A Block of Tamarind Pulp

objects, part 1

In my experience, stolen food tastes better than food that is legitimately yours. The fat is creamier, the salt is bolder, the spice is more threatening. It is not more calorically filling, necessarily, but it is more experientially filling. Most of the acts of ingestion in my lifetime are unmemorable: one more hamburger, passing into the trackless depth of time. But the stolen pleasures remain. And, as with many acts of indecency, the risk of being caught is part of the pleasure itself.

But this might make me sound like some daring thief, sticking it to the rich by stealing rabbit pate from bougie grocery stores, or like some character in Les Miserables, covered in aesthetically appealing soot. But the vast majority of my food theft was not glamorous. In fact, mostly, I was just a broke loser in college, with slightly less broke roommates, many of whom were vegan and health-conscious: not people who had delicious groceries, but rather, people who bought unappetizing food, and then forgot to eat it sometimes. So I would steal what they didn’t want or probably wouldn’t notice the disappearance of, which was not good. I’d have like a bit of bok choi about to go brown, or some horrifying tofu bar left in the back of the freezer, or some organic miscellaneous nut butter. I would eat a little knife-tip of their nut butter, if I was alone in the house, and then, if my knife mark made a conspicuous impression, I would try to smooth it over with a spoon, an act which, I discovered later, is not unlike patching stucco. 

I only did this for a couple of years, at the beginning of college. It supplemented other inexpensive elements of my diet, like stale bread a local bakery left out in garbage bags. My thefts were not noticed by my roommates, I think, or if they did notice, they didn’t say anything, maybe because the infractions were only as significant as their own unpunished infractions: filling the house with weed smoke and progressive rock music, leaving dishes stacked in the sink full of rotting scraps, having loud friends over, and so on. We were all horrifying animals, fucking up our own lives and spilling our ashtrays on each others’ lives, and nobody was going to complain about anything too much. 

My last major theft was Darrah’s tamarind pulp. But she was not a loser roommate—she was the first cool person I lived with. Really, I did not belong in her house; it was all capable Jewish women in their mid-to-late 20s, who understood the basics of life, like, if you allow your friend Steve down the street to borrow your plunger, you must get the plunger back. I did not understand this; I gave away our plunger, and never got it back. This lead to a predictable emergency: someone destroyed the toilet with a large shit, perhaps me, I don’t remember, and there was nothing we could do about it, and it was Sunday night, and the hardware store was closed. My roommate Lisa told me with infuriating sobriety and compassion: “I don’t want you to feel bad. I just want you to know that it’s just really, really irresponsible.” 

I gained access to this house of adult women by cooking them a lovely dinner; I made them short ribs, braised in red wine until they were utterly soft and tender, with carefully browned vegetables. They were stunned; one of them broke her vegetarian diet to eat it, and said, “that tastes like God.” This meal has been a calling card for me; recently I made it for a very famous person, and I said nearly nothing all dinner, because I was terrified of his presence, but I felt alright about it in the end, knowing I had acquitted myself well in the meat department. 

The adult women imagined, I suppose, that I would give them feasts of this kind regularly. That happened sometimes. But I also stole Darrah’s tamarind pulp.

It is not a food, it is an ingredient. But that is kind of a thrill of its own: you are beating the system by eating an ingredient, stealing some time back from the injunction that food requires assembly. There are culturally sanctioned forms of this, like the charcuterie board. However, we don’t have to stop there, we can refuse to spend our lives in preparation and just wantonly ingest the pantry. Eating ketchup, hot sauce, butter: this can be a sophisticated culinary education, getting you closer to the raw elements of cooking. Or a way of breaking free of the artificial boundaries of sophistication in which we trap ourselves: it’s all just calories, it’s all just fuel. One can imagine Nietzsche writing about the Ubermensch breaking free of the tyranny of meals and telling us: eat the pulps of your roommates, lick the sap from the trees, live off mayo packets stolen from Jersey Mike’s, dominate the earth. 

