Most famous for creating Holden Caulfield the freshly expelled prep school, malcontent student who embodied everyone’s teenage angst, beginning with the first sentence of The Catcher in the Rye, “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.” From that sentence on, we were all hooked.

Salinger, like Howard Hughes was intent on fame before he got famous. In college (which he didn’t finish) he bragged about writing the great American novel. Once he did that—and changed the literary world forever—adulation followed him wherever he went. He grew to detest the limelight. He fled his Manhattan apartment and retired to a rural 90 acre farm in Cornish, New Hampshire. He gave his last interview in 1980, and was rarely seen in public.

Of course, my first question when I heard that Salinger had died was, “Had he kept writing, and would those manuscripts be published?” Recently it was announced in the press that Vladimir Nabokov’s (Lolita) wife intended to publish his last, unfinished manuscript even though he expressly told her not to if he died before finishing it.

The press is now leaking stories about Salinger, that there are no less than fifteen unpublished manuscripts moldering in a safe in his remote house.

No doubt publishers are salivating seeing as The Catcher in the Rye has sold more than 60 million copies and continues to sell 250,000 copies every year. So now we wait. Did Salinger order his manuscripts to be published after his death, or destroyed? Right now, no one knows.

Here we have my spice drawers with all my spices and sea salts.

Here are my cupboards that contain vinegars, mayo, John’s coffee, drink mixers from his company Christmas party 2008, herbal teas, and hot chocolate mix from Paris.

Canned garbanzo beans, capers, canned tomatoes, one box of Domino sugar from the market a few doors down from us that I bought under duress when I was out of sugar, various organic sugars and a maple syrup. Oatmeal, pancake mix that I guarantee will go bad before I throw it out, crackers, really great graham cracker like crackers that I got at Whole Foods but can’t find again, Ak-Mak crackers, and two packs of Lind chocolates that I won’t eat because I’m spoiled on Godiva.

Brown rice, popcorn (emergency, almost out), quinoa, lentils, country rice, penne pasta, macaroni, sticky rice, black beans, and something Japanese (I’m not sure what it is).

At the bottom are some sad cans of doggie diet food that India hates but I feed her on occasion when I fear she’s getting too fat. Below that are bottles of water, salt and pepper mills from Williams Sonoma that I’m thinking of taking back because they are a pain in the butt, a Neti pot and an ice bag left over from when I had rotator cuff surgery last year.

In my veggie basket, I have squash, onions, garlic, and tomatoes. Then of course there are bottles of Pellgrino, and a few assorted bottles of sherry and red wine.

On the kitchen peninsula counter is a bowl of fruit. Kind of boring in the winter with just apples, oranges, grapefruit, lemon, and avocado.

Moving to the fridge. This is the cheese and bread drawer.

These are the basics: a half used container of tomato soup, (behind that is cooked leftover whole wheat fettuccini), eggs, sliced fresh bakery bread (top shelf kind of hard to tell what it is), a canister of green juice, yogurts—in the back is plain whole yogurt, lots and lots of eggs, Lemon Pellegrino, fresh peanut butter, whole cottage cheese, Jewish Rugalaugh pastries (even though these are vegan, they are really good), ground chicken to make dog food, organic Irish butter.

Bottom shelf oldish but still drinkable egg nog, whole milk, O.J., open olive oil, tonic water, some orange drink that I don’t know where it came from, Pelligrino, a Ziplock baggie of chicken.

The doors! Organic soyhu, vegan Worcestershire sauce, bread and butter pickles, vinegar, mustard, mayo, cod liver oil capsules. Lots of butter, molasses, organic chocolate sauce, cranberry sauce, champagne, Pellegrino, Chardonnay, and herbal formula #5 from Dr. Ron.

Veggie drawers: Salad, parsley, cucumbers, rosemary, basil, red bell peppers, asparagus, cherry tomatoes, cucumbers., salad, celery, and more salad.

