I’m the last person you want editing a magazine about food.
Whenever I fly back to Phoenix, AZ, my hometown, the first thing I do is stop at the Jack in the Box at 44th and Camelback and pick up a cheeseburger and two tacos so greasy you can see through them.
For five years working a previous job writing health magazines for children, my lunch was ramen noodles and fake crab—those whiting fish they stir into a goo and inject with toxins to trick you into thinking they’re shellfish. That stuff is delicious, no matter what you (or the FDA) say about fish paste infested with bacteria that glows in the dark.
A favorite delicacy? Why that would be navel orange peels munched between bites of Thin Mint Girl Scout cookies. I spawned the rind-eating habit on walks home from school through an orchard before I learned how to peel oranges with my fingernails. I used my massive front teeth, opening the citrus like a gopher with a flattop, and discovered that navel orange peels taste good. (The skin of regular oranges and tangerines, by the way, is awful.)
I binge on carrots. By the bag. In high school they turned my skin yellow. The doctor called it “carotenemia.” I thought he made it up.
When I was a kid, Swanson or Banquet made my favorite meals. My culinary knowledge includes this: Swanson pot pies taste better (especially turkey), but the machines tossing oddly cut poultry parts onto the conveyor belt at Banquet make much better fried chicken TV dinners. And there’s no Apple Brown Betty in the middle to leak into the fake mashed potatoes.
It’s not that my mom wasn’t a good cook. I still long for her hamburger and noodles. I’m grateful that her tuna casserole was buried in enough peas, cream of mushroom soup, and layers of potato chips to mercifully smother the tuna taste. And who can forget mock chicken legs, whatever they may be?
But I like things simple. And easy. In a box or can with directions. My grandfather is my role model. He ate the same chicken with rice soup and Townhouse crackers for lunch during all the years I knew him. With a martini prescribed by his doctor for his heart condition. He lived into his 80s.
So it took my friend Mark Shreve ’04 to talk me into this edition about food. I wanted something about cars. (If you’ve got a sunset orange Nissan 350Z roadster with a six-speed manual transmission that I can drive, we’ll do that car theme next.)
Mark insisted that food was the perfect liberal arts subject. Bob Shaver ’04 said that “food touches everything” and quoted an op-ed from The Washington Post: “The food industry is the largest sector of our economy. Food touches everything from health to the environment to climate change to economic inequality and the federal budget. How we produce and consume food has a bigger impact on Americans’ well?being than any other human activity.”
Then last November I spent the morning with 15 students in Professor Rick Warner’s kitchen, where the focus of conversation ranged from how to make eight essential sauces to the cultures of their countries of origin—a tasty trip through world history in about an hour. Students stayed after class, too, eating and asking more questions. This is a generation paying attention to what we grow and eat, how we prepare and sustain it.
When I sent an email asking alumni to share their culinary memories, we received the most responses we’ve gotten in 20 years of these sorts of prompts. Even those in my generation have learned to better savor not only food, but its power as a touchstone of our past and those we love.
So Mark was right. Food is the perfect theme for a liberal arts magazine. And in this issue you’ll also read…
Well, you’ll see. I’ve got no business writing about any of this. But may you savor this edition as a fine wine during your own favorite meal. Allow me to recommend a pair of braised mock chicken legs on a bed of Betty Crocker potato buds, paired with a sleeve of navel-orange-peel-garnished thin mints, al dente.
Thanks for reading.
Steve Charles | Editor