Alas, it was not to be! As I have indicated in the beginning of this entry, it was indeed a loathsome experience. Aside from the sneering undergraduates and invisible cockfight, S’s expedition to the lavatory was rewarded with the absence of toilet paper and mine own was rewarded with no working toilette; was there no greater persuasion to utilize the men’s lavatory! The caffeine-free tea that I ordered was impressive as well, managing to present itself in an incredible likeness to gardening mulch in both smell and taste.

As I silently weeped over my disappointing libation, the idea of a hot savory beverage appealed to my senses. While reposing inside on a particularly tempestuous winter afternoon, why shouldn’t a piping hot mug of savory hot be as complimentary as a hot cocoa? Aside from the famed and much aligned beef tea, what else can we drink that is neither sugary nor sugarless? Coffee is one suggestion, although I cannot give any advice about it, choosing to abstain from it. In my endeavoring, I have found a few alternatives that might please you, dear readers. Should you have any other suggestions, please feel free to engage in correspondence.

Beef Tea
- Recipe, courtesy of Soup Song
The standard. Should you find yourself in a pinch, heating a can of low-sodium beef broth will suffice.
Vegetable Tea
- Recipe, courtesy of Astray.com
A bit time consuming, but nutritious.

Tomato Tea
- Recipe, courtesy of Earth Clinic
Disregarding the claims to its homeopathic elements, this recipe is very good. That it also contains substitutes in the case that you are out of the required ingredients.

Reading about hot savory drinks
Savory Characters (Washington Post) - Mainly about the chilled alcoholic beverages. Bacon-infusion?
Staffordshire Foods: Bovril (BBC News) - History behind the classic instant beef tea.

You also might be interested in this NPR interview with Michael Paterniti on his experience.

The Last Meal
By Michael Paterniti
Esquire, May 1998
Volume 129, Issue 5

A two-ounce songbird. A lemon-sized tumor: An imperial appetite for death, flesh, and the immortal gesture. It was time for dinner.

THE NIGHT BEFORE THE LAST MEAL, I visit a stone church where mass is being said. In the back row, a retarded boy sits with his mother, his head tilting heavenward, watching, in an unfocused way, the trapped birds that flutter and spin in the height of the church vault. About a hundred yards away, in the immense holy hangar, tulips bloom on the altar. It’s the end of December–gray has fallen over Paris–and the tulips are lurid-red, gathered in four vases, two to a side. A priest stands among them and raises his arms as if to fly.

Last I remember, I was on a plane, in a cab, in a hotel room–fluish, jet-lagged, snoozing. Then, by some Ouija force, some coincidence of foot on cobblestone, I came to a huge wrought-iron door. What brought me to France in the first place was a story I’d heard about Francois Mitterrand, the former French president, who two years ago had gorged entry gal to eat. Rare and seductive, the bird–ortolan–supposedly represented the French soul. And this old man, this ravenous president, had taken it whole–wings, feet, liver, heart Swallowed it, bones and all. Consumed it beneath a white cloth so that God Himself couldn’t witness the barbaric act.

I wondered then what a soul might taste like.

Now I find myself standing among clusters of sinners all of them lined in pews, their repentant heads bent like serious hens. When the priest’s quavery monotone comes from a staticky speaker, cutting the damp cold, it is full of tulips and birds.

Somewhere, a long time ago, religion let me down. And somehow, on this night before the last meal, before I don a white hood, I’ve ended up here, reliving the Last Meal, passing my hand unconsciously from my forehead to my heart to either shoulder–no–yes, astonishingly pantomiming the pantomime of blessing myself.

Why?

When it comes time for communion, why do I find myself floating up the aisle? Why, after more than a decade, do I offer my tongue with the joy of a boggled dog and accept His supposed body, the tasteless paper wafer, from the priest’s notched, furry fingers? Why do I sip His supposed blood, the same blood that leaves a psychedelic stain on the white cloth that the priest uses to wipe my lip? Why am I suddenly this giddy Christ cannibal?

At the end of mass, the priest raises his arms again–and the retarded boy suddenly raises his, too, and we are released.

Then I find the hotel again. I lie awake until dawn. Fighting down my hunger.

That’s what I do the night before..

On his good days, the president imagined there was a lemon in his gut; on bad days, an overripe grapefruite, spilling its juices. He had reduced his affliction–cancer–to a problem of citrus. Big citrus and little citrus. The metaphor was comforting, for at least his body was a place where things still grew.

And yet each passing day subtracted more substance, brought up the points of his skeleton against the pale, bluish skin. He spent much of his waking hours remembering his life–the white river that ran through his hometown of Jarnac, the purple shadows of the womblike childhood attic where he had delivered speeches to a roomful of cornhusks. He sat, robed and blanketed now, studying how great men of ancient civilizations had left the earth their final gestures in the space between life and death. Seneca and Hannibal went out as beautiful, swan-dive suicides; even the comical, licentious Nero fell gloriously on his own sword.

Yes, the gesture was everything. Important to go with dignity, to control your fate, not like the sad poet Aeschylus, who died when an eagle, looking to crack the shell of a tortoise in his beak, mistook his bald head for a rock. Or the Chinese poet Li Po, who drowned trying to embrace the full moon on the water’s surface. Yes, the gesture was immortal. It would be insufferable to go out like a clown.

So what gesture would suit him? The president was a strange, contradictory man Even at the height of his powers, he often seemed laconic and dreamy, more like a librarian than a world leader, with a strong, papal nose, glittering, beady eyes, and ears like the halved cap of a portobello mushroom. He valued loyalty, then wrathfully sacked his most devoted lieutenants. He railed against the corruptions of money, though his fourteen-year reign was shot through with financial scandals. A close friend, caught in the double-dealing, killed himself out of apparent disgust for the president’s style of government. “Money and death,” the friend angrily said shortly before the end. “That’s all that interests a him anymore.”

And yet as others fell, the president survived–by tricks of agility and acumen, patrician charm and warthog ferocity. Now this last intruder hulked toward him. He shuffled with a cane, stooped and frosted silver like a gnarled tree in a wintry place. It took him an eternity to accomplish the most minor things: buttoning a shirt, bathing, walking the neighborhood, a simple crap.

And what would become of the universe he’d created? What would become of his citizens? And then his children and grandchildren, his wife and mistress? Was this the fate of all aged leaders when they were stripped of their magic: to sit like vegetables, shrivel-clicked, surrounded by photographs and tokens of appreciation, by knickknacks and artifacts?

When he slept, he dreamed of living. When he ate, he ate the foods he would miss. But even then, somewhere in his mind, he began to prepare his ceremony des adieux.

I’m going to tell you what happened next–the day of the last meal–for everything during this time in December shaped itself around the specter of eating the meal.

That morning, I pick up my girlfriend, Sara, at Orly airport. I’ve prevailed on her to come, as any meal shared around a table–the life lived inside each course–is only as good as the intimacies among people there. Through customs, she’s alive with the first adrenaline rush of landing in a new country. But then, as we begin driving southwest toward the coast and Bordeaux, she falls fast asleep. It’s gray and raining, and ocean wind sweeps inland and lashes the car. The trees have been scoured lifeless. Little men in little caps drive by our windows, undoubtedly hoarding bags of cheese in their little cars. And then a huge nuclear power plant looms on the horizon, its cooling towers billowing thick, moiling clouds over a lone cow grazing in a fallow pasture.

There is something in the French countryside, with its flat, anytime light, that demands melancholy. And I wonder what it means to knowingly eat a last meal. It means knowing you’re going to die, right? It means that you’ve been living under a long-held delusion that the world is infinite and you are immortal. So it means saying sayonara to everything, including the delusions that sustain you, at the same time that you’ve gained a deeper feeling about those delusions and how you might have lived with more passion and love and generosity.

And then the most difficult part: You must imagine yourself as a memory, laid out and naked and no longer yourself, no longer you, the remarkable Someone who chose a last meal. Rather, you’re just a body full of that meal. So you have to imagine yourself gone–first as a pale figure in the basement of a funeral home, then as the lead in a eulogy about how remarkable you were, and then as a bunch of photographs and stories.