Side freezer: Old sponge cake, rib eye steak, chicken parts, macaroni and cheese with chicken that was such a strange recipe but turned out really good, two types of fresh pasta, shrimp, cod, skirt steak, peas, corn, and organic berries, tomato soups.

Ah Ha! Vodka and more vodka, coffee (which I do not drink because it’s about as appealing as a cigarette to me), Ben and Jerry’s ice cream.

Another freezer drawer containing various flours, Czech liquor that my friend Jitka brought from the Czech Republic, gin, and two freezer bowls for ice cream makers.

The last drawers contain various supplements, and beer!

Freezer drawer containing all my green drinks for the week and two types of homemade granola.

That is my kitchen. Comments welcome.

Dinner last night was cod with brown rice and salad.

The cod was not defrosted when I came down to the kitchen because I have not lived through enough East Coast winters to understand that food will not defrost in a freezing cold kitchen. Good to know!

So I defrosted it by poaching it in an inch of boiling water with a half a lemon squeezed into and a lot of sea salt and pepper. Then I transferred it into a roasting pan with more lemon, melted butter, and olive oil and put it in the oven to broil.

Meanwhile, I made brown rice in the rice cooker.

The salad was chopped red bell pepper, avocado, seeded cucumbers, and cherry tomatoes (olive oil and balsamic vinegar dressing).

For a very quick sauce I used lemon juice, capers, mayo, and salt and pepper. The dinner was delicious and didn’t eat up my entire evening to make it.

Shhh! Babies sleeping. Well, not human babies. But still. I think I can safely say that I’m not the only person in America who coddles my dogs.

Dogs and cats have cleverly evolved to be too cute in the eyes of humans to eat. How did they do that? They were smart enough, or clever enough to have figured out how to play humans to assure a place in a soft bed rather than roasting in a barbecue pit.

They must be really happy with themselves now that other animals lead hellishly tortured lives from birth until they are slaughtered in horrifying, painful ways.  If you’re a cat or dog, it’s a relief. If you’re human who eats animals then it’s a horribly squeamish subject.

A subject that I would like to address. I eat for physiology not for ideology.

If you want to understand human physiology read Death by Supermarket (which I spent four years researching and writing so I’m not going to rehash it here). Suffice it to say that meat is an historically eaten food, and just because we have the luxury of not killing our own food doesn’t change human physiology.

You can have a lot of idealistic goals and moral standards—like Buddhist principles (BTW, the Dalai Lama eats meat)—but the fact is that we are still the same creatures we were 10,000 years ago. We ate meat then. (This is all about insulin resistance and aging, and getting diseased and dying faster, which is too huge of a subject to go into here.)

In the 1992 film “The Last of the Mohicans,” Hawkeye is an Anglo-Saxon frontiersman who had been orphaned as a baby and adopted by the Mohican Chingachgook. The film opens with Chingachgook, his blood son Uncas and Hawkeye running silently through a heavily canopied forest, hunting an elk. When the elk is felled by the .59 caliber round of Hawkeye’s five foot rifle, the three men kneel at the beast. In Mohican, Chingachgook speaks to the elk, “We’re sorry to kill you, Brother. Forgive us. I do honor to your courage and speed, your strength. . . .”

This reverential attitude that some cultures historically held for the animals that provided them sustenance was repeated (copied) in James’ Cameron’s 2010 “Avatar” when the Na’vi Neytiri witnesses the humanoid Na’vi (called an Avatar) Jake Sully proving himself with a “clean kill” of a forest creature that ostensibly the Na’vi would eat.

All of this said, if you want to eat for physiology not for ideology (an historically diet including meat), you need to take a stand against the torture of animals. You need to buy only meat that you are sure has been organically raised and humanely slaughtered. That goes for milk products too. Are you buying supermarket brands? Because if you are that stuff is noxious (another reason to read DBS).

Taking a stand against the torture of animals includes taking into consideration what we feed to our animals.

