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OAKLAND TRIBUNE / ANG Newspapers, October 10, 2001

Finding hope at Culinary Exhibit at UC Berkeley

By Deborah Grossman CONTRIBUTOR

It was two days after September 11th. I had no desire to drive an hour to a public building in Berkeley. I wanted to glue myself to the TV set and listen to Dan Rather struggling to make sense of the destruction.

Yet a prior commitment dragged me out of the house. In normal times, a trip to the California Culinary Culture exhibit at the UC Berkeley Bancroft Library would entertain and inspire a history-loving foodie like me. Yet this journey seemed so insignificant against the backdrop of disaster.

At the exhibit, I found what I expected: paintings of native fisherman, menus from the 1800s, oral histories of early vintners, and lots of memorabilia about Alice Waters and Chez Panisse.

But then a small photo caught my eye. A man and a woman hunched over a makeshift stove of bricks. Behind the stove, several stalwarts clustered around a table - a stand of old barrels - in the middle of what was once a bustling street before the earthquake struck on April 18, 1906.

They were lone figures on a deserted street surrounded with rubble and crumpled buildings. Their resolute faces and gallant efforts to boil up a kettle and heat a skillet on that bleak day captured the post-earthquake devastation in a way more telling than around-the-clock coverage on CNN.

I wondered what the men and women ate that day in the street. Did they make flapjacks from flour rummaged from their shattered house? Find coffee grounds for boiled water? Fry a fish? I wondered if what they scrounged for supper helped them feel normal again.

I then pictured exhausted Red Cross volunteers in cavernous makeshift shelters in lower Manhattan hurriedly cooking up meals for exhausted firemen and rescue workers.

And my thoughts turned to my pregnant niece Pauline. From the tiny kitchen in her one-bedroom apartment on the upper east side of Manhattan, Pauline and her husband were providing food and shelter for two friends, who, with their 3-month-old daughter, had to flee from their apartment just three blocks away from the World Trade Center.

Walking across the UC Berkeley campus, I was preoccupied by the image of Pauline's cramped apartment harboring her friends and the remnants of their lives. I imagined Pauline, still numb and unable to comprehend the tragedy, assembling peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in her postage-stamp kitchen.

I realized that in the midst of destruction and chaos, the kitchen - no matter what location, size, or shape - retains its role in healing souls and nourishing bodies.

And as I considered how grand the city of San Francisco is today compared to those post-earthquake photos, I was filled with hope. New York City - and the American spirit - will also survive, rebuild and thrive.

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