And that’s when you must imagine one more time what you most need to eat, what last taste must rise to meet your hunger and thirst and linger awhile on your tongue even as, before dessert, you’re lowered into the grave.

It was just before Christmas 1995, the shortest days of the year. The president’s doctor slept on the cold floor of the house in Latche while the president sleet nearby in his bed, snoring lightly, looked down upon by a photograph of his deceased parents. He was seventy-nine, and the doctor could still feel the fight in him, even as he slept–the vain, beautiful little man punching back. In conversation with the president’s friends, the doctor had given about a 30 percent chance of making it to December. And he had. “The only interesting thing is to live,” said the president bluntly.

So there were lemon days and grapefruit days and this constant banter with the tumor: How are you today? What can I get you today? Another dose -of free radicals? Enough radiation to kill the rats of Pans? Please go away now. There was also a holy trinity of drugs–like blessed Dilaudid, merciful Demerol, and beatific Elavil–that kept the pain at a blurry remove, convinced him in his soaring mind that perhaps this was happening to someone else and he was only bearing witness. Yes, could it be that his powers of empathy–for all his countrymen–were so strong that he’d taken on the burden of someone else’s disease and then, at I the last moment, would be gloriously released back into his own life again?

With the reprieve, he would walk the countryside near Latche, naming the birds and trees again, read his beloved Voltaire, compose, as he had thousands of times before, I love letters to his wife.

He planned his annual pilgrimage to Egypt–with his mistress and their daughter–to see the Pyramids, the monumental tombs of the pharaohs, and the eroded Sphinx. That’s what his countrymen called him, the Sphinx, for no one really knew for sure who he was–aesthete or whore-monger, Catholic or atheist, fascist or socialist, anti-Semite or humanist, likable or despicable. And then there was his aloof imperial power. Later, his supporters simply called him Dieu–God.

He had come here for this final dialogue with the pharaohs–to mingle with their ghosts and look one last time upon their tombs. The cancer was moving to his head now, and each day that passed brought him closer to his own vanishing, a crystal point of pain that would subsume all the other pains. It would be so much easier . . . but then no. He made a phone call back to France. He asked that the rest of his family and friends be summoned to Latche and that a meal be prepared for New Year’s Eve. He gave a precise account of what would be eaten at the table, a feast for thirty people, for he had decided that afterward, he would not eat again.

“I am fed up with myself,” he told a friend.

And so we’ve come to a table set with a white cloth. An armada of floating wine goblets, the blinding weaponry of knives and forks and spoons. Two windows, shaded purple, stung by bullets of cold rain, lashed by the hurricane winds of an ocean storm.

The chef is dark-haired man, fiftyish, with a bowling-ball belly. He stands in front of orange flames in his great stone chimney hung with stewpots, finely orchestrating each octave of taste, occasionally sipping his broths and various chorded concoctions with a miffled expression. In breaking the law to serve us ortolan, he gruffly claims that it is his duty, as a Frenchman, to serve the food of his region. He thinks the law against serving ortolan is stupid. And yet he had to call forty of his friends in search of the bird, for there were none to be found and almost everyone feared getting caught, risking fines and possible imprisonment.

But then another man, his forty-first friend, arrived an hour ago with three live ortolans in a small pouch–worth up to a hundred dollars each and each no bigger than a thumb. They’re brown-backed, with pinkish bellies, part of the yellowhammer family, and when they fly, they tend to keep low to the ground and, when the wind is high swoop crazily for lack of weight. In all the world, they’re really caught only in the pine forests of the southwestern Landes region of France, by about twenty families who lay in wait: for the birds each fall as they fly from Europe to Africa. Once caught–they’re literally snatched out of the air in traps called matoles–they’re locked away in a dark room and fattened on millet; to achieve the same effect, French kings and Roman emperors once blinded the bird with a knife so, lost in the darkness, it would eat twenty-four hours a day.

And so, a short time ago, these three ortolans–our three ortolans–were dunked and drowned in a glass of Armagnac and then plucked of their feathers. Now they lie delicately on their backs in three cassoulets, wings and legs tucked to their tiny, bloated bodies, skin the color of pale autumn corn, their eyes small, purple bruises and–here’s the thing–wide open.

When we’re invited back to the kitchen, that’s what I notice, the open eyes on these already-peppered, palsied birds and the gold glow of their skin. The kitchen staff crowds around, craning to see, and when we ask one of the dishwashers if he’s ever tried ortolan, he looks scandalized, then looks back at the birds. “I’m too young, and now it’s against the law,” he says longingly. “But someday, when I can afford one . . .” Meanwhile, Sara has gone silent, looks pale looking at the birds.

Back at the chimney, the chef reiterates the menu for Mitterrand’s last meal, including the last course, as he puts it, “the birdies.” Perhaps he reads our uncertainty, a simultaneous flicker of doubt that passes over our respective faces. “It takes a culture of very good to appreciate the very good,” the chef says, nosing the clear juices of the capon rotating in the fire. “And ortolan is beyond even the very good.”

The guests had been told to hide their shock. They’d been warned that the president looked bad, but then there were such fine gradations. He already looked bad–could he looked worse?

It seemed he could. On his return from Egypt, he’d kept mostly to himself, out of sight of others; his doctors still attended to him, but they had begun to quarrel. The president’s stubbornness, his fits, and his silences–all of them seemed more acute now. When he entered the room, dressed in baggy pants and a pleasant coat, he was colorless and stiff-legged. He was supported by two body guards, and part of him seemed lost in dialogue with the thing sucking him from earth–with his own history, which was fast becoming the sum of his life. He was only half physical now and half spirit.

When the dying are present among the living, it creates an imbalance, for they randomly go through any number of dress rehearsals for death–nodding off at any time, slackening into a meaningful drool. They ebb and flow with each labored breath. Meanwhile, we hide our own panic by acting as if we were simply sitting in the company of a mannequin. It’s a rule: In the vicinity of the dying, the inanity of conversation heightens while what’s underneath–the thrumming of red tulips on the table and the lap of purple light on the windowpane, the oysters on crushed ice and the birds on the table, the wisp of errant hair drawn behind an ear and the shape of a lip–takes on a fantastic, last-time quality, slowly pulling everything under, to silence.

The president was carried to a reclining chair and table apart from the huge table where the guests sat. He was covered with blankets, seemed gone already. And yet when they brought the oysters–Marennes oysters, his favorite, harvested from the waters of this region–he summoned his energies, rose up in his chair, and began sucking them, the full flesh of them, from their half shells. He’d habitually eaten a hundred a week throughout his life and had been betrayed by bad oysters before, but, oh no not these, Hydrogen, nitrogen, phosphorous–a dozen, two dozen, and then, astonishingly, more. He couldn’t help it, his ravenous attack. It was brain food, and he seemed to slurp them against the cancer, let the saltwater juices flow to the back of his throat, change champagne-sweet, and then disappear in a flood before he started on the oyster itself. And that was another sublimity. The delicate tearing of a thing so full of ocean. Better than a paper wafer–heaven. When he was done, he lay back in his chair, oblivious to everyone else in the room, and fell fast asleep.

Now I have come to France, to the region of Francois Mitterrand’s birth and his final resting place, and on this night, perhaps looking a bit wan myself, I begin by eating the Marennes oysters–round, fat, luscious oysters split open and peeled back to show their delicate green lungs. Shimmering pendulums of translucent meat, they weigh more than the heavy, carbuncled shells in which they lie. When you lift the shell to your mouth and suck, it’s like the first time your tongue ever touched another tongue. The oysters are cool inside, then warm. Everything becomes heightened and alive. Nibbling turns to hormone-humming mastication. Your mouth swims with sensation: sugary, then salty, then again with Atlantic Ocean sweetness. And you try, as best you can, to prolong it. When they’re gone, you taste the ghost of them.

These are the oysters.

And then the foie gras, smooth and surprisingly buttery, a light-brown pate swirled with faint greens, pinks, and yellows and glittering slightly, tasting not so much of animal but of earth. Accompanied by fresh, rough-crusted, homemade bread and the sweet sauternes we drink (which itself is made from shriveled grapes of noble rot), the foie gras dissolves with the faint, rich sparkle of fresh-picked corn. It doesn’t matter that it’s fattened goose liver. It doesn’t matter what it is. Time slows for it.

