Consumed

The city of sabor

Everyone's so angry, my Tampa friends tell me.

What surprises my friends is Miami's Cuban/Anglo hostility, which, now that they've reconnected with me, they follow in miamiherald.com postings about... Cuban sandwiches.

These Tampa friends are not Cuban, not Latino at all. But in Tampa everyone grew up eating Cuban sandwiches -- as well as Spanish bean (garbanzo) soup -- and drinking cafe con leche. Cuban/Spanish food was already part of the Tampa menu. Whatever anti-Cuban resentment reared its ugly head among "Anglos" (in the Gulf Coast no such word was ever used, neither was the yankee "WASP", the word was: crackers) would have done so in the 1880s, when a wave of Cubans and Spaniards came to open and work in cigar factories.

My friends were born into a city full of folk who spoke Spanish and ate ropa vieja and rice and beans. My high-school, in an Anglo part of town, had its share of Hispanics, Italians and Jews. We all ate each others' foods, which included Southern dishes -- God bless Dixie for its cooking if for nothing else; my life would be diminished if I never ate barbecue, collard greens, biscuits, grits.

Perhaps immigration takes the better part of a century to heal its wounds. A generation or two from now, it may seem as silly to fire salvos of ethnic hostility over Cuban sandwiches to native Miamians as it does today to native Tampans.

If we savor each others' cuisine, will we get along? Can world peace be achieved at an international barbecue cookout -- barbecue loosely defined as cooking meats outdoors with the aid of fire. Make Food, Not War: does that slogan have legs?

This is not as wack as it sounds. Dance someone else's dance and you will experience that person's experience of her/his body, which is the experience from which all human culture springs. Eat, or better yet, cook someone else's food and you will learn how she/he inherits a sense of taste and smell, protocol and ritual, sensuality and civilization.

Drink a cafe con leche in the morning and our heads, yours and mine, will be in the same place. Our city, in the morning, will have the same lingering taste. It may not solve all our problems, but it's a tasty start.

High on gastronomy

Food is the new marijuana.

   Thanks to the web, I have reconnected with Gulf Coast friends from college days, back in the 60s.

   Changes, as that era used to say. "We're all foodies,'' one of my old friends emails me. Indeed, when I go the Tampa area for an overnight visit, they've made pork cooked with brightly coloredpeppers (Braised Pork With Three Peppers from The Italian Country Table by Lynne Rossetto Kasper, alas, recipe not online) to serve over polenta. Actually, he's made it. My main connection is with a woman who went to high school and college with me, and her family. Her husband (2nd one, which is average in our generation) did the cooking.

   Her sister and brother are visiting, as well as another woman friend of both of us. We tell old stories. Since I last saw them all, the counterculture intervened, so I have to ask.

   Do you guys smoke herb?

   Not really. Why? Do you have some?

   Not really.

   So we uncork another bottle of red … from Italy or California or Chile, I have lost count. And we go for seconds. With dessert, we sip port.

   Until there's nothing left to sip. They walk me to the garage and show me the air-conditioned upstairs room where I'll sleep. I walk back for another short spell of conversation and run into the big little brother, who near 7'' tall … or so it seems … still has the build of the football player he was almost half a century ago. He's zonked on the food and the reds and has walked out to get some fresh air in his shirt and jockey shorts.

   Nothing's changed, I say. It's your sister's party and here you are standing around with your pants off. He laughs, totally unselfconscious.

   In the morning, the husband once again has been at it. Poached eggs over coarse-ground grits and topped with a tomato sauce and toasted rosemary bread.

   It's Creole-Italian, he says. It's delicious. We're tripping. Food is the new acid.