Americans Fend Off Sorrow With Laden Fork and Spoon

The hot fruit crisps at Nancy Oakes’ restaurant are selling as fast as she can bake them. Daphne Derven has gone on a canning binge. Rachelle Friedman cooked more for Rosh Hashanah this year than she’d ever cooked in her lifetime. Dale Dietert has been walking 10 miles a day--his yearning for carbohydrates has been that intense.

Gretchen Stagg’s social calendar is suddenly burgeoning with potlucks and dinner parties. Barbara Fairchild’s desk is suddenly burgeoning with Butterfingers and Hershey’s Kisses and chocolate-covered soy nuts from Trader Joe’s.

It’s not the most dramatic fallout from Sept. 11, but it is surely the most fattening: From coast to coast, in big towns and small ones, social networks are buzzing with tales of sudden cravings for food.

“Appetites are roaring,” said Barbara Haber, a culinary historian at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies. “People seem not only to be eating as if there’s no tomorrow, but they’re cooking as well.”

Though industry groups say it is too soon for hard statistics, those who follow food trends say they sense a change in the nation’s eating habits as the shock of the attacks is waning. Baskin-Robbins reported a 4% increase in sales in the week ending Sept. 16. A Safeway Inc. spokeswoman said the chain had a similar uptick in supermarket sales immediately after Sept. 11 (though receipts have since leveled off).

New York-based restaurant consultant Clark Wolf says he has spent the last three weeks advising clients to simplify menus, partly because staffs are going to have to shrink in response to the now-apparent recession and partly because the notion of foie gras and truffles has become all but unbearable to grieving patrons.

Says Wolf: “People just want a glass of scotch and a good steak now.”

That sense, he and others say, is based on personal experience and anecdotal information as the rituals of mourning have given way to the reality of a loss that is both permanent and sweeping. Restaurant owners talk of tables that have emptied as patrons’ social calendars have filled up with spur-of-the-moment potlucks. Working parents for whom “gourmet” has meant “anything but takeout” report sudden urges to whip up homemade soups and eggplant lasagnas. Newspaper food pages from San Francisco to Allentown, Pa., have overflowed with references to “comfort food” and recipes for wintery one-pot meals.

Some of it is seasonal--autumn is traditionally the time of big eaters--and some is surely hype. But enough of it has been real that legions of calorie counters have reported concerns about maintaining their diets. “This has been a difficult couple of weeks for a lot of people,” said Weight Watchers International spokeswoman Linda Carilli.

Those people include Dale Dietert, a trainer for Weight Watchers in Manhattan, who had lost 57 pounds before the World Trade Center collapse and had kept it off by walking two to five miles a day. Since the attack, however, his craving for bread and pasta has spurred him to double his mileage.

“I control ... my urge ... by walking,” Dietert panted into a cell phone. “In fact right now ... I’m four blocks from the ... World Trade Center. I’ve walked 10 miles ... today.”)

Haber, the culinary historian, says people like Dietert are not the only ones who are suddenly a little concerned about their waistlines. “I found myself baking biscotti and these Italian sesame cookies and eating lots more of them than I normally do, and I finally started calling my friends to see if this was some sort of aberration,” she laughed. “I asked people, ‘Are you suddenly eating a lot of sweets?’ And everyone was! One person told me, ‘Are you kidding? The diet is out the window. What can we do but eat cookies at a time like this?”’

Rachelle Friedman, a high school history teacher who lives in Manhattan, says that in her 30-plus years of life, she had never done so much cooking for the Jewish holidays as she did after the attacks. “And labor-intensive food,” she marveled. “Chicken soup and kreplach and a plum cake and an apple cake and applesauce. And all on a night I had a blind date and had to get a manicure and be somewhere at 7 to meet this guy.”

Gretchen Stagg, a 31-year-old single mother from Mill Valley, says that since the attack, she is suddenly deluged with invitations to eat. “Dinner parties, hot apple cider parties, hot chocolate and cookie parties--way more than normal,” she said. “My daughter’s godmother came over and picked her up this evening. They’re over at her house baking a cake.”

Sara Schneider, senior food editor of Sunset Magazine, says socializing may be more on peoples’ minds now because the attack made it so clear that friends are precious and life is short. On the weekend after the attack, she said, she had the irrepressible urge to host a dinner party. “I realized I really wanted people in my house, people I cared for, and the response was unusually enthusiastic, not just yes, but ‘Yes!’ “

Bon Appetit’s editor in chief, Barbara Fairchild, said her irrepressible urge has been for chocolate, which she nibbled as she pushed deadline to redraft her letter to readers for the Thanksgiving magazine. “I know that thinking about a meal like this right now may be almost impossible for some of you,” she finally wrote after acknowledging that world crises “are not typically addressed by magazines like ours.” Nonetheless, Fairchild urged her readers to “create once again a meal that can be a haven of comfort, joy and goodness--the feast of thanks that has stood the test of time.”