Before WWII people fed their animals the same food they ate (i.e. table scraps). Then we industrialized dog food so that dogs were eating body parts that humans wouldn’t eat, body parts of tortured animals that is. There are organically raised dog food out there, but if you want to make your own, here is a recipe.

Bon Appetit Little Doggies Food

3 cups organic brown rice
5 cups water, or organic chicken broth
2 pounds pasture raised organic ground chicken, turkey, pork or beef, OR LEFTOVERS OF YOUR DINNERS, MINCED UP
3 ten-ounce bags of frozen organic mixed vegetables
(green beans, peas, carrots and corn)
6 to 8 pasture raised eggs
Grated cheese (whatever is going to go bad in the fridge)

Layer all ingredients, except eggs, into a rice cooker and turn on. It takes about 1 hour to cook. When the cooker turns off, transfer the cooked mixture into a large bowl. Working quickly while it is still very hot, crack eggs into the mixture and stir to “cook.” Stir in cheese.

Cool and store in an airtight container in the refrigerator or freezer.

(Note: Do not stir cod liver oil into hot food as polyunsaturated oils become rancid easily with exposure to heat, air and light. And be careful with the cod liver oil as it is cathartic and you may end up taking your dog out in the middle of the night.)

Like humans, all dogs are different. Our dogs get a lot of exercise so may need more food than a dog that doesn’t exercise much or that is much smaller. This a very nutrient dense recipe so experiment to see what amount is best for your dog.

Before the first Surgeon General’s warnings on cigarette packages in the 1960’s people had positive attitudes about smoking. It was thought to “calm the nerves.” Tobacco companies advertised smoking for weight loss in medical journals. It was perceived of as sexy and cool when cigarettes dangled from an actor’s lips. Women smoked with societal impunity during pregnancy, and after childbirth. Doctors smoked in their offices and offered patients cigarettes. You could smoke in hospital rooms, airplanes, movie theaters, and virtually every public and private space including in a car carrying kids and infants, with the windows rolled up. You could not escape cigarette smoke. So a lot of people took up the habit, and most everyone approved of, and encouraged smoking, including the medical community. And the tobacco industry was coddled and protected by the government.

People who smoked eventually developed wracking coughs, dental problems, leathery, heavily wrinkled skin, and God-awful breath. Then in crept the reality of cigarette smoking, the cancer bit. While cancer began as a sporadic occurrence, pretty soon it seemed like quite a few people were getting cancer. As the incidence of cancer increased, the tobacco industry concocted deadlier and deadlier cigarettes (go figure) with more potent chemicals in the hopes of keeping people addicted. Then all of a sudden the entity of cancer was large enough and scary enough to penetrate people’s denial. By then Americans were all cancer all the time.

The admission by the government and medical community that cigarettes were a major contributing factor to the epidemic of cancer eventually caused it to become less convenient to smoke due to restricted smoking in public places. When it was not socially acceptable to smoke and it was hard to find a place to light up, it was a lot easier to quit. At first just a few mavericks quit (those sissies), then more people got fed up, then people started jogging and quitting all over the place. Even though the tobacco industry fought to the death to keep people smoking and to recruit new smokers.

Meanwhile supermarkets started being built across the country and at first people thought the factory food sold in those stores was, if not sexy, at least cosmopolitan. No one wanted stuffed cabbage bubbling on the stove anymore. They wanted TV dinners and canned pork and beans, and frozen pizza. Factory produced food was touted as being healthy, convenient, and economical. What started as a corn flake turned into hundreds of thousands of fake food products that are so far from being food it’s not funny.

Nevertheless, Americans embraced this factory fare and most everyone approved of, and encouraged eating it, including the medical community. And the food industry was coddled and protected by the government.

