CHAPTER 1

1991

"It sat silently, hoarding its secrets."

This particular story begins in the dusky hollows of 1991, remembered as a rotten yearthrough and through by almost everybody living, dead, or unborn. I'm sure there were afew who had it good, maybe even made millions off other people's misfortune, but for therest of us, there wasn't a glimmer. January dawned with tracers over Baghdad, the GulfWar. It was a bad year for Saddam Hussein and the Israeli farmer (Scud missiles, weakharvest), the Politburo of the Soviet Union (dissolved), and the sawmills of BritishColumbia (rising stumpage fees, etc.). An estimated one hundred and fifty thousandpeople died in a Bangladeshi cyclone. The IRA launched a mortar attack on 10 DowningStreet, shattering the windows and scorching the wall of the room where Prime MinisterJohn Major was meeting with his Cabinet ("I think we'd better start again, somewhereelse," said the prime minister). In the Philippines, Mount Pinatubo erupted, ejecting 30billion metric tons of magma and aerosols, draping a thick layer of sulfuric acid over theearth, cooling temperatures while torching the ozone layer.

It was a brutal year for the ozone layer.

Here in America, it was no better: the rise of Jack Kevorkian, Magic Johnson's HIVdiagnosis, Donald Trump's dwindling empire. Rape, mass murder, and masturbation.The country slopped along in a recession, and meanwhile, I wasn't feeling so goodmyself.

To kick things off, I got dumped in January. I was twenty-six years old, making about$5,000 a year, pretax. I lived in a two-bedroom apartment in Ann Arbor, Michigan, withmy roommate, Miles, both of us graduate students in the creative writing program forfiction, a.k.a. Storytelling School. We each had a futon and a stereo—andeverything else (two couches, black-and-white TV, waffle iron) we'd foraged from pilesin front of houses on Big Trash Day.

That year, I toted around a book entitled The Great Depression of 1990, one bought onremainder for a dollar, and that predicted absolute global meltdown ... in 1990. But I, forone, wasn't going to look like an idiot if it hit a year or two late. The advantage I had overmost everyone else in the world was my lack of participation in the economy, except toissue policy statements, from the couch, before our blizzardy TV screen of black-and-white pixels. The eleven o'clock news brought us Detroit anchorman Bill Bonds and allthe bad acid and strange perversions of the year—the William Kennedy Smithtrial, the Clarence Thomas hearings, the Rodney King beating—all delivered frombeneath his superb toupee, woven it seemed with fine Incan silver.

Nineteen-ninety-one was the year we were to graduate, and as the months progressedtoward that spring rite of passage, a funny thing happened: We, the storytellers, could notget our stories published— anywhere. We typed in fits of Kerouacian ecstacy,swaddled our stories in manila envelopes, sent them out to small journals across thecountry. The rejections came back in our own self-addressed envelopes, like homingpigeons.

So we stewed in our obscurity—and futility. We were Artists. We worked ascourse assistants and teachers of Creative Writing 101, reading Wallace Stevens poems tothe uvulas of the yawning undergrad horde, moving ourselves to inspiration while theclass spoke among itself. We kept office hours in a holding pen with sixteen otherteachers, and then went and drank cheap beer at Old Town Tavern, swapping lines fromour rejection letters. As it began to dawn on us that the end of our cosseted academic ridewas near, the tension ratcheted so high that we started spending extra time with the onlypeople who were consistently more miserable than we were: the poets.

In pictures from our graduation, we—my posse and I—look so innocent,like kids really, kids with full heads of hair and skinny bodies and a glint of fear in oureyes, gazing out at the savage world and our futures. You can almost see our brains atwork in those photos, now just hours away from the cruelest epiphany: Those preciouslyimagined short story collections and novels, copied and bound lovingly at Kinko's, calledThe Shape of Grief or What the Helix Said, qualified us for, well, almost ... exactly ...nothing.

Which is what led me to a local deli, a place called Zingerman's, to see if they needed anextra sandwich-maker on weekends. This was Zingerman's before it did $44 million inannual sales and possessed a half million customers, but it was already an Ann Arborlegend, a fabled arcade of fantastic food, a classic, slightly cramped New York–styledeli in the Midwest, with a tin ceiling, black-and-white tiled floor, and the yummiestdelicacies from around the world. The shelves overflowed with bottles of Italianlemonade, exotic marmalade spreads, and tapenades. The brothy smell of matzo ball souppermeated the place. On Saturday mornings, before Michigan football games, peoplethronged, forming a line down Kingsley Street. The sandwiches cost twice as much asanywhere else, and whenever we splurged as students, we'd go there and stand in the longline, the longer the better actually, just to prolong the experience. Then we'd order fromcolorful chalkboards hung from the ceiling, detailing a cornucopia of sandwiches withnames like "Gemini Rocks the House," "Who's Greenberg Anyway?," and "The FerberExperience," each made on homemade farm bread or grilled challah or Jewish rye,stuffed with Amish chicken breast or peppered ham or homemade pastrami, withWisconsin muenster or Switzerland Swiss or Manchester creamy cheddar, and toppedwith applewood-smoked bacon or organic sunflower sprouts or honey mustard.

