Z4a

— Chuck Wendig (@ChuckWendig) April 5, 2019

The bad news, of course, was that Chuck was right, and that they don’t actually sell this stuff in stores, because I think that EU regulations prevent you from selling the culinary equivalent of a slumber party dare and that’s why we now have Brexit. Thanks a lot, Angela Merkel. I did find a lot of Cadbury chocolate, and I did ask one Duty-Free employee about the mayonnaise and he was so incredibly helpful while he slowly backed away from me like I was a raccoon holding a flamethrower.

I asked if they had mayonnaise.

Guy gives me a look reserved for a child who has just cut their own hair.

“Mayonnaise, madame?”

“YES THE KIND WITH CANDY IN IT.”

*blank stare *

“No, madame.”

— Geraldine (@everywhereist) April 5, 2019

He told me to go ask at a restaurant.

“They can give you mayonnaise, maybe?”

He then backed away.

“IT IS FOR MY FRIEND CHUCK, THE WRITER, AND LIN-MANUEL.”

*more blank stares*

“LIN WAS IN THE HARRY POTTER SEQUEL”

(I meant Mary Poppins but got confused)

— Geraldine (@everywhereist) April 5, 2019

I briefly considered mentioning the James Beard Award nomination, but I felt like that would have pushed the story just too far into the realm of absurdity. I sadly left Heathrow without any success. In the meantime, I’m wondering if I can make this abomination at home. I mean, I have the technology. And a James Beard Award nomination.

That is a strange thing to say for a lot of reasons. For one, I don’t know if the concept of emergency porchetta is widely known. A Google search for the term reveals four results, the most salient of which is someone looking for cooking advice. “Emergency porchetta question” they write. But the urgency seems to come from the nature of the query itself, and not the hunk of roast pork it pertains to.

For another, we had a great trip. Despite the endless rain and the grey skies and the hotel mishaps and the projectile vomiting on the side of the road in Genoa (my apologies to all who witnessed it), we had a wonderful week in the north of Italy. So many things happened that reminded me of why I love to travel.

But damn it, that porchetta was everything.

It could have ended differently – all travel stories can. That’s what travel is supposed to do – to open up a door to a thousand possibilities. And when I look back on the scene – the four of us wandering through a market in Canelli, the air chilly and damp, the sky that deep blue-grey that it always is in the early evenings of late fall, when the sun has never bothered coming out – it could have gone terribly awry. It was crowded and we were tired and Oli was hungry – that urgent hunger that comes on quick and catches you off guard.

Canelli from above.

And damn it, Oli is a picky eater. I mean picky. We passed bar after bar, but they only served pasta (which he doesn’t eat because he’s an alien), or no food at all, or weren’t open yet. And then we came across a stall where a man was selling all manner of salumi. A vegeterian nightmare of every sort of cured meat you could imagine. And there, at the center, a roast of pork, a giant thing the size of a not-insubstantial child.

“They have porchetta.” I offered. It seemed like a long shot.

“Yup,” Oli said, with zero hesitation. “That works.” Because Oli is picky, except when he isn’t at all.

I told the man behind the table that we wanted some, and he indicated with his knife the thickness of a cut.

No, I said, that’s too much.

No, Oli corrected me, that’s just fine.

Sometimes you don’t realize the scale of something until it is in your hands, and it was only when the man wrapped it up and we saw the price that we realized that Oli had just paid 20 Euros for half a kilo of porchetta. Not an unreasonable price, mind you. But you know, it was half a kilo of porchetta.

The face of man who has just purchased a pound of roast pork.

Oli stood in the middle of the crowd, and pulled off a chunk.

“Oh my god,” he said. “Have some.”

And we all stood with him, picking at it with our fingers in the twilight, dubbing it “emergency porchetta.” We returned to the phrase again and again – the accidental purchasing of a pound of roasted pork on a chilly night. The sort of thing that turns your evening from potentially disastrous to absurdly memorable. That sort of unpredictable, unrepeatable moment that will forever be grander than the sum of its parts.

My husband and I are driving through southern Oregon, like we have every summer since we were married. I see a Red Lobster.

I scream.

I tell him to pull over immediately. He ignores me. After more than a decade together he can distinguish between my “something is urgently wrong” scream and my “I need a cheesy garlic biscuit” scream (he is able to read nuance).

He keeps driving. I accuse him of not loving me. He disagrees. I tell him that I need endless shrimp. He counters that no one needs endless shrimp. I tell him that orcas do. I feel that this is a winning argument.

“You are not an orca,” he says.

