Greens

Americans around the world are known as people who often eat too much. As one Greek friend of mine noted – he was referring to a portly businessman acquaintance – you see these quite often among Americans, but rarely among the Japanese. I joined volunteers at D.C.’s Central Kitchen where a new effort to bring nutritionally sounder meals to the city’s homeless and hungry is under way. Volunteers go out to cooperating farms after fields have been picked for market and glean the remainder for usable produce. The result the day I was at the kitchen was dozens of bags of collard greens, the mainstay of American soul food, fresh and smelling of earth, crisp as whips. We set about de-stemming and chiffonading the large leaves. I got my vitamins for the day just slicing and dicing. They put me in mind of a recent meal I had up in U Street, a hole-in-the-wall counter in Duke Ellington’s old neighborhood - mac and cheese, greens, and corn bread. At the bottom of my cup of greens was left the juicy pot licker, slightly acidic, salty from the bacon, sopped up with the sweet corn bread, my childhood lunches in the South came flooding back to me.