Notes on the Chili Movement

The haute cuisine of 1989, says one food expert, will involve either caviar or cabbage, due to the current thaw in relations between the United States and the Soviet Union, where caviar and cabbage are considered Slavic soul food. The haute cuisine of 1989, says another food expert, will be heartland chow, such as meat and potatoes with gravy, due, I suppose, to the creation of a kinder and gentler America.

Muffins are in, they say, croissants are out. Oat bran is in, sugar-puffed cereals in the shape of teddy bears and astronauts are out. Soft-egg ravioli are in, Greek food is out. The food experts did not say why Greek food is out, but I suspect it has something to do with this not being the Year of the Dukaki, as Olympia Dukakis predicted. When a man loses a political race, even his food goes.

I mention all of this by way of pointing out that no food expert whose works I scanned in newspapers and magazines said anything about chili. The reason why, according to Ormly Gumfudgin, is that chili is never out. Chili is there for you when you need it. Chili won’t divorce you, fire you, wreck your car or give you a sexual disease. Chili, says Ormly Gumfudgin, is forever.

Ormly, whose real name is C. Stanley Locke, is the spiritual leader of the chili movement in America. He is to chili what Timothy Leary was to psychedelic drugs: the quintessential tout. He calls himself Ormly Gumfudgin because no one listened when he said his name was C. Stanley Locke. It’s like the old Smothers Brothers tune. A man fell in a vat of chocolate and yelled Fire! because no one would have come had he yelled Chocolate! Makes sense to me.

I called on Ormly the other day in Glendale because I had heard that the International Chili Society, of which Ormly is poster boy and historian, was making a new move to have chili declared the official food of the United States.

Ormly is 66 years old (he calls himself a “seasoned citizen”), a lean 6-feet 2-inches and has a whitish beard and squinty cowboy eyes. He worked for an aeronautics firm for 22 years until a heart attack forced him into early retirement and full-time chili. He also sings, invents, plays the bazooka and hustles Pepto-Bismol, the official stomach remedy of the Chili Society.

When I asked Ormly why chili ought to be declared the nation’s official food, he said because it is an authentic American creation. “Mexicans created chili peppers,” he added quickly, in deference, I suppose, to my ethnic linkage, “but range cooks created chili.”

These range cooks discovered in the 1890s, says Ormly, that packing meat with chili helped preserve it. Then they added beans to make it go further and voila! you got your chili beans, a Western staple. Chasen’s restaurant dignified it years later.

“They began serving it in jails back then,” Ormly said, peering at me through those squinty cowboy eyes, “and it was so good, people committed crimes to get to the chili.”

Also part of chili folklore is that a Spanish nun created chili in the 1600s and through an out-of-body, time-propelled experience appeared before a tribe of Indians in the Southwest 200 years in the future. Chili will do that to you sometimes. Once there, she taught the Indians how to make chili and then returned to her body, Spain and the 1600s.

Ormly tells the story scornfully. It does not fit the All American image of chili. It isn’t the Indians, who are the ultimate All-Americans, but he does mind the Iberian intrusion.

“Why chili and not apple pie and hot dogs as the official American food?” I asked.

“Apple pie and hot dogs are very nice, “ Ormly said, “but they’re from Germany.”

Ormly sidestepped the question of fried chicken, hamburgers, pizza, grits and blackened red fish, which is also out this year by the way. He preferred instead to tell me of a friend who has invented chili-on-a-stick. “He calls it,” Ormly said grandly, “a hotsicle.”

Ormly feels this is chili’s year. He and his fellow chili junkies are busy gathering a million signatures on petitions that ask Congress to make chili official. That’s OK with me. I’m tired of chicken, I don’t like hamburgers and 10 strong men holding me to the ground can’t make me eat pizza.

The only thing more American than chili is a bald eagle, and I’m reasonably certain they won’t let us eat them.