I tell him that one day I will demand he take me there for my birthday, and he will be unable to deny me. He says nothing. The restaurant’s sign grow smaller in the side mirror.

My husband refuses to eat at restaurants with more than two locations. He does not understand the love that is ingrained in me. It predates him. We have to travel back to find its origins, to a time when everyone has terrible hair and most clothing is layered over a turtleneck. Welcome, dear friends, to the 1980s.

I am 4. Or 5. Or 6. My age correlates perfectly with the number of years my mother has been in America. She and her parents are Italian. In my earliest memories, she and my grandmother spend hours in the kitchen. They roll out pasta by hand. My mother stuffs cannelloni and makes bechamel. My grandmother makes giant pizzas covered in anchovies and the oil pools on top of the cheese. It is Seattle a decade before the internet. There is no such thing as fresh mozzarella in this new world. I am round-cheeked and sustained almost exclusively by carbohydrates.

By the time I am in the third grade, we have moved to Florida, a state which is almost completely surrounded by water. Maybe my mother thought a peninsula would be more like Italy. It is not. Florida feels like a primordial creature that has just endeavored to step out of the sea, and may go slinking into it again if you do not pay attention. The humidity makes everything wet. We do not have air conditioning. I am strange for having divorced parents. I am strange for speaking another language with my family. I am strange.

It is too hot to spend a lot of time in the kitchen. My nonna is growing older. My single mother is tired. They do not make fresh pasta anymore. The tradition is gone before I have time to realize what I’ve lost.

My family does not go to restaurants. My mother and aunt argue that there is no reason to when the food you make at home is better. (I am young. I do not think the food they make at home is better.) I become a child intent on being the subject of her own demise: I refuse to eat.

Every year or two, my uncle visits from Italy with his family. I do not realize that we are lonely until after they arrive and it dissipates. My grandparents smile. My mother laughs. My family does not feel small and isolated. Look, there are more of us now. We lovingly scream at one another in the same language. We are not an island. We are attached to something bigger. We are a peninsula. We are better than Florida.

(We still do not have air conditioning.)

My cousin and I collect tiny mollusks from the beach, pearly blue in color and barely the size of my fingernail. My aunt carries them home in my useless bikini top (the first time in its existence that it has actually carried anything of substance), and later will serve us a pasta studded with tiny clams. She will insist they are the same bivalves we collected. I am skeptical, but eat it anyway. (Twenty years later, she will admit to the deception: the clams were canned, and ours were discarded.)

After weeks of effort, my cousin and brother and I succeed in systematically breaking down our parents’ defenses. There are three of us and our whining is a magnificent chorus that spans two languages. Enough with your pasta. Enough with your recipes. Enough with my nonna’s hands, covered in salt to remedy the burns she sustained while cooking because her eyesight is failing. Take us out to eat.

Our choices are limited. We are in central Florida near the end of the twentieth century. Our upscale dining options are Red Lobster and Olive Garden.

We end up at Red Lobster because we are not going to Olive Garden. Contrary to what their extensive marketing campaign claimed, no Italian wants to go to Olive Garden. Our only option soon becomes an annual tradition. Some summers, we go twice.

The minute we step through the door, I feel an opulence I thought was inaccessible to me. This is the height of middle-class American casual fine dining. There is air conditioning. There are tablecloths. There is the sound of clinking silverware in the distance and a tank of lobsters by the door.

I marvel at these creatures, marked for death. I press my hand against the cool glass of their prison. I should be sad, but I keep thinking that their end will be noble. Besides, I am absolved of guilt for the demise of these particular crustaceous souls: no one at our table will order lobster. Even our extravagance has its limits.

Every meal comes with a salad, and we all opt to make ours Caesar. It is covered in cheese and croutons and I think how fancy Caesar must have been and how he is Italian, like us. I honor my heritage with bites of once-crisp lettuce now limp with dressing. When I later learn that Caesar salad was invented in Tijuana, I will refuse to believe it.

I almost always order the same thing: shrimp scampi and a baked potato with “the works.” I order my potato this way because it sounds elegant, and it costs the same as a potato with merely butter. I am getting the most for my dollar. I am savvy about money. When I am grown, I will be rich and eat here every week.

The visiting Italians marvel at the potato. They have never seen anything like it. I want them to fall in love with America. I want them to move here so I feel less alone and so that my grandparents are happy all the time, but they never will.

The shrimp swim in a tiny ramekin of butter and garlic. Scampi is an Italian word, I think proudly. The servers do not treat us like pariahs. We are regal. We are European. The Romans conquered the world, and now we have conquered Cheddar Bay.

