Foodies, rejoice! The annual New Yorker Food Issue is out. It might be our most popular issue now that eating has become the national pastime. You’ll discover the fine points of food foraging, learn how to build a better apple, and be immersed in the history of coffee cultivation, consumption, and connoisseurship.
All of which is helpful if you’re looking for an excellent roadside mint that goes wonderfully with lamb, an apple so delicious that it will put the Red Delicious to shame, or an exquisitely brewed cup of coffee that will cost you more than a glass of wine.
I’m not. When it comes to food, the best is the enemy of the good, and the good is the enemy of the merely O.K.—which I’m O.K. with.
Whatever the opposite of a foodie is, I am. The guy in this cartoon of mine is basically me:
Look, as far as I’m concerned, any variety of apple a day will keep the medical profession at bay.
And even instant coffee quickly turns me human in the morning.
I know this makes me sound like a curmudgeon, but now that Andy Rooney has died I feel someone has to take up the mantle of cantankerousness. By relentlessly raising the bar for the satisfaction we demand from an apple or a cup of coffee, we assure that most apples and cups of coffee won’t measure up. And the very useful human capacity for adaptation only makes the quest for perfection more quixotic, because great food eventually gives us no more pleasure than what was good. So, when I hear “Good, better, best, never let it rest, until the good is better and the better is best,” I say, “Let it rest.”
With one exception, of course: cartoons. Next week, the search for the perfect cartoon. Actually, the week after that. Next week I’ll be foraging my fridge for Thanksgiving.
