I Wonder What the Poor People Are Eating Tonight?

Louise Erdrich’s novel The Sentence asks: What’s on your dinner plate?

“Grab your pig’s feet, bread, and gin, there’s plenty in the kitchen. I wonder what the poor people are eating tonight?” — Fats Waller

Poor person's food is fantastic! It’s the original farm-to-table organic. It’s based on what’s local, plentiful, cheap, and in season. It’s hearty. Will pick you up, fill you up and help you get over everything from heartbreak to hangover.

This is How We Do It in the ’Hood

Herbs, salts, chutneys, salsas, oils, rubs, marinades, and seasonings make hoi polloi chow some of the best grub you can sink your teeth into. The comestibles of the common folk? It’s what’s for dinner tonight!

What’s your culture? Tamales, matzo ball soup, or kimchi? Is it baked ziti, pho, bao, burgers, or BBQ?

That sort of po’ folk cuisine where we eat it all the time — and we are what we eat. And like sex, we think we invented it and brag ’bout what we can do with what our mama gave us.

Celebration, Community, Communion, and Cake: Or Eat Me!

That’s why we enjoy crawfish boils, s’mores, backyard grill-outs, clam bakes, and potlucks. And Hot Dog Eating Contests/Great Midwest Rib Fest. Not to mention (all right, let’s talk) the competitive burrito/donuts/sausage roll/strawberry shortcake eat-offs.

Po’ folks' grub means harboring your favorite comfort food recipe, and all your friends know the ingredients, but pretend it’s a surprise — every time. Even if one of the ingredients is canned soup. Me, I have faith that my nachos are epic — and people are in awe of my guacamole.

Tastes Like Chicken

Let’s deconstruct The Sentence, which hits all the high notes you’d expect from a Pulitzer Prize-winning heavyweight novelist like Louise Erdrich. And yet, what makes The Sentence delectable is the hot and heavy comfort food writing — cozy, home-cooked, pure-simplicity, down-home edibles that invite you into the sentence and scene.

Brined, salted, roasted, seared, dried, marinated, and preserved, food is communion, caring, and communication. It’s halal; it’s kosher; it’s free-range.

It’s hot cocoa or kombucha. It’s natural Mexican vanilla, maple syrup, and cajeta. It’s jerky — alligator, elk, or salmon. Sausage-n-peppers, blintzes, spring rolls, or chicken masala. Fried clams or rocky mountain oysters. Bread, cheese, vino. Ritual and ceremony. It’s wedding cake and post-divorce tequila shots.

So Good

And it’s good people, creating and sharing simple food with grace: after-work peanut butter sandwiches and beer, with that odd jar of fruit jam, served on the side, is how The Sentence shows a scene of cozy domesticity.

Erdrich’s writing nourishes her audience from soup to nuts and from 1984’s Love Medicine to 2020’s Pulitzer-luring The Night Watchman (based upon the author’s grandfather’s history).

For example, let’s look at wild rice; well, there’s nothing tame about it! Everyone’s a critic. Leave the room, and people critique your cookery. It’s hard to get the authentic stuff. It’s who you know and what you grow. And with wild rice musings, Erdrich dishes on indigenous culinary customs, tribal affinity, and lineage.

The Sentence takes its title from the narrator, Tookie, and her past as an ex-con and her current life as a bookstore employee. Set in Minnesota during the early Covid/BLM protests, the novel, published in 2021, has a taste for its time and place and takes a bite out of its historical moment.

I Love the Smell of Napalm in the Morning!!!

Tookie nibbles a snack scored from an open popcorn emporium, and as she walks in the devastated landscape, she appreciates how the salty treat helps disguise the smell of tear gas.

Or, during a tense family dispute, the father slips away to prepare coffee and sandwiches. Tookie and her stepdaughter bet the dad loads ’em up as a bribe. The sandwiches arrive. Tookie lifts the bread — total Dagwoods, as predicted.

The New Epicureans

What Erdrich does with food makes her a new-school Epicurus. And while “epicurean” has become interchangeable with gourmand or connoisseur, Epicurus, an empiricist, was a proto-hippy who shared simple vegetarian meals and complex philosophical discussions, welcoming everyone, including women and enslaved people, into “the Garden.”

And in stark contrast to the food, friendship, and freedom modeled by the Epicureans, here in the industrialized nations, we’re slamming Ozempic and Wegovy, meds that suppress the appetite by signaling that you’re — literally — fed up.

Act — A Balance

Beyond “Ozempic face” and “ass,” side effects may include a range of diminished pleasures — of the palate — and in smoking, drinking, nail-biting, and online shopping — the very scaffolding from which I, personally, have constructed a persona. Maladaptive as all hell, but a personality, nonetheless.

Then, oh, then there’s the squirm-inducing irony of paying deep green to drug and drop poundage while others are unsure where their next meal’s coming from. C’est de très mauvais goût!

Could this be an invitation to watch — or rewatch—the classic film Koyaanisqatsi (1982)? This is the Hopi word translating into “life out of balance.” It’s directed by Godfrey Reggio, cinematography by Ron Fricke, and music by Philip Glass — it’s a flick sans dialogue. Yes, please!

Speaking of balance, The Sentence could be diagramed and shown to possess all the delicious ingredients of a literary novel. The plot merges tales of a specter, a former bookstore regular, BLM protests, the onset of Covid, and cultural and familial navigations. Share the memories with someone you love! Too soon? Perhaps…And yet —

Consider this exchange between Tookie and Pollux, her love interest, who works part-time with the tribal police. He’s about to put the zip lock ties on her wrists, but he’s guiding her to make the best of her story.

Tookie protests. “It’s stupid. He wasn’t near fresh enough to sell.” Pollux advises, “This goes federal. People in that system don’t know your sense of humor. Your charm. You’ll just be a big mean-looking Indian like me.”

Some would say (all right, I say it) that’s as good a working definition of love as any: Avowal. Acknowledgment. Acceptance. Then the handcuffs.

The Minnesota weather is also a character in the novel, whether Tookie and Co. gab in the sunshine in the backyard or negotiate the frozen, Covid-empty streets on a quest for takeaway grub.

Between the Covers: In Praise of Indy Bookstores

For those who resonate with indy bookstore culture, The Sentence is your happy place; slip between these covers. A celebrated chronicler of indigenous people’s history, customs, and stories, Erdrich’s flavorful play with language, ritual, and relationships goes down a treat.

The Sentence is a tasty medley of colorful bookies from both sides of the counter!

In a meta-twisty moment, Louise Erdrich, proprietor and tutelary spirit of Birchbark Books in Minneapolis, and the celebrated author of this story, with a cameo stroll-on part as — an author/bookstore owner.

The Sentence is delectably written, with hauntings, haints, and incantations. It has Jingle dresses. A haunted confessional booth. Zip-tie handcuffs. Stews. Kinship, water bottles, and corpse drug running. A paramour who creates his own language. Incarceration. Protests. A buried book. And love in its many permutations. Plus, Frybread, freshly-baked, extra-Sugar Cookies, and Corn Soup for the soul.