The biscuits come in baskets, inexplicably mixed with spherical hush puppies that are doused in powdered sugar. The savory mixes with the sweet but we continue to eat basket after basket. My mother tucks a few in her napkin and smuggles them out of the restaurant in her purse. Two biscuits to later be shared among three children. It will be a bloodbath.

We do not order dessert. We do not order soda. I do not mind. I do not feel deprived. Those are for people who like to waste their money. We are too clever for that. Besides, there is an abundance before me. Behold the bounty of the sea, dredged up from the depths of the oceans, battered, and deep-fried. We have both tartar and cocktail sauce. We can have everything. For ninety minutes, we even have air conditioning.

I am so full that I have to unbutton my pants.

Time passes. We move back to Seattle. It is cold. My grandmother stops cooking. My grandfather stops eating. They leave us all in one fell swoop, my grandmother in the spring, my grandfather in the summer.

Six months later, I meet my husband. He is refined. He has straight white teeth and clean fingernails and impeccable taste. He takes me out to an Italian restaurant for our first date. The napkins are made of cloth and there are candles on the table. When he rests his forearms on the table instead of his elbows, I realize I am out of my depth. The owner stops by our table and I chat with him in my mother’s native language. This is calculated. I want to impress my date. It works.

Many years later, walking through Milan on a chilly night, I will ask him if he thinks it is neat that I speak Italian.

“Neat?” he says. “No. No, I do not think it is neat. I think it is a goddamn superpower.”

He takes me out to beautiful restaurants that neither of us can afford. When we are out of money we stay at home and cook. He obsesses over my family recipes and learns to make them better than I do. He learns to make them better than my grandmother did.

He cooks countless dinners for me, and on nights when I am finicky, he cooks two.

I accuse him of not loving me because he will spend hours in the kitchen preparing me a meal but will not take me to eat unlimited Cheddar Bay biscuits. This is the same argument I made to my mother more than twenty years ago.

We are driving through southern Oregon again. It is three days after my 33rd birthday. I do not know where my husband is taking me. I cannot see the now obvious conclusion of the story. I am in a state of disbelief when he pulls into the parking lot and opens the door. At dinner, he puts on a bib and beams at me over a brilliant red-orange lobster, and all I can see is his smile.

————— 

Note: I’ve written about this before on the blog, but I reworked it into this piece and never found a home for it.

I have simultaneous loved Anderson’s work and resented it; it resonates with me in a way that feels like I’m somehow being manipulated. When The Royal Tenenbaums came out, my brother called me and we had one of those sparse exchanges that can only take place between people who have known each other their entire lives. He asked if I had seen it. Yes, I told him.

“Royal,” he said.

“I know.”

“Dad,” he said.

“I know.”

2009. One of my all-time favorite photos of my father, in which he manages to look pissed off while eating ice cream.

Therein lies Anderson’s brilliance – he creates characters who are often miserable and yet they are fine. Things are simultaneously bad and okay. That is a world I know.

I was angry that Anderson could pinpoint me – and so many others – so well. I’d like to think I was less predictable than that. My response was reactionary – I tried to resist his work. As years of Halloween costumes attest, this endeavor has not been successful.

Sam and Suzy from Moonrise Kingdom.

–

Steve Zissou and Margot Tenenbaum.

Rand tried to keep our visit a surprise, but I eventually learned of it. He asked me if I want to see photos beforehand, but in the same way that I refuse to watch trailers for Anderson’s films before they are released, I shook my head.

“I want to see it for the first time in person,” I told him.

A small part of me didn’t want to go, scared it wouldn’t live up to my expectations. Or that it would, and that the world then would seem dull by comparison.

The bar was on the edge of town, a 15-minute drive even from the Duomo at Milan’s center. We took a cab, and found ourselves in a industrial district, full of long white buildings and factories. Bar Luce resides in one of these, the only indication of its existence is a small neon sign along the front that reads “BAR.”

As we walked in I imagined that I could see us from afar, moving in-slow motion as music played.

My biggest grievance about the worlds Wes Anderson created was that they existed only on the screen, and I could never step into them. Even when I paid a pilgrimage to the house from The Royal Tenenbaums (up in Harlem), I could only stand at the curb and stare, the delta between his work and reality feeling bigger than it ever had.

I thought Bar Luce would change that. Alas.

Every piece of it has been crafted by Anderson. It is perfect execution of his vision, but it is not perfect – his work never is. Pants hemmed too short, rusted out cars, a penciled in mustache – there is always something intentionally amiss.

Above a sea of terrazzo, there are islands of Formica the color of Easter eggs.