Wolf, the restaurant consultant, says that sense of security and shelter have become crucial to restaurant patrons in the wake of the attack. “They want not ‘comfort foods’ but foods that are comforting, in places where someone is going to come up to you and hug you and say, ‘Good to see you,’ and mean it. The $18 cocktail and attitude at the door are over. Neighborhood restaurants, and places that feel like neighborhood restaurants, are going to do well,” he said.

Joachim Splichal, whose 20-plus restaurants range from Los Angeles’ top-ranked Patina to eateries at Disney’s California Adventure, says his business has borne out that theory. His receipts, he says, have slumped about 30% overall, with the larger losses at the higher end and in destinations that are more sensitive to tourism, such as the theme park restaurants.

Nancy Oakes, chef-owner of Boulevard in San Francisco, says it took a few days for her crowds to return to anything even close to normal. But when they did, on the Friday after the attack, she said, “the mood was very subdued and tender. I went into the dining room and said hello, personally, which is something I normally don’t do, just because I was so happy to see everybody.” Since then, she says, customers have gradually returned to “their old, needy selves--’Where’s my this?’ ‘Where’s my that?”’ But dessert sales--and cocktails--have run higher than usual, with sales of hot fruit crisps through the roof.

It is perhaps only natural that grief would show up as much at the dinner table as at any human venue. Food is, and has always been, so much more than just something to eat.

“The communal table is really just a metaphor for civilization,” says cookbook author and food columnist Marion Cunningham. “You sit across the table, looking at each other, and your defenses drop. The table tells you who you are and where you are, and without those things, you’re a loner. The tribe is as important today as in primal days, and this tragic disaster, if we ever needed an example, is certainly it.”

“People use food as a language,” adds Daphne Derven, an archeologist specializing in eating habits and curator of food at COPIA: the American Center for Wine, Food and the Arts in Napa. “Food is a way for us to express how we feel. It is a way to draw people to us. The idea of gathering together to eat in a social context is something humans have always done, as far as we know, and something that has long been considered nurturing in times of stress, whatever they may be.

“People talk about ‘comfort food,’ but what they really mean is food nurturing a circumstance in which you can draw connectedness and comfort. If you ask a person what food they find comforting--ice cream or mashed potatoes or whatever--inevitably it will be something that can be shared.”

When people talk about food in the Great Depression, she noted, they talk about soup lines and sharing apples. World War II veterans talk about sharing rations and planting Victory Gardens. After the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989, San Francisco’s bars and bistros were packed to the rafters, not so much with drunks as with people who just wanted a central place to exchange “are you OKs?” and “how about you’s?”

On Sept. 11, Derven said, she first hung an American flag, then called her loved ones. Then she went out to her yard and reflexively picked a bushel of figs. Twenty quarts of fig preserves now line her pantry. “Since then I’ve done a lot of cooking,” she said.

So has Sharon Boldt, Stagg’s mother, who will perhaps forever think of the weekend after the attacks as the weekend of The Pie. For days, she said, she had felt numb, and, seeking solace, she had gone outside to tend her roses. A wasp attacked the 59-year-old tax accountant, sending her into anaphylactic shock and nearly killing her in her own yard. When she got home from the hospital, she said, she awoke with a rush of feeling, both for herself and for the thousands of victims and those they had left behind.

“I thought, ‘That’s how all those people in New York must have felt,”’ she said. “I thought, ‘Life is so precious.’ The next thing I knew, I was out in the garden, picking apples. I didn’t even know why.”

“I picked apples and lemons and ripe pomegranates,” she said. “And when I had enough, I went to my kitchen and got out the flour. I felt the grains of it when I mixed in the shortening. I peeled the apples--you know how the peels curl in one long piece. And I thought of all those people, and all that grows in this great land that is so wonderful.

“I thought, ‘There is so little you can really do, to not be so taken with the killing that has happened, and the killing that is going to happen.’ But I could do this. I could roll out this dough. I could put in these apples, and put it in the oven. And when it was done, I could take a piece up to my brother.

“And it sounds silly, but that pie helped. I feel better, and not so hopeless, now.”