Ah, food and the world (of food) … having grown up with two incredible cooks, my mother and grandmother ( and all from mostly homegrown fruit and vegetables too), I used that as an ‘excuse’ to not become a cook (could never do it right for them anyway…). - But not as an excuse to not love food  - and luckily I married, for a while, a Southern gentleman who cooked real well … and have travelled (not yet enough) to have tasted some pretty far out, wonderful food.

But there is one memory of incredible meals that has very much to do with the environment it originated in (just as Joan and Phyllis pointed out here before!)

As a student in the 70’s I worked a summer job as a maid at a small inn on a ‘fattoria’ in Tuscany … an easy job in an extraordinary beautiful place! But most memorable were the meals! The owner, the Austrian widow of an Italian landowner, was an amazing cook. Everything came from the farm and vineyards - the meats was prepared in age-old stone ovens, the pastas were handmade in a separate kitchen by a group of black-clad old Italian ladies, and there were hunters, vintners and farm-workers, the cast and crew of a veritable movie set, characters all of them. And the meals for the staff were made as fresh as the ones for the guests (no left-overs for our gang) … and among those guests were actors from Germany and prominent Italian families from nearby Florence. I felt like I had landed in a dream … actually, I do sometimes dream of that place - and that amazing Italian food! - and even wonder if it all was a dream … I have never been back to the Fattoria Di Caldeta …

Yet the most recent incredible meal was almost the opposite, again as memorable for the place as for the great taste: simplicity itself on a Caribbean beach in the remotest Costa Rican village - beach shack food: a piece of freshly caught fish with rice and avocado … 

"… glaringly obvious, though, is that … imaginations are able to encompass only rich and poor — the vast and increasingly stressed middle is not only incomprehensible, it is invisible."

Very true, everywhere. What a timely article … thank you, Emily.

Having ‘chosen’ (unemployment ‘helped’ …) these, worst of, times to try to become a writer, I find myself suddenly working as ‘nanny’ - for two very different families (private/public …) and begin to really see this vast, seemingly all-important difference in the school environments … and no amount of ‘outsized kindness’ (to scholarship kids, the help etc.), charity work, non-snobbery really masks all the (none too) subtle implications of the class system … invisibility indeed, for just too many.

It seems great how you and your daughter handle the ‘privileges’ of this school’s fabulous education … and how glad she’ll be to know how to navigate a subway system (makes being a citizen of this world so much easier …), obviously one among many other skills her schoolmates are not acquiring …

Hi Phyllis,

thanks for the great addition of Nabokov to this  thread … 

 .. "a splendid toothy tale" indeed … thanks Sheila, for a bittersweet laugh  - had many ‘toothy tales’ of my own, and most often no laughing matter either … particularly, as you mentioned, the many different ‘species’ of dentist one has to deal with … while I love my wonderful lady dentist, all those referrals are driving me nuts … anyway, recently it all had to stop … having a break in the big renovation program … just like many new buildings this one will have to sit it out for a while …

Dear Peggy

… thanks, for this column, I am always looking forward to the new horoscope … But I am still confused (asked this one before): my birthday is January 19th, most astrologers have me as a Capricorn, but you start Aquarius on 1/19 … help?!? WHAT am I … that’s the question anyway, right now …