The shelves behind the bar and the glass dessert cases look like they’re filled with props.

But the cake was real, and I couldn’t really ask for more than that.

The cafe was empty when we arrived, and the staff looked like they were suffering from a terminal case of ennui. We were unaware of the rush of people that would soon come through the doors, and so the sheer number of waiters and baristas looked excessive.

We sat down and ordered. I scanned the menu for a butterscotch sundae, eager to placing my order in heavy, bored Italian, but there wasn’t one. Instead, I got The Royal, a sandwich made with culatello, and literally nothing else.

This is the cafe’s signature cake – vanilla pan de spagna with a light chocolate cream and covered in pink fondant.

Supposedly Rand ordered it.

(He didn’t get to eat most of it.)

At some point I demanded that we abandon our lives back in Seattle and move to Milan and, specifically, to Bar Luce.

“We can’t; we just bought a house,” Rand said.

“Let’s sell our house.”

“No.”

“Please?”

“YOU ARE THE ONE WHO ASKED ME TO BUY YOU A HOUSE.”

“And now I’m asking you to sell it so we can move to Milan. Please?”

“No.”

“But it takes so little to make me happy.”

“That is patently untrue and you know it.”

He was right. But for a few fleeting moments, I was excessively happy, in a way that Wes Anderson’s characters never are. I endeavored to hide my delight from everyone because it felt thematically off.

Once again, I was not successful.

Along the back wall of the cafe sits a jukebox that mostly had Italian songs from the 1950s and 60s. It had a bunch of Rita Pavone, but no tracks that I was familiar with. So the songs were obscure even if you were familiar with the obscure genre.

Next to the jukebox was a pair of pinball machines.

Rand got up to play one of them, and came back to the table, his eyes wide.

“It only takes lira,” he said.

We laughed.

“I’m not kidding.” (100 lira coins are available from the counter – 4 for a Euro.)

This superfluous detail stuck was exactly what I had hoped I would find here. These little elements serve no other purpose than to you bring you into Anderson’s world. We met every little idiosyncrasy with, “Well, of course.”

This pinball machines features Jason Schwartzman. The other one had Bill Murray on it. Because of course they do.

At times it became hard to shake a feeling that this wasn’t a cafe designed by Wes Anderson, but rather what fans imagine a cafe designed by Wes Anderson would look like. It gave me everything I wanted and more, right down to the meticulously designed bathrooms.

But in doing so, it almost felt as though it bordered on parody. In Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, which is often thought to be the bard poking fun at his own tropes, every single Shakespearean cliche is thrown at the audience: lost princesses disguising themselves as boys, buffoonish villains, an exodus into the forest. It’s an absolutely ridiculous play because it is so over-the-top Shakespearean.

Bar Luce had that same sort of feel. It feels like almost too much from a director who plays in subtlety and nuance (right up until somebody snaps and crashes their car into the house). Maybe that’s the problem. Bare Luce exists. And so it can never truly be a part of Wes Anderson’s world because it is a part of ours. We have cell phones and credit cards and top 40 songs that we all hate but still know the lyrics to. We do not walk in slow-motion. Alec Baldwin does not narrate our story.

I say this not to disparage Bar Luce – I loved it, and our visit. But as a devout Wes Anderson fan, it brought up a bit of an existential crisis: I’d always wanted to step into Anderson’s cinematic universe, not realizing that part of the magic lay in the fact that I couldn’t.

“The … the curry plane?”

He nods, pouting. I am confused.

“Like, a plane of existence that consists of … curry?” I ask, hoping for clarification.

He is annoyed.

“The curry plane.”

“The curry plain,” I say, nodding, having no idea to what he is referring. “… a spacious expanse filled with curry.”

“The plane in Munich airport.”

“Yes. There are many planes in Munich Airport.”

“There is one that serves curry.”

I finally understand what he’s talking about.

“You’re mad at me because – ”

“You never wrote about the curry.”

There is more to it, of course. The curry post – or lack thereof – was the line of demarcation for Rand. For him, it marked where I stopped blogging regularly about our travels. He is wrong – not about my failure to blog regularly (that is a fact I can’t dispute) but that there is a clear line as to when that began. They are stories I failed to tell that took place before the curry plane, there are plenty that I’ve written about that happened after. But when life changes, we often attach meaning to an event or to a place. Here, we say. All that is different in our world began here.

I do this, too. The line I drew before and after my brain surgery, before and after my father’s death. The world hurls us all forward, and the space between me and those moments becomes bigger. I cannot change those things. But I can tell you about the curry plane. Maybe, for a little while, I can stop time.

