Menu for a New Day
Even those of us in the hectic world of restaurants must occasionally take a break, and so it is that Inauguration Day found me in the High Desert north of Santa Fe, New Mexico. I took the train from my home in Iowa and am now enjoying the healing waters at Ojo Caliente and reflecting on the new world we’ve entered. Much has been said about the myriad ways this milepost in history marks profound change: in matters of state, matters of race, matters of politics and compassion; and rightly so. A new day is indeed dawning, and if you’ll pardon the mixed metaphor, joy cometh in the morning.
As a nation, though, there is an important aspect we still refuse to grapple with in its totality: food. Maybe because it is such an immense prospect to ponder — food is one of the very few things that we all share in common, and it touches nearly every aspect of our lives. We work in the daily grind each day, perhaps in part because of our love of the work (for the lucky among us anyway), but mostly in order to put food on our tables and nourish our families. Yet in our national discourse, the closest anyone gets to talking about food is either in considering the minutia of the farm bill or decrying the latest food-borne illness outbreak that is often brought about by that very minutia.
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