This is the foie gras.

The capon is superb–not too gamey or stringy–furiously basted to a high state of tenderness in which the meat falls cleanly from the bone with only the help of gravity In its mildness, in its hint of olive oil and rosemary, it readies the tongue and its several thousand taste buds for the experience of what’s coming next.

This is the capon.

And then the wines. Besides the sauternes (a 1995 Les Remparts de Bastor, a 1995 Doisy-Daene), which we drink with the oysters and the foie gras, there are simple, full-bodied reds, for that’s how Mitterrand liked them, simple and full-bodied: a 1990 Chateau Lestage Simon, a 1994 Chateau Poujeaux. They are long, old, and dark. Complicated potions of flower and fruit. Faint cherry on a tongue tip, the tingle of tannin along the gums. While one bottle is being imbibed, another is being decanted, and all the while there are certain chemical changes taking place between the wine and its new atmosphere and then finally between the changed wine and the atmosphere of your mouth.

This is the wine.

And so, on this evening in Bordeaux, in the region where Mitterrand was born and buried, the eating and drinking of these courses takes us four hours, but then time has spread out and dissipated, woodsmoke up the chimney. Mitterrand, who was famous for outwaiting his opponents, for always playing the long, patient game, once said, “You have to give time time.”

And so we have, and time’s time is nearing midnight, and there are three as-yet unclaimed ortolans, back in the kitchen, that have just been placed in the oven. They will be cooked for seven minutes in their own fat–cooked, as it’s gently put, until they sing.

With each course, the president had rallied from sleep, from his oyster dreams, from fever or arctic chill, not daring to miss the next to come: the foie gras slathered over homemade bread or the capon and then, of course, the wines. But what brought him to full attention was a commotion: Some of the guests were confused when a man brought in a large platter of tiny, cooked ortolans laid out in rows. The president closely regarded his guests’ dismayed expressions, for it gave him quiet satisfaction–between jabs of pain–to realize that he still had the power to surprise.

The ortolans were offered to the table, but not everyone accepted. Those who did draped large, white cloth napkins over their heads, took the ortolans in their fingertips, and disappeared. The room shortly filled with wet noises and chewing. The bones and intestines turned to paste, swallowed eventually in one gulp. Some reveled in It; others spat It out.

When they were through, one by one they reappeared from beneath their hoods, slightly dazed. The president himself took a long sip of wine, let it play in his mouth. After nearly three dozen oysters and several courses, he seemed insatiable, and there was one bird left. He took the ortolan in his fingers, then dove again beneath the hood, the bony impress of his skull against the white cloth–the guests in silence and the self-pleasing, pornographic slurps of the president filling the room like a dirge.

At the table now, three ortolans, singing in their own fat. We’ll eat the birds because the ocean storm is at the purple windows; because this man, our chef, has gone to great lengths to honor us at his table; because we’re finishers; because it’s too late and too far–the clock is literally striking midnight–to turn back.

We offer the third bird to the chef.

And so he’s the first to go. An atheist, he doesn’t take his beneath the napkin. He just pops the bird in his mouth, bites off the head with his incisors, and holds a thickly bundled napkin over his lips, occasionally slipping it from side to side to sop up the overflowing juices. Slowly, deliberately, he begins to chew. As he does, he locks eyes with Sara. For long, painful minutes during which we can hear the crunch and pop of bone and tendon, he stares deeply across the table at her, with the napkin to his mouth.

I believe the chef is trying to seduce my girlfriend, a scene mirrored by ortolan-eating lovers in Proust, Colette, and Fielding. But then I realize that he’s not so much trying to take something from her as trying to find a still point from which he can focus on the chaos in his mouth. He’s chewing, sucking, slobbering, savoring. And he’s trying to manage all of the various, wild announcements of taste.

After he swallows and dabs his napkin daintily at the corners of his mouth, it’s our turn. We raise our birds and place them in our mouths. I can’t tell you what happens next in the outside world because, like Mitterrand, I go beneath the hood, which is meant to heighten the sensual experience by enveloping you in the aroma of ortolan. And the hood itself, with its intimation of Klan-like activity, might trouble me more if not for the sizzling bird on its back in my mouth, burning my tongue. The trick is to cool it by creating convections around it, by simply breathing. But, even then, my mouth has gone on full alert. Some taste buds are scorched and half-functioning, while others bloom for the first time and still others signal the sprinkler system of salivary glands.

And now, the hardest part: the first bite.

Like the chef, I sever the head and put it on the plate, where it lies in its own oil slick, then tentatively I try the body with bicuspids. The bird is surprisingly soft, gives completely, and then explodes with juices–liver, kidneys, lungs. Chestnut, corn, salt–all mix in an extraordinary current, the same warm, comforting flood as finely evolved consomme.

And so I begin chewing.

Here’s what I taste: Yes, quidbits of meat and organs, the succulent, tiny strands of flesh between the ribs and tail. I put inside myself the last flowered bit of air and Armagnac in its lungs, the body of rainwater and berries. In there, too, is the ocean and Africa and the dip and plunge in a high wind. And the heart that bursts between my teeth.

It takes time. I’m forced to chew and chew again and again, for what seems like three days. And what happens after chewing for this long–as the mouth full of taste buds and glands does its work–is that I fall into a trance. I don’t taste anything anymore, cease to exist as anything but taste itself

And that’s where I want to stay–but then can’t because the sweetness of the bird is turning slightly bitter and the bones have announced themselves. When I think about forcing them down my throat, a wave of nausea passes through me. And that’s when, with great difficulty, I swallow everything.

Afterward, I hold still for a moment, head bowed and hooded. I can feel my heart racing. Slowly, the sounds of the room filter back–the ting of wineglasses against plates, a shout back in the kitchen, laughter from another place. And then, underneath it, something soft and moving. Lungs filling and emptying. I can hear people breathing.

After the president’s second ortolan –he had appeared from beneath the hood wide eyed, ecstatic, staring into a dark corner of the room–the guests approached him in groups of two and three and made brief small talk about the affairs of the country or Zola or the weather. They knew this was adieu, and yet they hid their sadness; they acted as if in a month’s time he would still be among them.

And what about him? There was nothing left to subtract now. What of the white river that flowed through his childhood, the purple attic full of cornhusks? And then his beautiful books–Dostoyevsky, Voltaire, Camus? How would the world continue without him in it?

He tried to flail one last time against the proof of his death. But then he had no energy left. Just an unhappy body weighted with grapefruits, curving earthward. Everything moving toward the center and one final point of pain. Soon after, he refused food and medicine; death took eight days.

I’m eaten up inside,” he said before he was carried from the room.

food and wine, alone with our thoughts, feeling guilty and elated, sated and

The day after Mitterrand’s last meal seems to have no end. Huddled together, we wander the streets of Bordeaux, everyone on the sidewalks turning silver in the half light. And then we drive out toward Jarnac, the village where Mitterrand is buried– through winding miles of gnarled grape trees in the gray gloom. We visit Mitterrand’s tomb, a simple family sarcophagus in a thickly populated graveyard, and stand on the banks of his childhood river.

If I could, I would stay right here and describe the exact details of that next day I would describe how we watched children riding a carousel until twilight, all of their heads tilting upward, hands fluttering and reaching for a brass ring that the ride master manipulated on a wire, how the stone village looked barbaric in the rain, with its demented buildings blackened by soot from the cognac distilleries.

We just seemed to be sleepwalking. Or vanishing. Until later. Until we were lost and the streets had emptied. Until night came and the wind carried with it the taste of saltwater and the warm light in the boulangerie window shone on loaves of bread just drawn from the oven. And we were hungry again.

We ate two Thanksgiving dinners, one with her side of the family in Chinatown and the second in our own home with family friends. Both were different but equally good.

I liked this piece by Hemon and his intermingled longing for food and family. As I traveled north, my own suitcase contained a carefully wrapped container of leftovers.