In a wide courtyard in Munich Airport – my husband’s favorite in perhaps all the world – sits a WWII-era American bomber that bears a smiling pilot logo and the name “Smokey Joe’s.” This seems an odd era for the Germans to fetishize.

But the plane is not a plane. It is a food truck. It serves only one thing, a dish that is decidedly non-American in origins: currywurst.

The name of this food repulses me. I react to it viscerally, the way I do when men on the street tell me to smile, because I’d be so much prettier if I did. Wurst should not be part of the lexicon. I will not make a pun here. It doesn’t deserve it.

But despite the name, despite the appearance, despite its raw components … currywurst is not bad. Indeed, given the right circumstances, currywurst might be great. When you are drunk and hungry, it is there. When you are tired, and jetlagged, and you’ve just left Italy after perhaps committing rental car fraud, currywurst is perfect.

It is ubiquitous across Germany, tracing its origins back to a post-war Berlin, where a resourceful housewife supposedly traded booze to British soldiers in exchange for ketchup. She poured it over sliced pork sausage and sprinkled curry powder over the top. It spread like wildsausage over the country. It transcended social strata. It is said to be beloved by construction workers and Angela Merkel alike.

It became the quintessential German fast food without ever truly becoming fast food. Out of a WWII era bomber in the middle of Munich Airport, it is served in a paper boat with tiny wooden forks.

For years, I resisted this snack. Rand would threaten me with it and I would scream. I don’t like sauces, or messy foods, or meals that make you feel like you need a shower afterwards. Currywurst seemed a trifecta of evil. I was horrified. I swore I’d never try it. I eventually gave in. Those damn eyes of his, compelling me to historical feats.

There, in the middle of the night, in the middle of the airport, we ate currywurst together. You should, too, if the occasion arises. The pork sausage is oily and slightly sweet, cut by the sharpness of the sauce which is tart and should be repulsive but, bafflingly, is not. The layer of fries underneath is crisp, and you need to eat them quickly before the sauce makes them untenable. The spices are gentle and warm. It all sounds awful, but it is not.

I did not write about currywurst, because it did not seem of note. I did not write about it, because it was in Germany, and in the past, and if I dove back into my memory then I would have to sit, for a little while, in a world where my father was still alive. That is a hard thing to do.

If I write about the trip when we ate the currywurst, then I will inevitably see pictures of him.

If I write about the currywurst, I have to step into the past. And then I am crying, and I have written currywurst so many times and I hate that word, and if my father read any of this he would say in his stilted way, “What … the hell … is the matter with you?”

And the thought of that makes me laugh, just for a second.

You get upset when I don’t write about things, dearest, but you never ask me why I don’t want to. Sometimes, it sheer laziness – I won’t deny it. But sometimes, it is because I know it will make me sad.

Your mustache is gone now, and so is my father.

One night, not that long ago, you convinced me to eat currywurst out of a truck that looked like a plane. My father was alive, and we were young.

You asked me to write about it, my love, and I have kept my promise. Now keep yours: live forever.

For those unfamiliar with this “food” product, Soylent is a high-protein drink designed to appeal to lifehackers, dieters, and doomsday cult members who are maybe a little shy and don’t want to come out of their bunker for communal meals. It has an incredibly long shelf-life, and provides you nutrition without all the pesky side-effects that food usually has, like chewing, tasting like something, and being an excuse for human interaction.

As a bonus, it also apparently gives you raging diarrhea, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

Because I’m a blogger, and continually told that my life has relatively little value, my body becomes fair game for “creating content”. In the past I’ve tried Paleo, quit sugar for a month, and engaged in a series of workouts designed for double-jointed 19-year-olds who were probably genetically engineered in a lab inside Lululemon’s headquarters.

The point is, since I’m a woman who writes things on the internet, I’m continually told by trolls to “Drink bleach and die.” So I thought, Why don’t I drink something that is marginally better than bleach and instead of dying, I’ll write about it? Thanks for the idea, trolls! I hope you take a moment from your non-stop rage masturbation to reflect on how much I appreciate you.
–

So … What IS It, Anyway?

It’s a drinkable meal replacement created by computer developers with absolutely zero background in nutrition or culinary sciences. According to the company’s own website, this was the moment of inspiration that led the founders to create Soylent:

Living off a diet of frozen corn dogs and ramen, they grew frustrated with the effort and cost associated with purchasing, preparing, and consuming food that was neither healthy nor enjoyable.

