Thanks a Lot, Mr. Disney!!! Really

Walt and Mickey (Permission pending.)

My gluttony for international flavors occasionally gets me into trouble. And I still blame Walt Disney.

One Christmas Eve I snuck down the stairs every hour on the hour all night, surreptitiously shaking and prodding each present, checking the milk level in Santa’s glass and counting the cookies. I knew for sure what was in one package, the rectangle wrapped in elegant silver paper, tied with a thick red-velvet ribbon, with my grandmother’s handwriting on the little card, “To Cindy, Love Teeny.” It could only be a book.

And it was.

Before The Lion King, there was Walt Disney’s People and Places, by Jane Werner Watson and the Staff of Walt Disney’s Studio. Inside this 176-page treasure, chock-full of colored photographs still vivid so many years later, words spread out before me like a magic carpet. Squirreled away in my bedroom, the white chenille pressing hard into my elbows, I read the book from cover to cover. And in my mind, I flew away, away from the cold, cloudy winter days of eastern Washington state, away from an educated family that didn’t value books or even other people all that much. From Lapland to Portugal to Scotland, and even Sardinia, the Eurocentric nature of Western culture of the time was obvious in that book. But People and Places also covered such little-known and far-flung places as the Amazon and Samoa. Morocco, too.

In one brief afternoon, then, the world became my playground. And my banquet table.

As is true for the first time for anything, I remember my first brush with the fire of chiles. The heat, the flames, the pain, and, well, yes, the ecstasy.

A taco, not on the streets of Tijuana, but rather in a gymnasium in Seattle, changed my life forever.  I now date things B.T. or A.T.– Before Taco or After Taco. Epiphanies being what they are, I really think I had one of my first epiphanic experiences that day.

After several meals featuring hot dogs, hamburgers, and lots of Coca Cola (usually verboten), my parents were in the mood for something with a bit more variety. We had just seen the Space Needle. Nearby stood a food emporium, set up in the arena of a basketball court. White cement bleachers edged with green guardrails stretched from floor to ceiling, and below, on the arena floor, a colorful festival of international foods enticed us. Having grown up in San Diego, with its huge Mexican population, my parents beelined it to the taco stand, in hopes of finding the tamales they’d loved as children.

The vendor carried no tamales in his inventory, but he suggested ground-beef tacos instead. Plenty of shredded cheese and lettuce garnished the insides of the cardboardy-hard, fried corn tortillas. My father squirted some wonderful smelling, slightly vinegary red sauce on his taco.

Arty Tabasco Sauce (Used by permission of Othon Leon.)

“Tabasco Sauce” read the label on the thin, narrow-necked bottle, red as the fake blood we painted on our faces at Halloween. I decided to try some and grabbed the bottle off the vendor’s cart and started to shake it over my taco.

Dad said, “Be careful, that stuff’s pretty hot,” as I poured more and more of the sauce onto the taco.  “Dad …, I know what I’m doing,” I retorted. “I’ll be fine.”

Little did I know!

Salivating, I asked,  “How about getting something to drink, too?”

He replied,  ”We don’t have anything because the taco vendor is out of sodas. You’ll just have to go without. Or drink water.”

“No problem,” I smirked. I didn’t think anything more about the lack of drinks as we meandered around the nearly empty arena, finally settling down on some bleacher seats at the bottom, near the floor.

My stomach growling, I unwrapped my taco and took a hefty bite. Yow! My mouth shriveled and recoiled like a salted snail, my eyes watered without stopping, and my nose did something like what we now might call a break dance. Hot sauce coated my lips and my tongue, and in agony I beat at my lips with a thin napkin that tore right away. In an instant, prickly little bubbles erupted on the inside of my mouth. I spotted a drinking fountain at the top of the bleachers and I took off like a Globetrotter playing the Boston Celtics in an exhibition game, taking the steps two or even three at a time in my haste to get to water.

Returning to my seat, I took another bite and the same thing happened. I could do only one thing: I ate that taco sitting down next to the water fountain, rinsing my outraged taste buds in a torrent of ice cold water after every bite. In spite of the pain, I sensed the flavor circus playing in my mouth.

Hot Pockets (Copyright Janet Towbin, used with permission.)

But blisters or not, I was hooked. Foreign, exotic food tasted so much more alive and real than the food I ate every day. I loved it. In spite of the agony.

And so I began to learn to cook after that. Really cook. Coincidentally, at about the same time, my mother passed the baton of daily cooking on to me; she’d just started graduate school, relieved to escape what she considered sheer drudgery. No can openers for me. Sweet-and-sour pork, genuine Italian beef ragù, sukiyaki, rice and beans, you name it, I served it up to my brothers and sister and my parents.  My brothers weekly begged for Sweet-and-Sour Pork, but my sister Paula always cried when she found out that it was on the menu. An old-fashioned girl, she preferred roast beef and mashed potatoes.

I discovered Time-Life’s Foods of the World series not too long after that and I vowed that someday when I had lots of money I would own all of them. In the meantime, I copied the recipes I liked and pasted them into spiral notebooks of various colors. With so many captivating recipes available, I left casseroles in the dust. No more of the Campbell’s soup-based sauces and casseroles my mother favored.

And that is how cooking and culture became my passions. If my physical body couldn’t afford a trip to a particular country, I traveled there instead via my taste buds.

Re-reading Walt Disney’s People and Places, I now discern something almost reflective, if not prophetic, in the tone of the book. It seems almost as if the publishers sensed that the world teetered on the verge, that old ways would explode and disappear as fast as a nuclear mushroom cloud. Or at least become diluted and homogenized.

In one passage, a European told a Blue Man that it took him three hours by plane to cross the desert that took the Blue Man and his camels a month to transverse, and that was indeed progress, wasn’t it? And in reply, the Blue Man asked in true Socratic fashion, ” ‘And the rest of the time, what do you do?’ ” There is a hint, in that statement from a slower-paced era, of the coming worship of time, of the merciless, whip-cracking, tyrannical idol that now rules us all.

Maybe Walt Disney’s People and Places WAS the springboard for my international itch. Or maybe not. Maybe it WAS the taco. Maybe something just festered in me, a rolling stone, a wanderlust; after all, most of my ancestors went as far as West as they could go until there wasn’t anyplace else to stand except knee-deep in the Pacific Ocean and wonder what lay out there, too.

As for me, I went weekly to my town’s public library, and checked out every book about traveling that I could find. I’d stagger home so loaded down that sometimes I thought I’d never make it up the steep steps to our house. Whether oceanographer Eugenie Clark cajoled me with The Lady and the Sharks or Ernest Hemingway penned a love note to Paris, A Moveable Feast, through the words of others who escaped the mundane, my world expanded again and again beyond the pale pink tea roses wallpapering my second-floor bedroom in that cold nineteenth-century farmhouse.

I know now that I was starving, for something larger than myself, for the world in all its richness and all its lessons. And books provided the only sustenance for that hunger.

And then, slowly, I learned to feed my hunger in other ways.

© 2008 C. Bertelsen

Magic Carpet (Used by permission, Wildstar Beaumont.)