Aleksander Hemon
The New Yorker
September 3, 2007
Vol. 83 Issue 26

The Last Meal

In the days of my adolescence, my parents returned from work around 3:45 P.M., and the family dinner was held at four o’clock. The radio was always on for the four-o’clock news, featuring international disasters and domestic socialist successes. During the meal, my sister and I were subjected to an interrogation on school matters; we were never allowed to eat in silence, let alone read or watch television. Whatever conversation we could muster had to be terminated in time for the weather forecast at four-twenty-five; dinner was over at four-thirty, by which time we were obliged to have finished everything on our plates and to have thanked our mother for her efforts.

Although my sister and I were invariably given the biggest and best morsels, we experienced our family meals as a means of parental oppression. We always complained: the soup was too salty, peas were served too often, the weather forecaster was obviously lying. For the two of us, the ideal dining experience involved cevapi (grilled skin sausages, a kind of Bosnian fast food), comic books, loud music, television, and the absence of our parents. It was only once I was in the Army that I grasped the metaphysics of family meals and understood that the food was prepared over the low but steady fire of love.

In October, 1983, at the age of nineteen, I was conscripted into the Yugoslav People’s Army. I served my time in Stip, a town in eastern Macedonia that was home to both the military barracks and a bubble-gum factory. I was in the infantry, where the main training method was a kind of ceaseless debasement that began with the way we were fed. At mealtime, we’d line up on the vast tarmac for roll call, then march into the cafeteria, unit by unit, where we’d slide our sticky trays along the rails, each of us trying to solicit bigger portions from the pitiless kitchen staff. Our menu choices were fantastically limited. For breakfast, we got a piece of dry bread, a boiled egg, a packet of rancid margarine, and occasionally a slice of gooey, unsmoked bacon; we washed it all down with tepid sweet tea or decondensed milk in plastic cups that had been absorbing grease for all eternity. Lunch always required the use of a spoon; our favorite dish was a thick bean soup - complete with tiny sprouts that looked exactly like maggots - because it was filling and set us up for an encyclopedia of fart jokes. Dinner consisted of modified lunch leftovers, unless it was lunch all over again, plus a cup of prune-based bowel-movement potion. There was never time for conversation; we had to devour the grub quickly and then make way for the next ravenous unit.

Those were the good meals. We longed for them after we were deployed to the arid Macedonian plains, where we rehearsed for battles and slurped indefinable concoctions out of canteens or munched on the contents of our M.R.E.s: stale crackers, ancient cans of tuna, impenetrable dried fruit. Perpetually hungry, I often recalled my family dinners before I went to sleep, constructing elaborate menus that featured roast lamb or ham-and-cheese cr&êpes or my mother’s spinach pie.

Besides tough-loving us boys into manhood, the Army was supposed to be one big family, a community bound by loyalty, comradeship, and sharing. But you never shared a goody-laden package from home or left any food in your locker; in military dorms, pilfering was encouraged as a form of preparation for pillaging in future wars. What you couldn’t eat alone you traded for clean socks and shirts, for an extra shower or a daytime fire-watch shift. Food was a survival commodity.

One soldier in my unit went on a hunger strike. The officers ignored him, assuming that he was bluffing. Like everyone else, he was required to be present for each roll call and the subsequent meal. Suddenly he had a lot of close friends who were eager not to let his food go to waste. After a while, he became too weak to walk; he had to be carried to meals by two soldiers. The lucky men fought over his boiled egg while he smiled with his eyes closed, his gaunt cheek laid on the table.

A few months after my conscription, my mother and sister undertook a two-day trip from Sarajevo to visit me. By then, I was deployed in Kicevo, in western Macedonia. The weather was dismal, so we spent the visit at their hotel. Mother had brought along a suitcase full of food: veal schnitzels, fried chicken, spinach pue, even a custard cake. She spread a towel on the bed, as there was no table, and I ate from plastic containers. The first bite of spinach pie - that sublime blend of spinach, eggs, and phyllo pastry - brought tears to my eyes.

I ended up making my own. My maternal grandmother gave me A LOT of charsiu (Chinese BBQ pork shoulder) when I returned to the states, and I wasn’t sure what to do with all of it. While I read about ramen online in a lame attempt to satisfy my hunger, the internet reminded me that sometimes ramen contains chashu, or the Japanese version of charsiu. Generations of displaced, nostalgia-hungry countrymen have made do with what was on hand, so why couldn’t I?

Originally intended to be shoyu ramen, although it ended up a mishmash of things. The broth was made from lightly pan frying some charsiu with Shiangxi vinegar (Chinese black vinegar) in a soup pot, and then deglazing the pot with some chicken broth. Also added two chopped green onions, soy sauce, sesame oil, and a little more rice vinegar. After the noodles were cooked, I turned down the heat and added a spoonful of miso The mushrooms - reconstituted from dried - added a nice flavor to my broth but ultimately weren’t soaked long enough. Overall, a delicious meal.

Did you notice how nice and yellow the yolk on the hard boiled egg is? Cooked it for a little over 15 minutes (from time I put in in a pot of cold water over medium-high heat) and immediately let it cool in a cup of cold water. Avoids that greenish-gray ring around the yolk. I was also using up a huge stock of gai lan (Chinese broccoli) so I actually boiled the egg in that same pot!

Menma, or shinachiku , or marinated bamboo shoots, or just pickled and seasoned bamboo shoots

The bamboo shoots came from a local Asian grocery store. They actually came pre-packaged and pre-seasoned (about one pound), but I thought that it was pretty disgusting. I rinsed the bamboo shoots out in hot water several times to get rid of the coating and squeezed as much water out as I could.

In a wok with a tablespoon of heated canola oil, I sauteed them over medium heat for 5-7 minutes. Then I added a shaking of brown sugar (actually I used turbinado) and two tablespoons sherry (I had no sake) and Chinese vinegar (the black kind). Let it cook for a while over low heat until the liquid evaporated, another 10 minutes, stirring occasionally.

Add a small shake of either red pepper flakes or a drizzle of chili oil and sesame seeds. Serve hot or cold, alone or with something else. Not an authentic recipe, but it tasted pretty good. I like the crunch of bamboo shoots.

If you’ve read the Little House on the Prairie series, you’ll remember that in the first book “Little House in the Big Woods,” the Ingalls’ experience an excellent surplus of maple sugar from Laura’s maternal grandfather when they are still living in Wisconsin. Aside from maple syrup, boiling maple sap to make candy was also popular. High-fructose corn syrup has replaced maple syrup as the ingredient of choice for candy making, but for maple candy there isn’t any other substitution. In the book - you can read the excerpt here - the Ingalls boil maple sap to a soft/hard-ball stage and drizzle it generously onto a tray of fresh snow, where it cools to become a soft taffy-like candy. I don’t recall Ingalls Wilder giving this a specific name, but it is known as:

• Jack Wax
• Sugar on Snow
• Tire d’érable (French Canadian)
• Maple Taffee (Canadian)

Like snow itself, Jack Wax is meant to be eaten immediately. It doesn’t store at all.
Sugar snow is a phenomenon that occurs when a cold front with snowy conditions follows a warm day. The resulting drop in barometric pressure ensures a continuous flow of maple sugar, as the cold weather tricks the trees into believing it is still winter, thus witholding maple sugar (a source of nutrition) from the tree buds.The minimum sugar concentration for maple syrup is 66%. According to sources, the sugar concentration of maple candy ranges from 85% to 87%.

Using a candy thermometer will give you more accurate results and please the exacting types, but Jack Wax can be made without a thermometer. Using 100% real maple syrup - “maple flavored” will not do at all - boil in a pot on low heat. From sap to syrup, the maximum boiling point for maple syrup is 7-7.1 °F (219 °F) above the boiling point for water (212 °F) thus the maximum boiling point for making candy is higher. Always keep an eye on this, or be around the kitchen.
If you like a soft, easy-to-chew type of candy, boil the maple syrup until it has reached the soft-ball stage (230 °F–234 °F). If you’re without a thermometer, drop a bit of the syrup into a glass of cold water. If it turns into a definite ball in the water and flattens out in your hands, you’re ready to pour it into the snow. If you prefer a more tooth-pulling version, five degrees more ought to do. Any longer or hotter and it will begin to crystallize and become maple sugar. Or burn.

Again, you need to eat this stuff right away. Using a fork helps.