Now, you can understand why I was slightly concerned about ingesting something developed by guys who felt that the prep work for corn dogs and ramen was too much for them. Also, please explain to me how much time and effort is possibly spent purchasing those food items. You can literally buy them at a gas station.

Let me be clear: my body is not a temple. Today I’ve consumed a spoonful of raw cookie dough, and two slices of blueberry pie. At the time of me writing this, it is 9:57am. My eating habits roughly resemble those of someone who is high, because I am, in fact, often high.

But all of it was homemade and goddamn delicious. The point is, I derive a lot of joy from food because I’m not a sociopath.

Soylent takes its name from a 1960s sci-fi thriller starring Charlton Heston (the website maintains they actually got the idea from the book on which the film is based. Sure, guys. Sure.) In the movie, there’s a massive food shortage, and Soylent is the food replacement that everyone eats, and the most popular flavor is Soylent Green, which Heston’s character discovers is actually made from human flesh.

I’m going to repeat that, in case that paragraph was so batshit crazy that your brain rejected it. The inventors saw a movie in which people are unknowingly eating processed food that is made from humans and they thought “WE SHOULD NAME OUR PROCESSED FOOD AFTER THAT.”

Are we all on the same page of this ludicrous book titled Oh My God, What is Happening? Great.

The Experiment

I decided to replace two meals a day with Soylent every day for a week. That’s fourteen bottles.

It did not end well. It didn’t even begin well.

Soylent comes in a variety of flavors with ambiguous, litigation-safe names like “nectar” and “cacao.” There’s a caffeinated variant, if you want to avoid a high-maintenance lifestyle that requires you to drink coffee. Or, for you DIYers, you can buy Soylent in a powdered form, in case you like your Soy Protein Isolate Meal Replacements to have a more “homemade” touch.

I ordered a 12-pack from the Internet, and a few days later it arrived on my doorstep. The box said that I didn’t need to refrigerate Soylent, and that pregnant women should consult a doctor before drinking it, and you shouldn’t have arguments with your spouse within earshot of the package because it will anger the Soylents inside. Also, you are cautioned not to drink too much of the stuff. No, really. The actual label of the product tells you to maybe not drink it.

I was somewhat concerned because now even Soylent itself was like, “Hey maybe this is a bad idea.”

I mean, I can eat an entire bag of Fritos and at no point does the packaging say, “Whoa. Maybe slow down and consider some carrot sticks.”

I took a look at the ingredients and it was basically a list of characters from The Hunger Games.

Copper Gluconate. Manganese Sulfate. Pyridoxine Hydrochloride. Mmm, oat fiber. Never one to pass up an opportunity to drink canola oil mixed with rice starch, I started the project.

—————

Day 1.

 –

–

—————
–
Day 3.

No, screw you, I’m eating nachos.
–
Summary:
Bottles consumed: 0
Emotional state: Intense anxiety at the prospect of having to consume another bottle of Soylent.

At this point in the experiment my husband intervened and pointed out that I wasn’t so much “drinking Soylent for a week” as I was “drinking a single bottle of Soylent and blaming it for three days of subsequent farting.”

Day 4.

10:01 am: I am cowering from the fridge, which has historically been one of my best friends.
10:31 am: I open up the second Soylent of my life. Peeling back the wrapper, I am reminded of Pandora opening her box. The box, in this instance, is my poop hole.
10:37: Everything is fine.
10:42: EVERYTHING IS NOT FINE.
10:59: My intestines are just a shaken bottle of soda at this point.
11:02: I sit and watch my husband eat a bagel. I have never hated him more than I do at this precise moment. Soylent isn’t made of people. It’s made of resentment and broken promises.

I think he knew that I was planning to kill him.

11:33: I finished the bottle. It took me an hour and it was mostly unpleasant, so it’s basically like the first few times I had sex except it took 58 minutes longer.
1:00 pm: I have not pooped and it feels like a triumph.
2:15 pm: Ask husband if I have to open up another Soylent. Him, with a pitying look on his face. “I think so? For, like, science or whatever the hell it is you’re doing?”
2:20 pm: Open up my second Soylent of the day.
2:27 pm: Life is meaningless.
2:42 pm: I DON’T EVEN KNOW WHAT MUSCLES I’M CLENCHING
3:09 pm: Oh, good, it’s taken me so long to drink this thing that it’s now room temperature
4:43 pm: I’m basically engaging in a game of chicken with my sphincter at this point.
9:24 pm: After a evening spent eating actual food, I find myself doubled over with cramps. Intense, unprecedented, I feel like the diner scene from Alien but the thing that pops out of my abdomen is going to be a bottle of Soylent cramps.