In the days before the rise of gourmand culture, before our obsession with purity andpesticides, before the most fetishistic of us could sit over plates of Humboldt Fogexpounding on our favorite truffles or estate-bottled olive oil, Zingerman's preached anew way of thinking about food: Eat the best, and eat homemade. Why choke downover-salted, processed chicken soup when you might slurp Zingerman's rich stock, with itstender carrots and hint of rosemary? Why suffer any old chocolate when you mightindulge in handcrafted, chocolate-covered clementines from some picturesque village innorthern Italy, treats that exploded in your mouth, the citrus flooding in tingles across thetongue with the melted cocoa spreading beneath it, lifting and wrapping the clementineonce again, but differently now, in the sweetest chocolate-orange cradle of sensorypleasure? Judging by the towering shelves of rare, five-star products from around theworld— the quinces and capers, the salamis and spoon-fruits, the sixteen-year-oldbalsamic vinegar and Finnish black licorice—the quest for higher and highergustatory ecstasies never ceased.

If Zingerman's preached a new way of thinking about food, it was by practicing the oldways, by trying to make latkes as they'd been made a hundred years ago, by returning totraditional recipes. The idea was to deepen the experience of eating by giving customers asense of culinary history and geography, to ask questions like: Why are bagels round?

To my mind, such inquiry and excellence deserved me, and even if I was only going tobuild sandwiches, I would beam my own excellence in perfect slathers of mayo andmustard. After all, I needed a job, and the food and the karma were so good atZingerman's, it felt like a place I could make home for a while.

So one June day found me hiking up the steep stairs to the office above the deli andpresenting myself as the answer to Zingerman's problems, whatever its problems were. Icame armed with my résumé bearing the proud monogram MFA, and within threeminutes, two of them spent waiting, one of the deli mistresses set me straight."We don't have anything right now," she said, as seven phones rang at once, and turnedback to business.

A few days later, the deli called. They wanted to see me regarding a special opportunity. Ibee-lined back to the office and stood before the deli woman again. "I noticed you've donesome proofreading," she said casually, her eyes skimming my résumé to jog specifics."Ari writes all the newsletters himself, and we could use someone to check it eachmonth." It wasn't for sure, my new boss cautioned. And it might be four to six hours amonth. We could try one first. To see how it went.

I thought I heard something like eight dollars an hour. "Done," I said.I left with a folder clutched tightly under my arm and a new sproing in my step. Thenewsletter, the monthly newsletter! It sat in stacks in the store. Everyone from theebullient hard-core gourmands to the morose doctoral students read it while waiting inline, especially because it contained a menu and you couldn't read the chalkboards from amile away. But it was more than that: It was part foodie bible, part travelogue, in whichAri brought to stirring life his global search for goodies as he played out the thrillingIndiana Jones lead. From a business point of view, the newsletter had always been a bit ofmarketing genius, and now it had become Ari's trademark, one his followers cravedreading as much as their latest New Yorker issues.

The Ari in question was Ari Weinzweig, co-owner of the Zingerman universe and a manof panache, chutzpah, and wide-roaming palate. Once he'd been a University of Michiganhistory major and collector of anarchist literature; now he was caught in a dailydownpour of money from the clouds of patrons at his doorstep. Ari was tall, handsome,with dark ringlets of hair, the overeducated man's Jeff Goldblum. Everybody seemed towant a word. He was ARI, gourmet argonaut, the Sherlock Holmes of nosh and niblets.I'd seen him once or twice in the deli, wearing spandex shorts, just in from a run. He wasalways trailed by a gaggle of pretty people. Long, lean, hypnotic, the magic man offood—AHHHH-REEE.

And so, naturally, the newsletter was a revved-up reflection of Ari's peregrinations, andas such was never meant to be literature. His was a breezy, conversational style, full ofexclamations (This is the best!) and enthusiasms (You gotta try it!), a pleated high-schoolpep squad for his personal pantry. His greatest strength was a knack for making youhungry. Back at my apartment, even as I imagined Ari up in first class on a flight to St.Petersburg in search of the world's best beluga caviar, I dug a couple of pencils from thedrawer, then pulled the folder from my backpack, placed it on the desk, and beganperusing the pages. On first read, it was good, if a bit rustic. There was the occasionalclunker, but that was to be expected. I made some marks, deleted a few words, added asuggestion. I got up and fixed a grilled cheese. Sat back down. Made more notes. Werewe being a little too effusive about the Jewish noodle kugel? Couldn't we add a moresavory detail re: the sour-cream coffee cake? What about expanding our adjective horizonbeyond "tasty" and "delicious"?