Some people like it with donuts or dill pickles to balance out the sweetness. Saltines are also good; this combination in particular reminds me of a snack in China. Maltose syrup is sandwiched between two enormous and crispy saltine crackers. Sometimes there is a wooden stick inserted so you eat it like a popsicle.

An important message: When you make jack snow, make sure the snow is clean. No yellow snow.

And remember to brush your teeth!

A link to reading Laura Ingalls Wilder’s account of sugar snow, sugar on snow, and grandparents.

The lunch ladies of my elementary-school memories in Oklahoma are a stout, sweet-tempered breed. They wear cat’s-eye glasses and have beauty-shop perms, with hairnets drawn taut across their foreheads. They have gray uniforms and dishwater complexions, and stand in line dolloping out grayish food—boiled okra, spinach with vinegar, corn bread and black-eyed peas—smiling wearily, as if they knew that they were slowly killing us. I’m not sure what they would think of Ann Cooper, the new executive chef of the Berkeley public schools, in California. I suspect that she would make them nervous.

Cooper, who calls herself “the Renegade Lunch Lady,” was hired last fall to revamp the city’s dismal school-lunch program. She is small and tightly wound, with shoulders bunched from lifting weights. She has bright, defiant eyes, unruly brown hair, and a raspy alto that tends to break when she gets excited. In the kitchen, she moves with quick, stiff-legged strides, nipping at heels, barking out instructions, and sending her large, slow-moving colleagues into bewildered stampedes. She is, in short, a typical chef, landed in a world where real cooking is almost unknown.

Cooper is quick to admit that she’s making the worst food of her life. In her twenties, she attended the Culinary Institute of America and cooked on cruise ships. In her thirties, she owned her own restaurant, in Telluride, and was named an “up-and-coming chef” by Gourmet. In her forties, she transformed the Putney Inn, in Vermont, into a bastion of New American cuisine. Now, at fifty-two, Cooper has ended up where most chefs wouldn’t deign to begin: in an under-staffed, under-equipped cafeteria, trying to wean four thousand children from deep-fried chicken nuggets. “I spent my whole career making fancy food for rich people,” she says. “I’ve cooked for Hillary Clinton and Emmylou Harris, Jimmy Buffet and the Grateful Dead. I don’t want to do that anymore.”

Cooper’s first experience with cafeteria cooking was of a more utopian sort. In 1999, her work at the Putney Inn caught the attention of Courtney Sale Ross, the wealthy widow of a former chairman of Time Warner. Ross had founded a school for fifth to twelfth graders in East Hampton, New York. It had a progressive, ecologically minded curriculum, and she wanted its food to be equally enlightened. “At first, I said, ‘No way! I’m a chef, not a lunch lady!” Cooper recalls. But when Ross showed her the school’s new, ten-million-dollar Wellness Center, where students could do yoga or dine overlooking a forest of silvery pines, Cooper agreed. Over the next few years, she hired a local poet-farmer to grow organic vegetables and sent students to help with the harvest. She lured sous-chefs from French and Asian restaurants in New York and wrote recipes linked to the curriculum—a feast of fifteenth-century dishes, for instance, for a course on the Renaissance. She made celery-root soup and green gazpacho, Caprese salad and fennel stew, and the children cleaned their plates, after a little cajoling.

People used to joke that the Ross School had the best restaurant in the Hamptons. Martha Stewart filmed a segment of her television show there, and a magazine for Lexus owners ran a story on it entitled “Haute Cafeteria.” But although Cooper had hoped that other cafeterias would adopt some of her methods, few could afford to do so. Elsewhere in America, one in five schools was selling fast food and less than half had working kitchens. The country was in the midst of an epidemic of childhood obesity, the Surgeon General had declared, yet eighty per cent of school lunches contained more fat than federal guidelines allowed. “I got tired of everyone telling me that what I was doing could only be done at the Ross School,” Cooper says.

Berkeley is her first attempt at cooking for the masses—at making private-school lunches on a public-school budget—but she is hardly alone anymore. America is suddenly full of people who want to save school lunch: celebrity chefs like Jamie Oliver, who exposed the sorry state of British cafeterias two years ago and has threatened to do the same in New York; guerrilla documentarians like Morgan Spurlock, who championed healthful lunches in “Super Size Me”; and a swelling horde of angry parents, crusading cafeteria directors, and politicians with bitter lunchroom memories of their own. Last year, more than two hundred bills in forty states sought to ban sodas and junk food from schools, and in May the major beverage companies voluntarily agreed to remove non-diet drinks by the fall of 2009. Bill Clinton, whose foundation helped broker the deal, called it “courageous.”

Still, expelling junk food won’t do much to improve school cafeterias. In East Hampton, Cooper had twenty-seven employees for five hundred diners; in Berkeley, she has fifty-three for four thousand. In East Hampton, Cooper spent about twelve dollars per day, per child on breakfast and lunch. In Berkeley, she spends three and a half dollars for the same two meals. Can a decent lunch be made for so little? And, if so, will anyone eat it?

The Central Kitchen of the Berkeley Unified School District lies on a quiet side street in northwest Berkeley not far from the city’s foothills. It was built in the nineteen-fifties, as part of Jefferson Elementary School, and has survived periodic upheavals from desegregation, bilingual education, No Child Left Behind, and the Loma Prieta earthquake. The kitchen occupies a dingy, high-ceilinged room. It smells of stale bread and disinfectant, and is populated by hulking industrial machines: a steam kettle, a sautéing vat, a pair of convection ovens, and a Hobart mixer with a vaguely menacing air, like the hooded mother beast in “Aliens.” There is no blender, no food processor, no stovetop or grill, yet the kitchen produces food for thirteen of the city’s sixteen schools, including all eleven of its elementary schools. (The other schools have their own kitchens, which Cooper also oversees.)

On a Tuesday morning in May, the menu called for meat loaf—four thousand servings of it, with mashed potatoes and oven-roasted squash. In the kitchen’s walk-in refrigerator, thirty cylinders of government-supplied ground beef, each two feet long, five inches in diameter, and ten pounds in weight, awaited Cooper’s attention. She heaved two of them onto her shoulders and dropped them on a butcher-block counter. “Now you can see why I lift weights,” she said, then took a swig from a protein shake. She’d had braces put on her teeth in January to fend off gum disease, and this was the only breakfast that wouldn’t stick to them. “It’s a chef’s worst nightmare,” she said.

Cooper had been up since three-thirty, and cooking since five. She lives alone in a rented house in Moss Beach, an hour’s drive to the south, and commutes to Berkeley every day before dawn. Her crew is usually there when she arrives. The assistant chef, Alan Lyman, an amiable Englishman with the shape and blush of a Bartlett pear, was making a tub of coleslaw. He had spent ten years cooking in British hospitals and twelve in the Berkeley schools, but he was still getting used to Cooper’s pace. Across from him, a team of eight black and Hispanic workers was scooping chicken and noodles into take-out trays. The group was led by Cecelia Adams, the kitchen manager, a middle-aged black woman with a deep, easy voice and an unflappable manner. Because the other schools lacked proper kitchens, the food had to be prepared well in advance. The chicken had been made on Monday for Wednesday’s lunch; the meat loaf would be served on Thursday; and a truck outside was unloading Friday’s lunch—tamales and enchiladas made by a local company. Cooper had met the owners at a stand at a farmers’ market. “Do you think you could make four thousand of these a week?” she’d asked.

To make the meat loaf, Cooper dumped the tubes of beef into the Hobart’s bowl, then added ingredients one by one. The full recipe called for three hundred pounds of meat, seven and a half pounds of bread crumbs, three gallons of milk, ten pounds each of beaten eggs and Parmesan cheese, twenty pounds each of diced onions and shredded carrots, and nearly four pounds of garlic and spices. Cooper worked in batches, calculating the proportions as she went. She has always had a good head for numbers: growing up in Hingham, Massachusetts, she was kicked out of high school twice for smoking pot, but she passed her equivalency tests in a day when she needed them for culinary school. When she had finished adding ingredients, she set the dough hook spinning. “They never would have served meat loaf here before,” she said. Why not? I asked. “Because it’s food.”

