Fasting

After a weekend with houseguests marked by stuffing our faces with local Ligurian specialities and guzzling wine, I decided it was time for the purifying ritual of fasting.  In past years, it was a ritual that Doug and I practiced once every Spring, vegetating on the couch while watching old movies and drinking gallons of water and herbal infusions.

But seeing as how someone was going to have to keep up his strength enough to run after our two happy little critters, this time I was going to be all alone in undertaking this ancient technique.  The practice of fasting has its origins at the horizons of human history: for millennia, believers and ascetics have done it while meditating as a way to near themselves spiritually to God.

All I wanted was to eliminate the unwelcome lipids and toxins in circulation throughout my body after my carefree abuse of food.

Aside from having obvious physiological effects (headaches, tiredness, hourly visits to the toilet, and the illusion of losing weight by the minute), fasting is a good way to improve your patience and strengthen your resolve in the face of privation.

I’ve never been exactly superlative in either of these virtues, and while I have no aspirations of becoming an ascetic myself, I do think that working on one’s capacity for patience is well-worth the effort.

In our super-fast modern world, being patient  and doing nothing while waiting for something to happen is practically incomprehensible, especially for teenagers.  Every moment of the day is filled with the constant sharing of information via cybernetic means, and the over-stimulated brain absorbs millions of bits of data.

The resultant hunger for input translates itself into the need to satisfy any and every psycho-physical desire, and thanks to faster and faster technologies, the time that one must wait for gratification is measured in nanoseconds.

Meanwhile, in the early afternoon of my fast, lying on the couch in a comatose state whilst dreaming of pizza and focaccia, I considered how I myself had become victim to the concept that not eating for 24 hours was impossible.  In truth, I had enough extra pounds on me to last a long winter’s hibernation.

Patience is all in your head.  And after 24 hours of patient fasting, a bit of ancient wisdom appeared alongside my breakfast: to will it is to do it.

Learning to be patient and waiting for events to take their natural course will give us great strength in those moments when we really need it.

Yum-Yum Land

One of the most popular channels in America is the Food Channel, which is entirely dedicated to, well, food.  Every thirty minutes another of its chefs rolls out another complicated and at times unrealistic meal, or reality shows judge the best chef to cook with surprise ingredients like root-beer jelly beans, or interior decorators are given 48 hours and a shoe-string budget to modernize dirty, greasy dives.

Becoming one of the celebrity chefs with your own show on the Food Channel means more than just being able to provide for yourself and your family … it means writing cookbooks, becoming head of a merchandizing empire, and becoming an American pop culinary icon.  And these icons have nothing to do with the slightly snobby image maintained by our celebrity chefs in Italy.  You might run into Paula Deen, a seventy-year-old lady with her down-home cooking and down-South accent always ready to stick a finger in some sauce and lick it off enthusiastically.  Or Rachel Ray, who chops and stirs in a state of perennial euphoria, selling her philosophy of three easy meals in thirty minutes.  Or Giada, who prepares Italian food while seductively murmuring “Mmmmmmmm” or “Ahhhhhhhh.” In fact this use of onomatopoeic sounds is everywhere on these types of shows, though I myself am not much of a fan …

For an XXL nation, this constant exposure to food, whatever its claims to being healthy, seems paradoxical.  The culture of eating well is still inaccessible to the majority of the population, who have less and less time and money to eat healthily, and who therefore resort to grabbing a quick meal out, frequently at a fast food joint.

Simplicity is never on the menu when you prepare dinner in America.  Recipes are significantly less simple than those in the Mediterranean diet and flavors are piled one on top of another in ever more caloric combinations.  Hot or spicy foods are particularly popular, and even a green salad gets covered in heavy sauces.  Dipping is everywhere, and the Rolls-Royce of this practice is certainly the Seven-Layer Dip, composed of  seven layers of creamy stuff to be scooped out by gigantic dip-sized chips.

