Flaneur-saboteur

I bought a pint of kumquats at Trader Joe's today, to eat on the twenty-minute walk from leafy Brookline to gritty, grimy Allston.  I perched the plastic box at the top of one canvas shopping bag, on a pedestal of Greek yogurt tubs and bottles of blueberry-pomegranate green tea, and slung the bag over my shoulder for easy access.  At crosswalks, my free right hand could dart into the bag and emerge with a handful of the quail-egg-sized orbs, miniature hand-grenades of tartness that burst between my teeth and saturated my parched tongue.  My weapons to make summertime pedestrian shopping bearable.

The last time I'd had kumquats was last spring, in Japan.  Never quite able to figure out the conversion rate from dollars to yen, I remained blissfully unaware of the exorbitant fresh fruit prices there and eagerly traded handfuls of flimsy coins for anything exotic and edible in bulk.  My favorite were roasted chestnuts, which I only figured out how to peel after the second time I bought them, but which still remain a dreamy memory of soft, velvety earthy-sweetness inextricably tied to the neon blur of nighttime Tokyo.  But the kumquats were a close second-favorite: they were sweeter than the ones sold in the States, with a thinner rind and more pulp.  I ate the whole bag in minutes.

Walking down Harvard Avenue with my Trader Joe's groceries, I was reminded of Japan not simply because of the similarity of taste and texture, but for the greedy, furtive way I was gobbling my street snack.  Another thing I didn't realize until it was too late is that the Japanese look down on street-eating, considering it impolite and borderline obscene.  That same sentiment, interestingly, is expressed in a recent report from the President's Council on Bioethics:

Worst of all from this point of view are those more uncivilized forms of eating, like licking an ice cream cone--a catlike activity that has been made acceptable in informal America but that still offends those who know eating in public is offensive. ... Eating on the street--even when undertaken, say, because one is between appointments and has no other time to eat--displays [a] lack of self-control: It beckons enslavement to the belly. ... Lacking utensils for cutting and lifting to mouth, he will often be seen using his teeth for tearing off chewable portions, just like any animal. ... This doglike feeding, if one must engage in it, ought to be kept from public view...

Of course, I giggled when I first read this, originally quoted in an essay that tore the concept of "dignity" a new one.  Finding ice cream cones offensive sounds downright cute in this hedonistic day and age.  But I'm compelled to admit a certain admiration for the logic.  Eating is personal and sensual, an activity to be savored; walking is brisk, goal-oriented, utilitarian.  In normal circumstances, the two should never meet.  So, it should come as no surprise that ice cream cones were invented in New York City, and that the whole phenomenon of "eating on the go" is a totally urban one.  Where else but in our modern Babylon would the spheres of life get so dangerously, deviantly mixed up, like wearing lingerie outdoors or jogging pants to work?  The only surprising thing is that Tokyo is resistant to this progressive trend, the last conservative bastion of the world's great and gluttonous cities (who can imagine Rome without its gelato, Moscow morozhyno-less, or L.A. minus the ubiquitous PinkBerry...?).  Well, even in Tokyo, taboos are made to be broken.  The ice cream I had there was divine -- sesame, sweet potato, and taro flavored -- and the way I found the stand was by backtracking from a departing gaggle of schoolgirls, all laughing and happily, publicly licking at their cones.  

Once upon a time there was a little princess who was still too young to wipe herself after she went to the lavatory, and the woman assigned to look after her was too lazy to do it for her, so she used to call the princess's favorite black dog and say, "If you lick her bottom clean, one day she'll be your bride," and in time the princess herself began looking forward to that day...

(...)

To the children listening, who didn't even know the word "incest," all this seemed perfectly natural, and it wasn't long before they'd forgotten all about it, whereas the part about the black dog obeying the lazy woman and licking the princess's bottom clean left a far more vivid impression, as you could tell by the way they lapped at their ice cream cones, barking between licks, or slobbered on the palms of their hands while they did their homework, which mad their mothers sick... [Yoko Tawada, The Bridegroom Was a Dog]

On a related note, I think I'm going to take a day-trip to New York City for my birthday next week and maybe explore Coney Island.  And I'll be sure to get an ice cream cone.