She looked around for Adams, who was shuttling a row of take-out trays through a shrink-wrapping machine. “Cecelia! Get me one of those things you used to serve!” Adams gave her a long, heavy-lidded look. Like most of the staff, she had little formal training as a cook, but she’d worked in the schools for seventeen years and was getting tired of being reminded of her deadly, grease-dispensing history. She trudged off to the freezer and back, then thumped a rectangular object on the counter. Cooper pounced on it. “El Extremo Burrito!” she shouted. She flipped it over and pointed to the ingredients list, a block of small-faced type six inches wide and an inch deep. “They’d go into the oven just like that,” she said. “They didn’t even get opened until the kids ate them.”

When Cooper took charge of the Central Kitchen last fall, she began by banning heat-and-serve dishes. She then made a list of undesirable ingredients—transfats, preservatives, and foods with too much salt, refined flour, sugar, or high-fructose corn syrup—and began looking for substitutes. White bread gave way to whole wheat, canned fruits and vegetables to fresh, and generic hot dogs and hamburgers to ones made from grass-fed beef. “Those changes anyone can do,” she said. “I banned chocolate milk. Easy. I only accepted hormone-free milk. I banned vending machines. I banned fried foods. That is not brain surgery. The hard part is to get back to scratch cooking, and getting around the commodity program.”

Every year, the federal government buys nearly a billion dollars’ worth of raw and processed foods and sends them to schools for free. Many schools then have some of the food sent to plants to be turned into ready-made dishes. The commodity program provides about twenty per cent of the food in cafeterias. Last year, schools got about seven hundred million dollars’ worth of meat and dairy products, and less than two hundred and fifty million dollars’ worth of vegetables. Cooper blames this imbalance on the Department of Agriculture, which uses the program to buy up farm surpluses and stabilize prices. “The U.S.D.A. is the marketing arm for agribusiness,” she said. “It’s responsible for the national organic standards, and it’s responsible for school lunch. How many ways can you say conflict of interest?” Yet schools are free to choose their own commodities, and they can fill their quota with vegetables and other nutritious staples. The real problem for Cooper was that the items must be ordered months in advance, so she was still using food chosen by her predecessor, now the food-service director for a prison system.

“Look at this printout!” Cooper said, flourishing a long list of processed cheese, canned fruits, and condiments, laden with sugar and salt. Cooper couldn’t afford to throw out those items, so she tried to incorporate them into more nutritious dishes: “beef crumbles” went into spaghetti sauce, croutons into turkey stuffing, canned peas into split-pea soup, and canned apricots into a barbecue sauce. Just that week, she’d received twenty-six cases of cranberry sauce and eighteen cases of lo mein noodles. “Oh, what are we going to do with it?” she said. “I don’t want to use any more shitty food.”

The answer was coleslaw. When Lyman had filled a five-gallon tub with shredded cabbage and carrots, raisins, salt, and apple-cider vinegar, Cooper came over with a can of the cranberries. “It’ll be like a sweet vinaigrette,” she said, without much conviction. She measured out a pound of the sauce on a scale, dumped it into the tub, then slipped on a pair of rubber gloves and mixed it with her hands. When she was finished, the coleslaw looked as if someone had bled into it. “Ah, that’s lovely,” Lyman said after he’d tasted it. “But I do think it needs a little more salt.”

Feeding four thousand on a public-school budget is at best a loaves-and-fishes affair, and at worst the equivalent of a bad casserole—full of dubious proteins cleverly disguised. The federal government subsidizes meals according to a sliding scale: schools get two dollars and forty cents per lunch served to the poorest students, and as little as twenty-three cents for more affluent students. In Berkeley, the state contributes another fifty cents or so, but it doesn’t add up to much. “It’s impossible,” Cooper said. “It’s egregious. It makes me want to cry.” But she’s lucky to get any subsidies at all.

In 1946, when the National School Lunch Program was first proposed to Congress, the country still had fresh memories of the Depression, when children sometimes fainted from hunger in class. Yet plenty of politicians were leery of paying for their food with federal dollars. “It was a highly improbable program,” Janet Poppendieck, sociologist at Hunter College who is writing a book on school lunch, told me. “Congress was looking at one of the largest deficits in national history—two hundred and eighty billion, in yesterday’s dollars—and it was full of articulate conservatives who wanted to shrink government.” No one wanted to take lunches away from needy boys and girls, the Republican whip at the time, Leslie Arends, declared. But, he added, “the greatest thing that we can hand down to our children is a solvent government.” The bill was finally signed by President Truman as “a measure of national security.” The country didn’t need healthier students, it seemed, so much as stronger soldiers: more than a third of the conscripts who failed the Army’s physicals had been malnourished at one time.

During the next thirty years, the program went from subsidizing seven million meals a day to twenty-seven million, and its annual budget grew to more than three billion dollars. Then, in 1981, Ronald Reagan appointed David Stockman as his budget director. Stockman had a simple plan for cutting subsidies: he redefined “lunch.” A nutritious meal would now have to provide only an ounce and a half of protein instead of two, six ounces of milk instead of eight, and half a cup of vegetables instead of three-quarters—a quarter cup of which could be a condiment. To show how this would look on a plate, Patrick Leahy served his colleagues in the Senate a mock school lunch. It consisted of a silver-dollar-size burger on half a bun, a box of milk, a squirt of ketchup, and six grapes.

The Reagan Administration withdrew the new guidelines after thousands of letters of protest were sent to the Department of Agriculture. But funding for child nutrition still fell by nearly a billion and a half dollars. (The Carter Administration had previously cut it by four hundred million.) Grants for kitchen equipment were eliminated, forcing districts like Berkeley to move their cooks into centralized facilities, and most schools couldn’t afford to cover their cafeterias’ losses. They needed them to turn a profit. “The gospel was preached that cafeterias should be operated like a business, and students as customers,” Poppendieck says. And these customers wanted sodas and snacks.

In the late nineteen-eighties, when my former high school started offering Coca-Cola and Mazzio’s pizza alongside regular lunches, I was more jealous than appalled. Fast food had yet to be demonized, fat kids were still just fat—not the tragic victims of an obesity epidemic—and name-brand pizza sounded a lot better than the cartilaginous stews we’d been served. Even in pure business terms, though, the new foods were often a failure. The more snacks and sodas students bought from vending machines or fast-food lines, the less they spent on regular lunches. Two years ago, when Texas banished junk food from its elementary schools and tightened nutrition requirements for all grades, cafeteria sales increased so much that the state received an extra fifty million dollars in federal subsidies—more than compensating for the loss in vending-machine revenue.

Berkeley first tried to reform its cafeterias in 1999, calling for salad bars in every school and organic vegetables for all. Like many of the city’s social campaigns, the effort was both pioneering and impractical. It drew mocking news coverage nationwide—the Washington Post accused locals of liking “to brag about how progressive they are”—and the salads disappeared as soon as the grants that paid for them ran out.

When Cooper was hired, last fall, after working with the cafeterias for a year as a consultant, her plan was to rebuild the system from the inside out. She wanted not only to improve the food but also to create a step-by-step manual for lunchroom reform nationwide—complete with recipes, menu cycles, and staffing and ordering guides. But she answers to three masters in Berkeley: the school district is her official employer; the U.S.D.A. subsidizes her meals; and the Chez Panisse Foundation pays her salary (ninety-five thousand dollars, plus benefits, a year). The first needs her to stay within budget; the second insists that she conform to its dietary standards; the third wants her to hurry up and start a revolution. She may yet fail on every front. “We’ve got union issues. We’ve got kitchens that don’t cook. We’ve got the same shit everybody else has,” she says. “This is the reality of school food.”

Tuesday is pizza day at the Malcolm X elementary school. When the second graders arrive for lunch, they bounce up and down and do little dances in line, chanting, “Oh, pizza! Oh, pizza! Oh, pizza! Oh, pizza!” The school has four hundred students, from kindergarten through the fifth grade. About a fourth of the students are white, a fourth are Asian and Hispanic, and close to half are black, and for many lunch is the best meal of the day. Berkeley’s wealth, like its houses, is distributed on a steeply inclined plane, with the poor clustered below and the rich perched high in the hills. People at the two extremes have a twenty-year difference in life expectancy, a study in 2000 found. About forty per cent of the city’s students are eligible for subsidized meals. At Malcolm X, the children wear bar-coded payment cards around their necks, so that no one can tell who pays full price. They get a slice of pizza, some grapes or an orange, and the pick of a salad bar that Cooper recently installed, then hold their cards up to the scanner.

