Today, I ate leftover Waffle House grits and toast, with freshly brewed coffee (w/sugar) and a new type of orange juice that is acid-free, Lunch was an inexpensive yet too-ample Cobb Salad(lettuce, egg, tomatoes, carrots, cucumbers, bacon, sliced turkey, sliced ham–I held the cheese) and more fresh coffee, in a local cafe. Crackers before dinner. Dinner itself: my wife’s oven-roasted brussel sprouts, her roast chicken, and some store-bought artisan-like bread with garlic baked into it. One tangerine and three cookies for dessert. Decaf tea as I write this at bed-time. Nothing special or interesting for me, beyond the loving preparation of the sprouts. Certainly nothing impressive to our many American foodies, such as the ones who might especially enjoy one of the few good movies of 2014, The Chef, which is about a top LA chef who finds himself by running a Cubano sandwich truck.
I spend very little of my life thinking about food. I admit that I probably ought to think about it more, the way the nutritionists do, and perhaps the way the local-foods advocates do, and that it would be gloriously pleasurable to have The Chef’s refined taste and the ability to cook for it. Still, today I ate reasonably well, thanks to the care taken by two low-end restaurants, my wife, and various suppliers and managers. Thanks to a government that permits modern markets to function.
Tonight I read this, from Michael Totten’s account of his visit to Cuba last spring:
Leftists often talk about “food deserts” in Western cities, where the poor supposedly lack options to buy affordable and nutritious food. If they want to see a real food desert, they should come to Havana. I went to a grocery store across the street from the exclusive Meliá Cohiba Hotel, where the lucky few with access to hard currency shop to supplement their meager state rations. The store was in what passes for a mall in Havana—a cluttered concrete box, shabby compared even with malls I’ve visited in Iraq. It carried rice, beans, frozen chicken, milk, bottled water, booze, a small bit of cheese, minuscule amounts of rancid-looking meat, some low-end cookies and chips from Brazil—and that’s it. No produce, cereal, no cans of soup, no pasta. A 7–11 has a far better selection, and this is a place for Cuba’s “rich” to shop.
My last Cuba post focused on how communism typically corrodes the soul’s integrity and demoralizes it. Here, my concern is more bodily, and yet I’m also reminded of The Chef, which while about Cuban food, is set in America. The land where people can road-trip across the states if they want, and where soul-food in the deepest sense is a possibility. It would be perhaps impossible for an ordinary Cuban to get similarly excellent Cubanos in Cuba itself. But it is often hard to get everyday fare like potatoes and milk there.
RTWT, and thank God that your meals, whether humble, fast-food, or foodie-fantastic, are not socialist ones.
UPDATE: There’s no point reading my musings here without also reading Angelo Codevilla’s more damning and more factual account of Cuba’s “hunger prison” over at Law and Liberty. H/T Flagg.