In the year 2010, there are way too many consumers who are under the same influences that previous generations of smokers were subjected to. Factory products are commercialized into kids’ heads via the delivery device of TV before they can even hold a spoon. That very same poisonous fare is served to sick, injured, and dying patients in hospitals and eaten by doctors and other medical personnel. It’s served on airplanes, at sports events, movie theaters, theme parks, and schools. You cannot escape it and for the most part it’s all you can find to eat.

Like diehard smokers, the population that has succumbed to fake food remains in the denial of their addiction even though they are suffering the combined effects of poisoning and malnutrition, some of which are obesity, degenerative disease, autoimmune conditions, neurological problems, and overall ill health. As people got sicker, the food industry concocted deadlier and deadlier food products (go figure) with more sugar, more deadly fats, more mineral stripped salt, and more potent chemicals in the hopes of keeping people addicted.

The government and the medical community have yet to admit that the epidemic of disease and the increased rise in cancer is the result of eating factory food. But a select few have come to their senses enough to recognize that what’s formulated in a laboratory and then made, grown, or raised in a factory is not a sustainable human diet, and these renegades have kept the flame of real, whole food alive. Meanwhile, the food industry, which lives in happy harmony with the diet and drug industries, will fight to the death to keep people consuming their products, and so far these industries have been protected, and coddled by the government, including the FDA.

So it does seem that there are enough parallels to prove Michael’s statement true, that “processed food is to our generation what tobacco was to our parent’s generation.” Unfortunately the most profound difference is that people can and should live without smoking, but people can’t live without food. It makes the battle against factory produced food much more difficult to win than the battle against smoking. And that’s saying something.

There are all kinds of theories about how people should eat to maintain weight. One is to eat six small meals a day. Personally I find that obsessive as you would just be finishing one snack when you were thinking of another. So I prefer to eat three meals a day as people have historically done. I don’t snack very often. If I’m really hungry and have worked out that day, I might have something nutritious along with something junky. No sense in total deprivation. I might have some fruit with a cookie. Some other snacks I might have:

Sushi
Apple or banana with cheese
Turkey slices with cheese
Nuts
Deviled eggs
A glass of whole milk
My green drink! (Yay!)
Chicken salad with grapes
Peanut butter in celery sticks
Carrots and hummus

I usually buy New Zealand grass fed, though I know that’s a hideous carbon footprint on my dinner plate. Let’s move on from there.

To cook a rib eye steak takes only sea salt, pepper, and a cast iron pan. If you don’t own one, you can usually find them at thrift shops already seasoned by a thousand years of cooking. I bought my last one for $5 at a thrift shop in Menemsha while on vacation in the Vineyard a couple of summers ago. You can buy them actually seasoned now so you don’t have to go through the whole vegetable oil/baking rigmarole.

All you have to do to cook your steak is pound them to the thinness you like and season with sea salt and pepper. Heat the skillet on high for a couple of minutes then turn down the heat to medium high. You want your steak to sear so the skillet has to be hot. Place the steaks on the skillet AND DO NOT MOVE THEM ONCE THEY ARE PLACED. You’ll know if you’ve got the skillet hot enough because the meat will grab.

Turn them when you see the meat browning around the edges, usually about 4 minutes. Cook another 4 minutes or so on that side, depending on how you like your meat cooked. One thing to remember is that rib eye goes from bloody to overdone very quickly.

Remove steaks to plates for two minutes to allow the juices to seep out. Then transfer to plates and serve.

You can serve rib eye with horseradish, but this meat is so delicious it really doesn’t need much accompaniment. You can also pour a little wine into the skillet and whisk for a couple of minutes and pour that over your steaks. While the skillet is still very hot, pack in some freshly washed watercress and move it around with a wooden spoon until wilted. Watercress goes wonderfully with rib eye because it has a peppery taste.

Enjoy.

Karma

The youngest attendee was the nine-year old author, Emma, who is pictured here as I shook her hand.  Tomorrow night is another event at the Morson Collection in Boston. You can listen to the two radio interviews I gave last night and this morning here.