(Yes, I am well aware this is from Spaceballs. You didn’t want the gif from the real movie. Trust me.)

10:06 pm: I have openly started weeping.
11:22 pm: I can’t sleep because I’m scared I will die.
11:26 pm: HOW COULD CORNDOG GOURMANDS WITH A CANNIBALISM FETISH LEAD ME ASTRAY?

Conclusion

(Writer tip: If you put “Conclusion” somewhere in your article, people will think that you are a legitimate journalist even if your work is literally full of gifs that suggest vigorous bowel movements.)

I’m all for convenient food. I’m super psyched about any food that I can eat with one hand because that means I can use my other hand to hold more food.

The problem is that most of what we eat nowadays isn’t even food to begin with. Everything has been so processed that it bears little resemblance to the living organisms that created it. It’s true of even meat and vegetables.

But Soylent takes things a step further. I’m used to seeing a weird list of ingredients on junkfood wrappers, but a Soylent box only has two or three recognizable ingredients, and it’s supposed to be a meal.

Also, IT IS NOT CONVENIENT TO SPEND HALF OF YOUR DAY ON THE TOILET.

Some websites tell me that your body needs to get acclimated to Soylent and after a while the diarrhea dies down but I feel like that should not be a threshold you have to cross in order to have breakfast.

In the end, it came down to two simple questions:
Do I enjoy having my butt turned into a poop geyser that I’ve affectionately nicknamed Old Squirtful? No.
But is it worth it for the convenience of not having to chew? Also no.

I’ll leave Soylent to those with stronger stomachs while I keep enjoying actual food that’s a little more complicated to prepare. But hey, at least it’s still food.

Ham. Ham, everywhere.

Dear Spain,

I like you. I truly do. You’re like Italy, but less mafioso-y. I begrudgingly appreciate how entire cities will shut down so that people can take naps. It’s absolute bullshit, and really annoying for tourists, but y’all are like, “FUCK IT! It’s 1pm. Let’s eat paella for 3 hours.” It’s hard not to be impressed with that level of impracticality. I, too, am weirdly committed to rice.

You have a bazillion types of ham, priced according to how much the pig in question seemed to appreciate the works of Cervantes. You came up with the idea of sangria. You gave us Javier Bardem and Antonio Banderas and Julio-Effing-Iglesias.

You also gave us the Spanish Inquisition, but I’m trying to focus on the good.

The point is, Spain, I can totally get behind you on a lot of stuff, and even excuse some of the batshit crazy things you do (like, seriously, chill out with the mayonnaise. There, I said it). But there is one thing that kept coming up, and it’s absolutely bullshit, and normally I wouldn’t give a shit except for Clayton.

Can we talk about Clayton?

Here he is with Rand at the Alhambra:

He’s quite adorable. Every time I tried to take a picture of him he kind of froze up and got a case of something I affectionately call “constipation face”, and I understand because I do that, too. Constipation face is a global epidemic that no one wants to talk about. We just scream, “LOOK NATURAL,” which, like screaming “RELAX” results in precisely the opposite reaction of what we are seeking. But look how cute he is when he doesn’t know he’s being photographed:

Clayton, at right, with his husband Rob, and yes, they look alike, and yes, they’ve heard it all before.

Now, under normal circumstances I would not be worried about this enormous tattooed gay muscle muffin. He can clearly take care of himself and fell entire forests while in the company of Babe, his Giant Blue Ox. But here’s the thing: Clayton is Canadian.

Have you ever been to Canada? It’s the most polite and unobtrusive country in the entire world. It’s like a giant Minnesota. Where apologizing is a national sport. Where people are so well-mannered that you think you might be hallucinating. Where someone once held a door open for me and then said they were sorry afterwards.

And here’s where the problem arose: Clayton is Canadian, and a vegan. Bless his crazy, protein-deprived heart. He realized that in Spain, this essentially equates to starving (even the water has cheese in it), so he downgraded this to just vegetarianism while we were there. He was compromising. He was being flexible.

This is where you let us down, Spain. Well, not us. (I love ham.) But this is where you let Clayton down, Spain.

And, if I’m to be perfectly honest, it’s where we let Clayton down, too. (But mostly, I’m blaming you.)

Because we went to countless restaurants – tapas bars and cafes and places that were well reviewed – and at most, there was one, maybe two items that Clayton could eat. I don’t mean entrees – I mean actual items.

Have you ever seen a 200+ pound man nibble of a crust of bread and some tomato slices while on the verge of collapsing from low blood sugar? It’s really funny but also sad. Like a sedated panda.  