Cooper doesn’t have a problem with pizza. When it’s made right, it contains vegetables, protein, fibre, and calcium—a full meal. “A slice of pizza isn’t bad for you,” she says. “A diet of pizza is bad for you.” When she first arrived, the cafeteria’s pizza came in bags, like its burritos. The Central Kitchen had neither the staff nor the equipment to make it, so Cooper hied Karen Trilevsky, an old friend who owns FullBloom Baking Company, in nearby Menlo Park. Trilevsky put her staff to work in her test kitchen for the next three months, then called Cooper in for a tasting. The FullBloom pizza had a thick focaccia crust made with spelt and whole-wheat flour. It had homemade tomato sauce, skim-milk mozzarella, and a variety of sophisticated vegetarian toppings: zucchini, corn, and fresh tomato; blue cheese, walnut, and roasted onion. “It was fabulous,” Cooper recalls. “It was fresh. It was delicious.”

The kids couldn’t stand it. The toppings were weird, they said, the crust too bready, the cheese too brown and not cheesy enough. At Malcolm X and the other ten elementary schools, the trash cans overflowed with rejected slices. “It was across the board,” Cooper says. The cooks at FullBloom tried chopping the vegetables into tiny pieces; the complaints continued. They tried hiding the vegetables beneath the cheese; the children rooted them out. Finally, in January, the cafeteria manager from Malcolm X came to Cooper’s office with a tersely worded petition (”We do not like the veggie pizzas, nor do we like the pork roast with applesauce. . . .”) and a large sheet of butcher paper signed by more than two hundred students. Cooper hung it beside her desk, beneath a line of Tibetan prayer flags. In the bottom left corner, a girl named Shalika had drawn a frowny face. Next to that, her classmate Tajahniqua had written, “Veteteriyin pizza. I hate that food.”

Two weeks later, Cooper put on her chef’s whites and went to face her critics. They marched into the Malcolm X auditorium in three shifts, during recess, and listened politely to her explanations. Then they raised their hands and began the inquisition. “What happened to the double hamburgers?” ‘Why haven’t we had orange chicken lately?” “Where are our nachos?” Cooper told them that there was hardly any chicken in the orange chicken and no real cheese in the nacho sauce, but they didn’t care. “They were really pissed off,” she says. “I took away all the crap they liked.”

Children can learn to eat almost anything, given time. In Mexico, they consume fiery chilies; in Japan, whale meat; in Sweden, pickled herring. But a palate, once formed, isn’t easily expanded. At Penn State, the psychologist Leann Birch has tracked the eating habits of a hundred and sixty girls between the ages of five and fifteen, as well as various tortured attempts to improve their diets. The most common ploys tend to backfire: forbidding sweets instills a craving for them, and insisting on vegetables can instill an aversion. Labelling foods as “healthy” makes them taste worse to children, and offering sweets as rewards for eating vegetables makes the latter seem even less appetizing. (Birch also tried offering vegetables as rewards for eating sweets, but the children just laughed at her.) Peer pressure sometimes helps. When Birch had kids who hated peas eat at tables surrounded by kids who loved peas, the pea-haters switched sides within a week. But cafeterias tend to breed complainers. At the Ross School, Cooper served three or four entrees a day, two desserts, and two kinds of pizza baked in a brick oven. Yet a month after she arrived she was cornered by a gang of sulky fifth graders. They were going on hunger strike, they told her, until they got their grilled-cheese sandwiches back.

The best way to broaden a child’s palate is to start early. When mothers eat garlic or carrots while pregnant, recent studies have shown, their newborns have a taste for those flavors as well, and breast-fed babies tend to be less picky about solid food than bottle-fed babies. By the age of four or five, almost all children become “neophobic”: they develop an aversion to new foods, and to vegetables in particular—an ancestral memory, perhaps, of too many poisonous plants eaten by children in the past. To overcome this instinct, preschools in Minneapolis, New York, and other cities have lately experimented with hand puppets, gardening and cooking programs, and color-coded vegetable charts. But there’s no real substitute for patience; the average five-year-old has to taste a new food between five and ten times, Birch has found, before he’ll accept it.

At the Ross School, Cooper could afford to wait: within a year, her students were happily eating jicama. In Berkeley, she had no food to waste. And so, in the month after the meeting at Malcolm X, the veggie pizza was slowly stripped bare. “They would call every week and say, ‘Take off the zucchini. Take off the corn. Take off the fresh tomatoes,’ ” a manager at FulIBloom told me. “Within three weeks, all the vegetables were gone.” The crust was still rich in protein and fibre, and the cooks pureed some squash, carrots, and other vegetables into the sauce, where even the students’ X-ray eyes couldn’t detect them. But by and large the pizza began to look like pizza again.

The second graders at Malcolm X had made their peace with it. Across town, though, the fourth graders at John Muir were unconvinced. Not having had a meeting with Cooper, they blamed the food on their new principal, Mr. John, whom they suspected of being a vegetarian. “It’s all vegetable,” a small, apple-cheeked girl named Melika told me. She hunched her shoulders and shook her ropy braids: “Ooooooooo! That principal get on my nerves!” Her tall, skinny friend Naeemah was of two minds. The food was better for you, she said, now that it wasn’t extruded by “this big machine thing” anymore. But the pizza was still overcooked, and she missed all the meat from last year. She picked at her pink coleslaw. “I’m moving to Texas,” she said.

The low point of Cooper’s lunchroom crusade came in February. She had always known that her food costs would go up, but she had hoped that her revenues would rise as well. Fewer than half of the district’s ten thousand students ate school lunches: most of the high-schoolers went off campus, to places like Top Dog and Extreme Pizza, and many of the middle-and grade-schoolers brought their lunch. If Cooper could lure a few hundred of them back to the cafeteria, she would be able to pay for a lot of organic vegetables. By late winter, however, she was tens of thousands of dollars over budget, and cafeteria attendance had yet to go up. Then came the inspectors.

The Department of Agriculture has devised a welter of well-meaning regulations over the years to insure that schools serve healthful lunches. Its original scheme, which is still used by most schools, is known as “food-based menu planning.” It requires that elementary-school lunches contain at least six hundred and sixty-four calories and portions of meat, grains, milk, and fruit or vegetables. Less than thirty per cent of the calories can come from fat, but carbohydrates are unrestricted. This has led to some predictable perversities. Corn and French fries are by far the most popular vegetables in schools, followed by other potato dishes. To keep fat down, schools often ban whole milk and deep-fried foods, only to find that they’re not serving enough calories. “It’s really an Alice in Wonderland situation,” the sociologist Janet Poppendieck told me. “They can increase the size of entrées, but it’s hard to do that without increasing the fat. They would like to increase the vegetables, but that they can’t afford. So they end up adding dessert. Or they sweeten the milk with strawberry or chocolate. They’ve taken the fat out of it, then put the calories back in with sugar.”

In the mid-nineties, the U.S.D.A., led by a former health activist named Ellen Haas, introduced a more flexible alternative called “nutrient-based menu planning.” Cafeterias could make almost anything they liked, as long as a week’s worth of meals contained all the necessary nutrients. If Monday’s lunch was heavy on beef, Tuesday’s could be a stir-fry. The only drawback was that every recipe had to be entered into a database so that its ingredients could be broken down into vitamins, minerals, protein, and so on. The most common ingredients and processed foods were preloaded in the software, but Cooper was cooking from scratch and reworking recipes continually. She didn’t have time to analyze her dishes before serving them. So she didn’t bother. She hired a consultant to enter the recipes as she perfected them, but otherwise kept cooking. “I never met a rule I didn’t want to break,” she says. “Especially stupid rules.”

