Soundings

by Dan Laskin

Someday, I'm sure of it, they're going to turn around and tell us that carbs are good after all.

The new gods with their fads of flesh will be overthrown. The diet books, proclaimed junk. Science will circle back to origins. We will gaze once more upon the food pyramid, ancient, eternal, rising from fields of grain.

Thus will we rediscover the world. Wade across the vast expanses of rice. Sing the lilting melodies of pasta in all its swirled operatic forms. With milk, butter, and a strong arm, transmute potatoes into ambrosia. Bake bread. Break bread. Become whole again.

I believe this with all my appetite. I am a lover of the starches. I come from a family of rice worshipers, who honored Friday chicken with Uncle Ben's. I married an Irish beauty, who brought from her mother's house the ancestral potato masher and set it like a shrine upon the countertop, for Sunday dinners. I can't help it. I embrace it. It's in my genes.

It's in the genes of the race. Adam and Eve, having sinned over fruit, went out upon the earth and discovered their humanity. Gathered the first wheat. Drew from the chaff the heart. Ground it. Wet it. Learned to knead. Found fire, found cooking. And found that it was good.

They journeyed to the New World and learned about corn. Meal, mush, pone, grits, cakes, breads, and flapjacks fattened football players, built America. In the Inca heights they borrowed potatoes, brought them home and called them pommes de terre, then made a banquet, preparing them à l'auvergnate, au beurre, à la ciboulette, à la crème, aux herbes, en croquettes, dauphine, duchesse, en ragoût, sautées, soufflées, surprise.

The one great discovery was the discovery of dough. What is civilization if not a recipe for bread? To mix it, knead, it, and watch it rise repeats the labor of the land: like a seed, it swells up out of itself. Every round loaf an earth.

Oh to grow stout on bread. Food of perfection, it embodies the essential duality, yin-yang, moon-sun, life-death, soft-hard, offering at once the resistance of crust and the yielding of crumb. With equal welcome it receives butter, lard, schmaltz, olive oil, jam. Sliced, it enfolds your lunch. Stale, it invites you to bathe in fondue.

Civilization flowered on grain. The West grew on the grinding of millstones, those original disk drives, before reality was virtual. The wisdom of the East was inscribed on grains of rice. Nobody ever wrote jack on a flake of salmon.

All art begins in childhood, with Mr. Potatohead and macaroni necklaces. All dreaming begins after school, over graham crackers and milk. All revolution has its roots in slurping spaghetti at the dinner table. All poems veil their meaning like corn, tassels fluttering in praise of ripeness. All movies unfurl through mouthfuls of popcorn. All soup needs Saltines. All writers do their best work sucking pensively on a pretzel rod. All days dawn with a yearning for doughnuts.

Carbohydrates. They are simply oxygen, hydrogen, the very air, the sky. And carbon, the stuff that makes us more than just seawater.

Dear friends, when I die, serve bagels at my wake. Make sure they're fresh. No lox, please. It leaves a taste in the mouth and will give you heartburn later. Lay me out in a breadbasket, like baby Moses floating on the Nile. Set a baguette on my breast. With one arm I will cradle my loaf. The other I'll rest on my comfortable, comfortable gut.