I can’t say that tamarind pulp is good, consumed alone. It is, however, loud. It really yells in the mouth, with a sour/sweetness soaring over a thick base tone that is almost like earth, almost like soil, almost garbage-like in its funk, at moments. The block of pulp itself, too, is thick. You could make a sculpture with it. Or mortar a building with it. It could make excellent mortar, actually, for building a small cabin, although the resulting sculpture might attract a bunch of flies, suddenly, in warm weather. 

Eating tamarind pulp is not pleasant, but you can relish the intensity of the experience. Like a jolt of pain, or a sudden clash of cymbals, it brings the moment to a sharp point. Such focused intensity is so often missing in life. One could imagine, and envy, an existence with a lot of such pinched, pressured aliveness: the life of a hunter in a frozen landscape, whose every breath is measured, calculated so as not repel the animals that are the hunter’s primary sustenance. That is an existence in which hours pass that have the sharpness of ingesting tamarind pulp.

It erodes the mouth, also: after consuming tamarind pulp, unless you just swallow it like a pill, you can sense an abrasion in the membranes near the alveolar ridge, the ridge on the roof of your mouth behind the teeth. Like a pizza burn or another benign mouth injury, this is not pleasant, but it is a source of intrigue, leading you back to the sensual realm involuntarily as you browse the local independent bookstore, again, without buying anything, again. And, if you are stealing the tamarind pulp, this feels like the cost you are paying for your clandestine ways.

The pulp was located in a big basket on the fridge, and wrapped in crinkly plastic. The basket contained all sorts of aspirational food purchases left to wither. Exotic herbs, spices, and ingredients purchased in an effort to have a more worldly pantry. We lived in a neighborhood with many international grocery stores, and it was easy to entertain fancies like this—okay, I will be the type of cool Jew who knows how to make Korean rice blocks, or who can use asafoetida correctly. Some of these fantasies came true, most of them didn’t. The tamarind pulp block was part of one of these dreams, and it was a dream component that was more edible than a lot of the others.

We were both, me and Darrah, figuring out which pretensions could become part of our permanent adult personality. She had a lot of flexibility in this regard; she was cool, smart, beautiful, and passionate, wrote plays, spoke a couple of languages, and had a super hot, smart boyfriend who also spoke a couple of languages. Many pretensions can fit onto a woman like this, even if they’re not totally congruent; you welcome, in an attractive person, something incongruous, something that is not quite being pulled off. Meanwhile, I did not have the same level of status, but there was still room for some creativity in the pallet of standard eccentricities available to a young man with literary sensibilities. I mourned the pain of a breakup by reading the experimental holocaust-themed novel The Tunnel in direct sunlight outside of a local coffee shop, refusing shade, not washing my clothing, growing smellier and smellier, smoking and smoking, until I felt like a cracked, bare canvas. One day Steve came over to try some clothing I didn’t wear anymore. “It smells terrible,” he said.

This was the same summer of the tamarind pulp. It wasn’t strictly necessary, this theft—I wasn’t going hungry, at that point, my job situation had improved. I just had horrible spending habits—maybe I had money for groceries or a Paul Celan collection, and so, I got the Paul Celan collection, and was hungry for a day or two. And then I was alone in the hot kitchen, with an empty stomach, and I knew the tamarind pulp was over there, so I would take a little bite—very acidic foods can be good for counteracting hunger. I ate it over the course of a month or two, in little bits, a few times a week. I remember feeling sticky-fingered and lonely, desperate and confused.

When it was gone, I stopped stealing her food. And I have never stolen any roommate’s food since, or at least not knowingly. Perhaps in response to the guilt I feel over having engaged in such lame and petty theft over the years, I have a sheepishness about the fridge now. My fiancee’s family recently scolded me for not eating enough when I was staying with them, and, it’s true; I could not bear to reach boldly into the fridge and take the snacks I really wanted. I even have this trepidation, sometimes, about food I bought myself. I will look at a fancy cheese I got for myself as a special treat, and I will think, that looks dangerous. Is that even mine?