STEAK AND POTATOES

Potatoes

Potatoes evolved around 9 million years ago. Cultivated potatoes are much younger, perhaps 8,000 or 10,000 years old. Before agriculture, before cities, before language as we know it, potatoes were sending out their stolons beneath the soil. Underground, while megalodon swam the oceans and giant saber-toothed salmon moved through prehistoric rivers. Potatoes are older than apples. So older than Eden.

During the first months of Covid-19, I stopped buying them. Groceries arrived like contraband from delivery services that had to pass by the refrigerated morgue trucks around the corner, parked beside the hospital. Every item was washed in alcohol and spread across the kitchen counter to dry. Bright oranges, cherry yogurt, and electric green grapes. Denial. Potatoes seemed too dull. They offered no surprise. They were what they were all the way through.

I was looking for the single most drab and dull thing I could draw, as the question was: why bother making anything? When I finally drew one, returning to graphite after years of working in colour, I noticed the thing resembled a smooth stone. It looked less like a vegetable than a fragment of a landscape, or a moon rock. Drawing it made the potato feel older than food. Older than mouths. A grinning expression, an alien, a disease that burnt crosses into the flesh. An exorcism. The potato became less an ingredient than an entry point into a world where every ordinary thing possessed its own singular history. While remaining made from the same material as everything else in the cosmos.

Potatoes existed long before groceries.

Steaks

There weren’t steaks 9 million years ago, because there weren’t knives. Or if there were steaks they were still latent in the bodies of the Miocene fauna, awaiting the advent of the cutting technologies that could bring them into being.

There were knives 2 million years ago, but these were rudimentary and incapable of creating a clean perpendicular cut. As they evolved from chippy flint clods to shimmering obsidian teardrops, to bronze, iron, and steel blades of increasing precision, butchers would generally cut following the anatomy of the fauna, slicing tissue between muscles with a knife, yielding boneless muscle cuts that were cooked and shared among many people.

Steaks as we know them evolved in 1925 with the invention of the first electric foodservice band saw, which made perpendicular cuts through bone quick and efficient and minted the T-bone and Ribeye as canonical shapes in the American supermarket. These were individually portioned and thrown on a Weber grill (1952) or a George Foreman grill (1994), or ordered from a waiter at a Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse (1927) while reading from a large folded menu, then cooked to taste, plated, garnished and paired with a potato (fried, baked, mashed).

Crude oil, coal, rare earths, cinnabar all existed 9 million years ago, but at that time they were just part of the ground, latent commodities waiting to be extracted, processed, and traded in the stock market.

In other words, the foodservice band saw and the electricity to run it were latent inside the Earth, waiting for Capital to bring them into being; the steaks were latent inside the fauna that trod upon it, waiting for the foodservice band saw to bring them into being. And so on.

There are latent steaks inside of you, too, a grisly idea that nevertheless occurs to MRI technicians every day.

For most of their history, potatoes were not fried, baked, or mashed. They were simply part of the earth. We are meat in need of a side. And we fry, we bake, we mash. Saint Lawrence embodies this union of preparation: “Turn me over, I am done on this side.”