A meal out in a restaurant never lasts more than an hour, and often less than that, and for an Italian it can be rather stressful.  As soon as you sit down, your waitress shows up and introduces herself in a loud voice, pouring huge glasses of ice water and leaving you the menu.  No more than five minutes later she reappears to take your order.  In Italy after five minutes people still haven’t figured out who is sitting where around the table.  After ten minutes, fifteen max, a steaming hot plate is dumped in front of you and then at intervals of every three minutes after that your waitress pops up to ask you if everything is fine and your hamburger cooked right.  The moment the first person around the table puts down his fork, the perky waitress (who needs to act this way since almost her entire salary depends upon tips from customers) shows up again to whisk away the plate.  When everyone has finished, the check is there waiting for you and before you know it the table is cleared and someone else is edging into your seats.  Sitting around chatting after the meal is impossible, since the restaurant counts on getting as much turnover as possible, whereas in Italy the maximum number of seatings for a night is two, and more frequently just one.

Food in America is experienced in two ways: intellectually by the wealthier class, who enjoys comparing Tuscan oils and French cheeses, or as a mere physical need that must be fulfilled.  In Italy, food is a social event, hours and hours at the table talking and sharing thoughts, drinking wine enjoying the dolce far niente in the presence of friends and excellent, simple dishes.

I remember the shocked faces of my American family when they first sat down for these long affairs.  I think that at first it was very strange for them to spend three hours in a restaurant without a waiter breathing down their necks.  On the contrary, he would often sit down with us to chat and to offer us a limoncino on the house.

They say that a nation’s culture can be measured by its television shows.  People’s relationship with food and their obsession with sports as certainly a good measure of American society.

But if that’s the case, what then would they say about us Italians?

… We haven’t turned into a nation of dirty old men and cheap sluts, have we?

Land of extremes

After just a week in America after a two-year hiatus, those dusty images I had of this land and that I had filed away in my mind have come rushing back. 

For most people, America is a controversial country, full of contradictions and excesses, and when you spend time here, walking around, spending time with people, seeing how they work and live, this would seem to be true.

 

If on one hand almost no one actually cooks anymore in America, creating a national obesity problem, and everyone buys ready-made junk food from the overstuffed aisles in supermarkets and washes them down with gallons of carbonated sugar drinks, on the other hand there is a gigantic market for low-fat foods, which in some ways is even more frightening than the good old fat from fast foods.  The calories are cut out of everyday products like peanut butter, yogurt, and cheese, but so is the flavor. 

If the average American is a bit overweight, certainly nothing around him is designed to help slim down.  Everything is designed to reduce physical movement, even in the most insignificant ways: there are rider carts in the supermarkets so you don’t have to walk while you shop, all of the cars are automatic so you don’t have to push the clutch, and you’d be hard pressed to find a door than doesn’t open automatically when you approach it.  And yet the gyms are open 24/7 and you can easily find a crowd of people at 5 a.m.getting in their cardio before heading to the office.  You see mothers running behind their sport-strollers at dawn and jogging is obstinately practiced by people of all shapes and ages. 

Americans are wizards of communication; they love to stop and speak with anyone and will unfailingly say hello to you on the street even if you have never seen them before.  They keep up a friendly smile – a bit out of their conception of manners, a bit out of natural generosity – with whomever they meet, be they tourists or new neighbors.  But it is not at all unusual for members of the same family, including brothers and sisters, to go decades without speaking to each other, and family relationships are often complicated by silence and misunderstandings.

 

After having exported the cool of smoking to the whole world through film legends like Humphrey Bogart and John Wayne, by now there is almost no one left who smokes and the government has launched a genuine crusade against cigarettes.  Too bad that the consumption of alcohol is at an alarming level among teenagers and adults who will down more than a few cocktails after work and during dinner and who drink beer at an enormous rate.  In Italy, the largest package of beer is a three-pack; here you can get them in cases of 24.

 

If you rent a motorcycle, many states won’t even oblige you to wear a helmet while driving it, but if you look around from the saddle of your Harley, you’ll see legions of cyclists, every one of them wearing a bike-helmet. 

America has given us the genius of its artists, those who left their mark on the history of music – like Dylan, Hendrix, and Elvis – and literature – like Steinbeck and Hemingway – but they have also given us the dubious gift of stars and starlets like Brittney Spears, Lady Gaga, Paris Hilton, Vin Diesel, and others in a very long list.

 

Basically America is the factory that produces both the best and the worst of what we will end up consuming in other parts of the world sooner or later.

 

They have started wars on dubious pretexts, bombed countries and rebuilt continents, and saved the world; extremism is in its very nature and it is for this that no foreign observer of America feels indifferent about it.

 

You love it or you hate it, this America.