Eating With “... A Conscientious Desire for Knowledge”
Eating With “... A Conscientious Desire for Knowledge”
From Tolstoy and Odysseus to Elko, Nevada's National Basque Festival
I’m reading War and Peace for the first time, participating in Simon Haisell’s newsletter, Footnotes & Tangents. Not surprisingly, I’ve been waiting to see if Tolstoy would write about food. Fifteen chapters in, we’ve been meeting new characters and getting to know them through their attitudes toward Napoleon and each other. For a few chapters, we’ve been building up to a dinner hosted by Count and Countess Rostov in Moscow.
The dinner is finally here, and we’re at the table. We watch the hosts exchange glances, the men talk loudly, and the women chatter. We move down the table through the young people who flirt jealously, until we reach the end where the children’s governess and tutor sit. Four crystal glasses engraved with the count’s monogram are at each place setting, and the table is decorated with pineapples. Many different types of wine are being carried around by the butler who “... thrust [the bottle] mysteriously forward wrapped in a napkin from behind the next man's shoulders and whispered: ‘Dry Madeira … Hungarian... or Rhine wine’ as the case might be.” I was reading, enjoying, when the closing few sentences grabbed me:
“The German tutor was trying to remember all the dishes, wines, and kinds of dessert, in order to send a full description of the dinner to his people in Germany; and he felt greatly offended when the butler with a bottle wrapped in a napkin passed him by. He frowned, trying to appear as if he did not want any of that wine, but was mortified because no one would understand that it was not to quench his thirst or from greediness that he wanted it, but simply from a conscientious desire for knowledge.”
In the hierarchy of characters, this unnamed tutor is at the bottom, and yet I identify the most with him of everyone I’ve met. I know that feeling of yearning for a sip as the bottle passes. Food is information and fuel combined – and only becomes separated when the information is already known. The people who say food is only fuel already know a lot about what they’re eating.
Eating as a way to learn about people and cultures unknown to the eater is a singular, irreplaceable method. My tongue and body knowing what other people taste and find delicious is a type of knowledge different from what I can find in a book or conversation, two other worthy approaches.
My earliest food memories place me in Davis, CA, eating fresh, vegetable-forward northern California food. My Dad would take me to the weekly farmer's market on the back of his bike. Family friends baked with buckwheat and cornmeal. My Mom cooked with whole grains and very little meat. This food retains its formative and comforting place in my heart and palate.
In 1996, we left Davis, the liberal college town with a population of 52,606, for a place that was its opposite in many ways: Elko, NV. My new home was rural and remote, a mining town with a population of 19,583. There were slot machines in the grocery stores, and people drove around town in trucks with guns on display in racks. The high desert felt spare and unwelcoming, and it wasn’t until the summer that I remember starting to enjoy living there–especially when we went to the Basque Festival.
I don’t know which years we went to the festival – it may have been once or every year from 1997-2000 – but I remember the little kids my age dressed in red and white, with soft leather shoes, dancing as a group, and the chorizo. The festival spilled out of the park and into the street, where descendants of Basque immigrants danced the jota and competed to lift the heaviest things onto their shoulders. The days were bursting with fun, and I watched everything.
It would be good for the narrative if I could remember the first moment I tasted the chorizo, or sheepherders bread, or anything else from the festival, but I can’t. From family stories, I know we all ate widely from what was sold. My memories focus, instead of on taste, on the music, dancing, and running around with my brothers. But since then, I’ve known what Basque chorizo is, that I found it delicious, and how it’s different from the Mexican chorizo my husband’s family eats rolled up with potatoes in a fresh flour tortilla.