The three inspectors who came to Cooper’s office in February weren’t pleased with this attitude. They asked to see her recipes and her analyses. She did not have them. They asked how she knew that the children were getting enough calories. She said, “Have you looked at the obesity rate?” They told her that she was not in compliance and was in danger of losing her federal subsidies. “I felt like a comet slamming into the side of a mountain,” she told me.

Cooper’s friend Kate Adamick, a corporate lawyer turned cafeteria consultant, sat in on one of the meetings. “I listened for a while, as they told Ann that she was doing everything wrong, that they were going to have to shut her down, and they hadn’t even tasted the food,” Adamick told me. “So I stepped in and said, ‘Would you rather Ann had spent a year getting the paperwork in place and then improved the food?’ And they said, ‘Yes.’ I said, ‘But the food they were serving was terrible!’ And one of the women said, ‘That is not true. They were using commodity foods.’”

As it happened, Adamick had recently attended a trade show in Los Angeles and had home pictures of the newest products being made for schools out of U.S.D.A. commodities. She called them up on the screen of her laptop one by one: corn dogs, pizza strips, and deep-fried cherry pies; grilled-cheese sandwiches, Texas cheese toast, and breaded chicken treats molded into hearts and moons and stars. “Look! Fried things in shapes!” Cooper joked, when she showed me the slides later. But, at the time, she was on the verge of losing her job. “Ann is basically fearless,” Adamick says. “I’ve never seen her intimidated by anything, ever. But these women made her seriously nervous. She would say, ‘We have a meeting with the mean people and they’re going to put me in jail.’”

As usual, Cooper’s cooking proved to be her most convincing defense. When the inspectors returned in March to examine the cafeterias, their attitude softened noticeably. Their report cited dozens of administrative and food-service infractions—”[the children] received 1/2 kiwi instead of the specified ‘1 each’ “—but noted that the food was “very high quality and was visually pleasing as well as tasty.” Cooper was given until November to fix the problems. “They could haw made my life miserable,” she told me. “They could have given me forty-five days to come into one-hundred-per-cent compliance, and in the end they didn’t.” She grinned. ”I’m proud to say we coöpted the U.S.D.A.”

By this spring, Cooper’s outlook had improved markedly. Her staff was getting used to cooking fresh food again, the consultant was filling the database with recipes, and, in March, cafeteria attendance had finally begun to climb. At this pace, Cooper’s losses would level off at around seventy thousand dollars—an acceptable amount, given all that she’d accomplished. And yet when she picked me up for dinner one evening in her Toyota Prius she looked haggard. She’d been to see her orthodontist for another radical tightening session, she told me. “It hurt so much I wanted to throw up.” But her uneasiness had more to do with meat loaf.

Earlier that day, Cooper had gone to see Alice Waters, the chef and owner of Chez Panisse, whose foundation paid her salary. Waters was no fan of meat loaf. “I was really excited,” Cooper said. “I told her that we were going to serve it with fresh vegetables and mashed potatoes. And she looked at me and said, ‘Meat loaf! The kids can’t possibly like meat loaf!’” Cooper took a long sip from her protein shake. “I almost got into it with her,” she said. “I mean, what is a French country pâte? It’s basically meat loaf, only it’s steamed, right? But we can’t possibly eat meat loaf.”

Cooper and Waters had seemed like a perfect match. They met in the mid-nineties, when Cooper was writing an oral history of female chefs and Waters was breaking ground for the Edible Schoolyard—a vegetable garden on the site of an asphalt playground in Berkeley. Waters’s vision, which has given rise to school gardens across the country, was that students would spend an hour or two working the soil every week, then cook and eat what they grew—learning history, ecology, and healthful eating in the process. Cooper’s cooking was supposed to be an extension of this philosophy. ‘The whole experience of lunch needs to be completely transformed,” Waters told me. “It needs to be a place where you can experience the ritual of the table, a way to teach kids about stewardship of the land, about nourishing yourself and communicating with people, about this rich subject of ecogastronomy.”

A year later, here they were, serving meat loaf. Cooper had been as idealistic as Waters once, but the longer she struggled to feed the masses the more she appreciated mass production: centralized kitchens, mainstream recipes, economies of scale. FullBloom, for example, had grown from a small bakery in the back of an espresso shop in San Francisco—the kind of soulful local enterprise that Waters adored—into a factory that made two hundred thousand pastries a day. That size allowed the bakery to spend months formulating pizzas for Cooper, knowing that they might recoup the investment later by baking for other local schools. “Alice doesn’t want to work with anyone as large as FullBloom,” Cooper said. “And I’m not sure I can work with anyone smaller. If I asked them to do the kind of R. and D. FullBloom did, they’d just say, ‘Get the fuck out of here.’”

Waters admitted that Cooper had made great progress—”We’re not sort of in the nacho place anymore”—but she felt that they still had a long way to go. Why couldn’t they serve vegetable curry, she wondered, or sauté dishes to order? Cooper, meanwhile, had decades-old refrigerated trucks that kept breaking down. Her produce sometimes looked as if it came from a compost heap. Her labor costs were fifty-seven per cent of her budget (in most restaurants, it’s less than forty), yet she couldn’t cut union wages. “Alice is a really wonderful visionary,” she said. “But this work is all about baby steps, and she can’t see baby steps. In her perfect world, she’d like to have the kids served bountiful baskets of fresh-picked berries. And you know what? It ain’t happening.”

When I was in the seventh grade, my father took a two-year sabbatical in southern France and put us all in public schools. My lycée was a glum, disagreeable place. The hours were long, the students anarchic, the teachers authoritarian, but the cafeteria nearly made up for it. We sat at round tables in groups of eight and were served three courses of some of the strangest food I’d ever seen—sautéed squid, boudin noir, rabbit with mustard sauce. There were no choices to make, no variable subsidies to claim, no bagged lunches or vending machines. Everyone ate the same food, and the food, I discovered, was wonderful. Thinking back on those meals when I was in Berkeley, I could understand Waters’s frustration. “What I’m imagining is happening all over the world,” she told me. “It’s not like we’re inventing something that has never been done before.”

For Cooper, too, the French system seemed an ideal model, if only she could afford it. A month before my visit, she had toured some cafeterias in the town of Challans, in the west of France. The lunches there were made in a central kitchen then trucked in bulk to the satellite schools, to be served family style, just as I remembered. “At one meal, the first course was raw beets in a vinaigrette,” Cooper recalled. “The second was braised salmon with lentils and leeks, and the third was a cheese course. That was school lunch.” The cost of food and labor came to about eight dollars a meal—more than three times as much as the average American lunch—of which every child paid about two dollars. (In Rome, which recently adopted a similar system on a much larger scale, the meals cost only about five dollars, and seventy per cent of the ingredients are organic.)

I asked Cooper, one morning, as we were driving to the Central Kitchen, how long it would take American schools to switch to the French or Italian system, if they had the money. “Two years,” she said. “There are three big issues: investing in kitchens, food procurement, and staff training. But I’ve made all these changes in six months without any money. You can’t tell me it’s going to take anyone else more than two years.” This sounded optimistic at best. The school-lunch program won’t be reauthorized until 2009, and it already costs the country seven billion dollars a year. To double the subsidies “would take a profile in courage,” one anti-hunger lobbyist to me. Then again, the program has always been a creature of implausible politics. “Come on!” Cooper said. “The war costs more than a billion dollars a week! Why don’t we say we’ll double what we spend on school lunch? Where are our priorities? Maybe I was high the day they explained that in school.”

It was well before dawn, and Cooper had to focus on the long, looping coastal road from Moss Beach. I could tell, though, that she was still running the numbers in her head. Politics, more than cooking, consumed her these days. “If I was getting up every morning at three-thirty just to make tuna-fish sandwiches, I’d jump off the Bay Bridge,” she said. She owns two houses on the East Coast, one of them with a former partner, but she said that she had no intention of moving back anytime soon. She had agreed to work in Berkeley for three years and was already looking further ahead—to reforming the cafeterias of Portland, Oregon, perhaps, or to some other, more subversive scheme. “I want to sue the U.S.D.A.!” I’d heard her say, her eyes gleaming. “I want Oprah to pick this up! I want school lunch to be an election issue in 2008!” But first she had a few thousand mouths to feed.

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