Every time I return from Europe, I get the same question: What was the most memorable thing I had to eat?
Invariably I give this answer: “A tomato.”
If some are puzzled by the reply, it is a pretty sure bet they have not traveled themselves. Their question was framed by some Gourmet magazine feature on the great chefs of Europe with glossy photographs of saltimbocca Romana and other lavish dishes.
Once in a while, the same answer will provoke a smile of understanding. Inevitably that means the questioner has been abroad recently and thus also has seen benchmark evidence by which to measure the direction in which our own country has veered. Tomatoes are engineered to endure the tests of time, not taste, which reflects a more general cultural shift in the U.S.
America’s supermarkets are piled high with geometrically perfect tomatoes, looking just like the illustrations on the crates they were shipped in. Unfortunately, their flavor is little better than that of the paper their picture was printed on.
Horticultural spin artists must whisper in their genetic ears, telling our tomatoes to reserve their energies for growing skins as tough as footballs, the better to weather the rigors of transport. They are exactly programmed to transform from green to bright red en route from vine to grocer.
In Venice, neither tomatoes nor the vehicles that move them will abide by any such constraints. The Old World’s tomatoes are often a little out of round and splotchy, and the pace of their distribution is determined by that of a gondola.
Watching the progression of produce and people through Venice can be a cross-cultural eye-opener, as I found on a recent stay there.
Where other cities are paved with asphalt or concrete, Venice is laced with water–and that simple substitution is enough to jog the imagination into entertaining alternatives to the standard building blocks of modern life.
No matter how often you’ve watched Katharine Hepburn go from small-town spinster to would-be woman-of-the-world in “Summertime,” the liberating effect of seeing residents sail down the Grand Canal cannot be anticipated. The vaporetti, the local equivalent of a CTA bus, are trailed by whole schools of smaller craft, peddling fruits and vegetables or carrying workers to the renovation of one of the Renaissance palaces that line Venice’s principal thoroughfare.
With the city’s work and play getting done without cars or trucks, exhaust fumes are largely absent, making the public squares that dot the neighborhoods inviting places for cafe-table ruminations on a darker side of progress.
On our side of the Atlantic, it is easy to fall amnesiac to even the potential for such a liability.
But where no expressways converge on mega-malls, shopping remains a daily celebration of neighborliness, not a weekly chore anonymously discharged. Venetians will put on a shirt and tie or wrap themselves in a fur coat for the evening promenade up and down the city’s canalside walkways. They will pass up one butcher shop in favor of another because something about the pork chops or the proprietor appeals to them.
Their predecessors have been doing much the same since the 6th Century, when Venice was founded by refugees from the barbarian invasions of that age. They abandoned the Italian mainland for a group of offshore islets, a decision that protected them from marauding Avars and Lombards but also inoculated their descendants against a speed-up of modern life initiated by the automobile and sanctified by the computer.
Our psychological clock is now calibrated in megahertz, much like a microchip–a development (if not the accompanying hardware) already foreseen by Marx.
As usual, old Karl didn’t quite get it right, but he wasn’t all wrong either. He thought capitalism eventually would require that workers toil faster and faster for less and less. In fact, the average American enjoys a standard of living that would be the envy of yesteryear kings. Our burden is having to buy more and more, quicker and quicker. The American economy seems to need us less as workers than as consumers.
To that necessity of pitching in to help move goods off the shelves and into our homes at an ever-increasing pace, other considerations must cede place. Obsolete now is a standard of manufacturing quality once the hallmark of American-made products. Any Saturday handyman intuitively knows to double the setup time for a home-repair project: Half the hardware or appliances will have to be returned because parts come out of the box broken or mismatched.
Nor is there any psychological satisfaction to be had by going ballistic when throwing shabby goods upon a vendor’s counter. He won’t even fight back, hardly remembering that a merchant once took pride in his product–a fact of life that dawned on me while observing a Venetian shopkeeper and his customer joyfully duke it out verbally over the quality of a salami.
Italians love to argue and willingly admit (indeed, with a certain patriotic pride) that their little corner of the Earth is a far from perfect place. They expect life to be a series of screw-ups, and positively enjoy resolving the resultant disputes through high-decibel confrontation.
Americans once had a similar taste for tongue-lashings, even volunteering on occasion to receive them. As a teenager, I worked in a flower shop where, not infrequently, a customer would call to protest that her corsage or centerpiece hadn’t been delivered. Lowering my voice a half-octave to imitate a boss, I’d reply, “That darn delivery boy left here hours ago. When he gets there, please tell him he’s going to hear about this from me.” Then I’d quickly throw together some flowers and head off to have the caller bawl me out according to my own script.
Alas, such yelling and screaming are now history. When I recently ordered some additional shelves for a favorite bookcase, the ones that arrived were three inches too wide. Protesting proved futile. Nor would the dealer return insults and name calling in kind. He kept calmly repeating that, according to the computer, those shelves were the proper fit. His final offer was to send someone out with a saw to hack them to size.
Finally, I realized the myopia was mine–for not recognizing that shelves aren’t really about carrying books just as tomatoes aren’t for eating. They are for ringing cash registers to an ever faster tempo–a reality that’s easier to appreciate at a distance in Venice, where life can be observed more clearly for taking place in slow motion.
One evening at a restaurant, a diner at the next table indicated his choice for the cheese course to the waiter, then leaned over to observe: “The ingredients are everywhere the same: A goat or a cow and grass. Yet a parmigiana from Emilia-Romangna tastes so different from a cheese from Tuscany or Calabria.”
His armchair gustatorial tour of Italy kept me up half the night with the realization that I soon would return to a place where meaningful choice has been virtually franchised out of existence. Pioneered by the fast-food industry, that homogenization has now engulfed upscale department stores and boutiques. The corporate logos that line Michigan Avenue or Rodeo Drive are no different from those to be found in some regional mall outside of Sandusky, Ohio.
The next morning, I happened to pass a flower shop with a display rack of vegetable seeds. Inveterate gardeners, Venetians will plant the smallest scrap of soil or window box. My eye fell upon a package of tomato seeds, even as my mind recalled the U.S. ban on bringing back agricultural products from abroad. I knew then the deliciously subversive impulse that impelled Winston in the novel “1984” to revolt against his government’s ban on love and truth.
“You’d have to endure a few minutes of terror passing by those damn sniffer beagles at customs,” I thought. “Maybe it’d be safer to plant and water at night. But you might, you just might, wind up being able to enjoy America’s ultimate forbidden fruit: A tomato that tastes like a tomato.”