To supplement my memory, I turned to the search bar. I found the flyer for 1997’s 34th annual Basque Festival in Elko. The slogan was “Basquing in America’s Freedom,” which is just incredible; I love people having fun with words. Memories came back as I read through it: The Star Hotel ad reminded me of eating there for family celebrations: Big plates of steak with sautéed mushrooms, onions, and horseradish sauce. WalMart’s ad reminded me that the first megastore had just opened – a big change that brought access, but now, knowing what I do about the food system, I wonder what adverse effects it had. The itinerary item “Competitive wood chopping” brought me back to my brother and me vying for a splinter of blonde wood that flew off the block.
In December 2023, the Las Vegas Sun wrote about Elko, mentioning, among other things, the National Basque Festival — they hosted the 59th annual last summer. It seems to have not lost momentum after being shut down because of the pandemic, and it still is the joyful celebration I remember.
When I was five, I didn’t wonder why so many Basque people lived in this small, northern Nevada town. I didn’t think about where they came from or who they missed. I ate and loved their food, listened to and enjoyed their music, and the sound of feet hitting the ground. But now, I wonder, and so I research.
In the early 1900s, “there was a shortage of shepherds in the American West, and Sen. Patrick McCarren of Nevada helped craft legislation in 1950 that allowed Basque men to take up this lonely and difficult job,” the Kitchen Sisters wrote for NPR in 2008. The article tells us about two brothers who came to the US in 1964 from Basque country in northern Spain, escaping the Spanish dictator, Francisco Franco, who “repressively ruled the country for nearly 40 years, made life miserable for the Basque people, suppressing their language, culture and possibilities.” The brothers, who had never worked with sheep, became two of the many who came over to work as sheepherders – the only way they could come to the US.
As is often the case, solutions proposed by politicians in the US serve the politician’s interests before the people who are supposedly being helped. The Basque people weren’t a people of sheepherders, but that’s what the US wanted, so they were forced to become to gain entrance.
The article quotes William Douglass, former director of the Center for Basque Studies at the University of Nevada, Reno:
"Teenagers were ripped up out of their communities back home, brought to a foreign land, with a foreign language, put up on top of a mountain ... crying themselves to sleep at night during the first year on the range."
“Conscientious” is defined as “(of a person) wishing to do what is right, especially to do one's work or duty well and thoroughly.” Having a conscience, in other words. What is often lacking in US policy can be found plentifully in people. Holding the multifaceted truth of how so many Basque people came to live in a small Nevada town and why they might want to cling so tightly to their culture and traditions is possible and necessary. Eating Basque food almost thirty years ago made a permanent impression on my tongue and increased, with specificity, my awareness of different cultures. Sometimes, other cultures are spoken about with a generic wave of the hand, othering them still more with a vague interest, a sort of pat on the head. Many more cultures than what's represented in mainstream media do more than exist; they thrive — just outside my, or your, knowledge. Even as a child, without naming it, I wanted to eat everything because I knew each dish had something to tell me, locked into its physicality and sensuality.
I’m re-reading Small Fires by Rebecca May Johnson (for Alicia Kennedy’s book club for paid subscribers, first discussion thread today!), and one of my favorite parts is about Odysseus and the Sirens. Odysseus knows the stories of men following the Sirens’ call to their deaths. He fills his rowers' ears with wax to keep them moving the boat forward. But Odysseus is greedy. He wants to hear the call and not succumb to it, so he ties himself to the mast. Rebecca argues that Odysseus may have heard but didn’t experience the Sirens’ call because “He will not put his skin in the game.” Rebecca connects it to cooking: “When I cook the recipe, I experience the difference between the knowledge promised by language, and the unboundedness of embodiment, which is both richer and more dangerous than the text can convey.”
Unlike Odysseus, I don’t hold myself back from enthusiastic participation. Like Tolstoy’s German tutor, I want to eat widely not out of greed but because I see many things whose taste I can only learn by placing it on my tongue.
Last week, BOMB published an interview I did with Lexi Kent-Monning about her wonderful new book, and I’m still thrilling over it. Next week, I’ll be sharing links to what I’m reading and cooking. January feels like a month with 97 days—anyone else?