By late afternoon, I'd completely rewritten the thing. Ari's style was now more ...Cheeveresque. I couldn't wait for him to return from St. Petersburg, or wherever, so Icould entirely rewrite his next newsletter about beluga caviar. I put the folder aside,revisited it once more late that night while eating cold noodles. Yes. Perfect. Bill Bondscame on: Boris Yeltsin was standing on top of a tank in front of the Kremlin; the Sovietregime had been toppled.

Things were looking up.

Back at the deli a few days later, reaction to the revolution—my firstedit—was surprisingly muted. "I think we're trying to keep Ari's voice intact," saidmy boss, handing back my edit. Maybe we should let Ari be the judge of that, I wanted tosay. But really, I needed the job. So I gathered the pages into the folder again and, homeat my desk, armed with a plump red eraser, brought him back to life. I added moreexclamations. In the margins, I wrote: "Wouldn't this be a good place for a 'delicious'?" Ireminded myself that I was thrilled not only to get paid for reading but also to be readinganything besides lit-crit books that quoted heavily from Lukács's theory of reification.

During a time when microwave popcorn passed for dinner, the subject of fine food alsooffered a vicarious thrill. While I couldn't afford to eat well, I could certainly aspire to.So I read with an enthusiasm that matched Ari's on the page. I could taste the pickles andsmoked fish. I could hear the cow moo and the butter churn. I was drawn deeper anddeeper into his savory world, though I never forgot my place as foot servant. The truth is,Ari Weinzweig never would have recognized me if we'd smacked into each other beforethe loaves of rye.

That, however, didn't dampen my enthusiasm about our next order of business together:the October newsletter, which was Zingerman's second annual celebration of Spanishfood. The deli was working in concert with the Spanish tourist board and artisanal foodmakers there, and sometime earlier that year, Ari had eaten his way across the country insearch of delectables. Something about the evocation of warm sun, sangria, and gluttonyjust as the low ceiling of gray lake clouds closed over Michigan for the next half yearstruck a chord, and while my only visit to Spain had come on a chilly European jauntduring my junior year abroad in London—there were Uzi'd policia in the streets ofMadrid ten years after Franco's death and an elaborate night trying to find Salvador Dalíon the Costa

Brava—the country flashed back now through Ari's prose.

That October newsletter was his aria, his masterpiece, his opus. The writing seemed tocome from a different man. The passion was unbridled. ¡Vaya! He sang the praises ofSpanish olives and Rías Baixas wine, Salamancan ham and a host of cheeses thatincluded Manchegos, Cabrales, Majoreros. I tightened and added a few "delicious"-es. Ipadded an entry about sherry, lightened another about olive oil. I turned thepage—and suddenly, from nowhere, came an entry that needed no interventionwhatsoever. It was about a special cheese Ari had hunted down, and it appeared under theheading "New and Amazing," three paragraphs buried among six type-packed, oversizedpages—crammed between a primer on Sephardic Jewish cooking and an ad for apaella-making clinic.

"Though I've saved this one for last," wrote Ari, "don't let me mislead you. This is reallyan outstanding piece of cheese ... so anonymous I discovered it by chance in London. It'salso the most expensive cheese we've ever sold. Makes me a little nervous just putting iton the counter."

The item went on to describe how this piece of "sublime" cheese was made in Castile, inthe north-central part of the country, and how, when Ari had visited the cheesemakerhimself, the Spaniard had shared vivid memories of his grandmother making the verysame cheese and imploring him to keep the tradition alive. When asked by Ari how hejustified making such an expensive cheese, the man had said, "Because it's made withlove."

But there was more: Each day this cheesemaker collected fresh milk from "his flock ofone hundred Churra sheep." The milk was poured into vats, stirred, and after it hadcoagulated, the curd was hand-cut into tiny pieces "in order to expel as much liquid aspossible." Each wheel of the cheese was then pressed to rid it of any remaining moistureand transported to a nearby cave. After the first aging, the cheese was submerged inextra-virgin olive oil and aged again, for at least a year. The stuff of his job—theminutiae, the care, the importance of time—happened to sound a lot like the job ofa writer.

"It's rich, dense, intense," sang Ari, "a bit like Manchego, but with its own distinct set offlavors and character."

There was something about all of it, not just the perfection of Ari's prose, but the story hetold—the village cheesemaker, the ancient family recipe, the old-fashioned processby which the cheese was born, the idiosyncratic tin in which it was packaged—thatI couldn't stop thinking about, even as I went on to contend with misplaced modifiers in apassage about marzipan. It occurred to me that there we were, living through cursed1991, in a crushing recession—when the national dialogue centered aroundwhether Clarence Thomas had uttered the question "Who has put pubic hair on myCoke?"—and along came this outrageous, overpriced, presumptuous little cheese,almost angelic in its naïveté, fabulist in character, seemingly made by an incorruptibleartiste who, with an apparent straight face, had stated that its high price tag came becauseit was "made with love."