Roger Pires Mar 15, 2012
When he's not offering his take on daily life, Roger Pires spends his days as a computer systems analyst. It's not exactly a glamorous calling but hey, it pays the bills. He enjoys hockey, canoeing, snowshoeing, and spending as much time as he possibly can outdoors. He lives in Udora with his wife and two kids, who are his prime inspiration for Ravenshoe Ramblings.
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The raw and the cooked
I’m no Indiana Jones. I’ve never had the urge to jump out of an airplane despite the wishes of friends and family. No primal stirrings have ever led me to wander the Outback in search of crocs or deep-sea dive disguised as a soft, pink appetizer for sharks. I’m not ashamed of this; it’s a common affliction. The guy next to you probably acquired that scar on his left arm from falling off his bike, not from hunting tigers in the Sumatran jungle.
Alas, my I’ll-just-stay-here-and-mind-the-cooler approach to the unknown also extends to the world of cuisine. I blame this shortcoming on my upbringing in the wilds of suburbia. I grew up in Bramalea, a community named not for a sylvan lake nor the surrounding hills, but for the developer that built it. The town is divided into “sections” of cookie-cutter subdivisions that sprouted from abandoned farmland like prefab mushrooms. The crowning touch was starting all the street names in a given section with the same letter. Thus the “D” section, the “G” section (you had to provide medical records to live in the “C” section). I grew up in the “F” section. I lived in a townhouse on Fleetwood Crescent and fell asleep in class at Fallingdale Public School. At the tiny convenience store on Forest Drive I purchased enough candy to put the owner’s four kids through university.
In this manufactured Eden an image of the world was forged, all straight lines and sharp corners. It didn’t take much for something to be considered exotic; like street names starting with a different letter for example. Ditto for food. You can imagine our trepidation at sampling anything you couldn’t drown in a pool of gravy. “Thou shalt not eat curry” was the eleventh commandment. A gastronomic leap consisted of bellying up to the counter at H. Salt Fish and Chips and ordering the Halibut Snack Box. This cholesterol-infused delight was little more than two lumps of batter with a sliver of fish inside. The “chips” had to be equipped with life jackets to prevent them from drowning in a sea of oil. But we savoured it like it was haute cuisine.
Our culinary Shangri-La was located next to the China Hut, an outpost of alien dining with hanging Buddhas and dragons and odd-shaped bits of food in multi-coloured sauces lying in wait under a heat lamp. It was the stuff of science fiction. My friend, Ted, called it “Vulcan food”.
Predictably, these humble beginnings left me completely unprepared for what I would find in the food courts of the big city. My one and only foray into the world of Indian food stamped a rather large exclamation point on this fact. Two of the main components of Indian cuisine are chickpeas and coriander, ingredients that are Kryptonite to my rustic sensibilities. Coworkers, obviously equipped with a more sophisticated palate, would ask me to accompany them on their lunchtime pilgrimage to the Mumbai Palace. And each time I declined. They kept poking and prodding me to go along. They were good folks; they meant well. But I informed them politely that I wouldn’t set foot in an Indian restaurant if you force-marched me there at the end of a bayonet. However, after months of them chipping away at my resolve and against my better judgment, I caved. I was about to find out that Indian food doesn’t much care for me either. Within the hour this eastern delicacy had declared war on my intestinal tract. I spent that night with my guts twisting and writhing in the throes of some biblical plague.
My past haunts me still. If my entrée didn’t spend its formative years running, flying, or swimming it isn’t bestowed the privilege of being my dinner. Anything green that appears on my plate was put there by accident or has started to break down molecularly.
But times they are a-changing, and I risk being left behind. We now dance to the rhythms of the world. The exotic has become mainstream. Sushi is the flagship of this new world order. And it’s everything a cheeseburger isn’t. It’s raw. It’s not garnished with a slice of melted-down traffic cone. It’s laced with healthy stuff: rice, Asian vegetables, and bits of unidentified marine life wrapped in the loving arms of a seaweed leaf. Each package should come with a little plastic diver inside. Sushi has also become a symbol of sophistication, evidence that one has broken away from the herd. Dining at a sushi bar is a free pass to an exclusive club that’s off limits to the hoi polloi. To a heretic like me it just looks like garden hose stuffed with Styrofoam – and is about as appetizing.
I’ve resigned myself to plod through this life like a great, polyester dinosaur but I hold out hope for the next generation. My daughter is a card-carrying member of Club Sushi. She’s extolled its virtues to me a million times. But it’s like teaching a Neanderthal to use a computer. I’m a product of the “F” section and I’ll never change.
