Vermmmont 2011:

Last night I got back from teaching Shakespeare in Vermont as I have for the past seven summers. This morning I ate a meal alone for the first time in weeks, and it was great, but something was missing: everything besides the food.

It’s been said that man (and, I presume, woman) cannot live on bread alone, and nor is a meal made from bread alone. (Unless you’re eating bread salad out of a bread bowl, with bread pudding for dessert.)  And what did Anthony Bourdain find out after skirring the globe for the superlative supper? That it doesn’t exist, or rather it exists everywhere, and is defined by context rather than substance. A jejune anticlimax to a book whose subtitle is “In Search of the Perfect Meal” — and a very similar ending to that of the Wizard of Oz — but a valid realization nonetheless.

Some of my favorite food writing comes from Lakota holy man John Fire Lame Deer, whose story was recorded in the incredible Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions, which contains one of my favorite passages ever written about cooking.  He also said something along the lines of “food has no power if it is not shared,” a notion I’ve tried to live by ever since my eyes first scanned those squiggles.

So there I was, eating an omelette with herbs from the porch, garlic and tomatoes from the farmers market, halved and perched atop two slices of hearty wheat bread I’d made with the help of an invisible army of leavening agents that descended from thin air, an immaculate conception more commonly known as sourdough.  It was a delicious meal on the tongue, but after breaking bread with seven to forty people for two weeks straight, it felt like merely looking at a drawing of food.   It was delicious, but powerless.