In our determination to not let him starve (and rest assured, in every single one of these photos, Clayton is starving), we looked up a few places that were recommended by vegetarians. One night, we even splurged and went to a gorgeous rooftop restaurant, and beforehand let the staff know that we had one vegetarian in our midst. That won’t be a problem, they told us.

When we arrived, I mentioned it again, and the server nodded – it wouldn’t be a problem, he said.

“He eats fish, right?”

“What? NO. He’s a vegetarian. He doesn’t eat meat of any kind.”

“Ah, then we don’t have anything for him.”

This happened again and again. Because in Spain, “vegetarian” somehow means you eat fish. Now, as my eating habits and physique will clearly attest, I am no expert on vegetables, but I am pretty fucking sure that salmon isn’t one. Plants grow in the ground, by mechanisms that I’m entirely unclear on (something to do with compost?), and fish can be found in the sea and, if you are in Spain, IN EVERY FUCKING DISH ON THE MENU THAT IS LABELED “VEGETARIAN”.

(Apparently the phrase for an actual vegetarian in Spain is “vegetariano estricto”. All of this is theoretical, of course, because there are no vegetariano estrictos in Spain. They all starved or moved to London.)

“We can make him some risotto,” the waiter said. That was basically what Clayton ate for nearly two weeks. Risotto. Crust of bread. Wait, no, sorry. Not that bread. That bread is actually made of ham.

Oh, and guess what? Clayton doesn’t like risotto.

Clayton, staring at rocks, wondering if that’s what we’re going to force him to eat that evening.

Honestly, we should have left that restaurant then and there. We should have left all of those restaurants then and there. We didn’t. Most of the time, three out of four of us had a nice meal. And that’s just a shitty percentage. That’s our fault.

“You don’t eat meat? Okay, cool. Here’s an animal cooked it its own shell. ENJOY!”

The problem was we had no idea that Clayton was miserable half the time, because he’s so fucking polite. See, Rand and I are Americans. If we go to a restaurant and there’s nothing there that’s acceptable, we leave, but not before flipping over a few tables, dousing them with gasoline, and running around in circles with a match while screaming Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run.” That is how we gently communicate our displeasure at being inconvenienced.

For fuck’s sake, a major plot point in our country’s fight for independence involves tea. We are not afraid to lose our shit in the name of sustenance.

It wasn’t until Clayton’s husband, Rob (also giant, also tattooed, hunky, polite and Canadian because God is real) let us know that Clayton was having a hard time. Three courses in at dinner one night, he gently informed us. And we realized that most of the time, they were just too polite to make their unhappiness known in a way that we Americans could understand. By the time we caught on, it was too late.

A happy moment before we talked to the waiter and realized that one of us was going to starve.

Later, Clayton would say that he wanted other people to realize that vegetarianism is a viable option. Even if it was just once a month, or once a week. He needed to show them how happy he was – and he couldn’t do that by feeling or being miserable because there wasn’t anything for him to eat. He’s so committed to his cause, he didn’t even complain.

I’m so sorry, Clayton. You deserved better. You deserve sweeping smorgasbords of lentils and falafel and whatever the hell tempeh is. You deserve cookies made with flaxseed eggs and coconut oil. And while I’ve uttered those exact sentences as a threat to people in the past, I say them to you with utmost affection. I hope you never go hungry again.

So I realize that we were part of the problem, Spain, but you also somehow think that turbot is a plant, so a lot of this is on you, too. You need to understand that there are people out there who are, well, good. Really good. They care about animals and the planet and about other humans. And when they have decided to live their life with a commitment to that, you cannot say, “Great, here’s a fish. Its name was Javier and it probably had feelings and a family. ENJOY.”

We need to make those people are happy, because they are really good people. We need to make sure they’ve gotten enough ethically-sourced food to eat. Especially if they are 6-feet tall and mostly made of slow-twitch muscle fibers.

Eating candy underneath a dental clinic sign. As one does.

In anticipation of seeing Clayton again, I’m reading up on how to make lavender and cardamom cupcakes without animal products. You can step up, too, Spain. We did our research, and you let us down. You need to understand that if something can wiggle around and swim away from you and has eyes that IT IS NOT A VEGETABLE. If you don’t want to cater to vegetarians, then say that. Stop pretending that you have options for them because there’s sardines on the menu.

Maybe – and I really can’t believe I’m saying this – MAYBE STOP PUTTING FUCKING HAM IN EVERYTHING.

I don’t mean my order – I love ham.  But you know, consider having some options for the good people out there. For people like Clayton.