Ay Dios Mio, es SALSA!

by effenheimer at 04:53 PM on August 29, 2003

I spent a good many hours Sunday making salsa at my sister’s house. And I have to tell you it was a good, old-fashioned time.
Our grandmother used to do all kinds of things people don’t do any more. Raise, kill and freeze chickens; can tomatoes; make pickles; spank kids; etc. Of course, to her it wasn’t old-fashioned, but I remember it being something of a good time.
Oh sure, today we tend to think of a good time as doing things that don’t include being up to one’s elbows in blood, guts and feathers, but back in the day, it was just as good a feeling as when the pizza guy shows up after 35 minutes. No one cries over Pepperoni.
It was good to get these things taken care of in one, long day of work that ended in a full freezer. Come what may over the next year, you had that chicken problem solved. And you did it yourself. You and your family.
Granted, making salsa isn’t quite as physically or emotionally tasking a process as killing a hundred chickens, but then my sister and I aren’t of “the greatest generation.” For the most part, people of our generation can’t even make their own tacos let alone the salsa. They cannot see why anyone would WANT to make their own when so many consistent and tasty varieties come in jars MEANT to be used as bowls. Just dip, dip, dip and toss. What could be easier?
But still, I was very much satisfied by the entire process. You can make salsa for one, but it’s better when you know you are making it for as many as eight people to “ooh and ahh” over. And even if they don’t, nothing is ever quite so good as when you make it yourself.
When I broke out the first of my ancho/roasted pepper/garlic salsa for Taco Monday, I wasn’t just having dinner. I wasn’t just eating tacos. I was reasserting my connection to something ancient. I was connecting to hearth and home.
We really miss out on something in our modern, go-go-go, drive-thru, pound it down society. Food is not just fuel. Food is not just sustenance. Food is culture, not in the haute couture sense of the word, but in the basics of human interaction sense. We cooked for others. We ate with others.
Our desire for progress has out paced our actual need for it. Human beings are social creatures. We evolved in a world that required us to live not just in family groups, but in bands, clans and tribes. Consolidation of effort wasn’t just for fun, it was a matter of survival, but it did have certain side effects that were quite pleasurable. Camaraderie, community, esprit de corps, society, togetherness.
And every night, when the work was done, when the wild beast was pounded flat and on its way to becoming pemmican, when the corn was ground and the chokecherries packed in fat ... it was magic time. Drums, singing, dancing.
Most people have a hole inside them these days. We modern, technologically marvelous human beings don’t realize how much we have given up in exchange for our two-bedroom apartments, microwave ovens and 27-inch TVs.
We grow up in nuclear family groups, if we are lucky, and that seems pretty good. When you’re 18, it’s time to move out and on with life, if the parents are lucky. Let’s say you go off to that job or school then career. You meet Mr. or Ms. Right or Right-Enough and combine your incomes and lives, create a few more lives, but to what end? Let’s say you are successful. You keep the marriage together, raise kids who aren’t screw-ups, eat your share of microwaveable chicken pot pies, you’re reasonably happy with work, take some vacations, save money, retire and take some more vacations, but to what end?
Is society served? Is culture saved, created or affected in any noticeable way? Was it ever?
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe salsa is just salsa and it doesn’t matter if it comes in a jar from Des Moines or you make it yourself. Maybe our fast-food-in-the-car culture is just as valid as home-cooking.
Maybe you can live without love. Maybe it doesn’t matter if we dance around a fire with our tribe every night or if we sit on a couch around the tube with all the other members of the “Friends” fan club.
Maybe our souls don’t suffer from the loss. Maybe they don’t exist at all. Maybe the millions of depressed Americans are just weak remnants, the dingleberries of evolution. Maybe this too, too real flesh is all there is to worry about.
Who knows? Maybe this is all so much mental onanism.
What I do know is that no matter how you look at it , I’ve got enough roasted corn and black bean salsa to last through the long, cold, lonely winter.