We’re settling into the hot tub, me with my glass of wine, my 30-year-old daughter with some probiotic drink. She lives in my pool house with her husband whose birthday is today. He’s working late tonight as a server at the Coffee Zone, wearing an “it’s my birthday” sash to get better tips. I let them stay for free as long as they pay electrical, to make them accountable and curb their use of AC. All three of my daughters have moved back home for stints of time to reset and relaunch. This daughter is a struggling writer. These days, moving back in with parents is a thing. Not like in my day. When you left home, either booted out or running free, you stayed gone. Mom booted me. She’s been on my mind since last week when I stumbled upon her lifelong list of things that made her angry.
This elusive, desperate desire that drives her narrator seems to me the central subject of Notice. It’s what gets Nina both into trouble and out of it; it’s the thing that keeps her alive but also pushes her to the brink. It is likely this same sort of desire—an urgent attempt to make meaning of her survival—that drove Lewis to write.
“Sometimes I worry you have Alzheimer’s,” says my daughter, yanking my brain back into the hot tub.
In Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet and Ourselves, Nicola Twilley argues that at each stage of its development, modern refrigeration has driven us to eat and behave in ways we wouldn’t have chosen if we could design the system from scratch. To take just one example, she explains that refrigeration is the main reason that so many commercial tomatoes are flavourless. It isn’t just that the volatile aromas in a ripe tomato are killed by the cold, or that the ripeness may be generated by ethylene rather than the sun, but that most of the tomatoes grown commercially don’t have the ‘genetic capacity’ to be delicious, as the plant breeder Harry Klee told Twilley. Tomatoes, she writes, are bred for ‘the sturdiness to be shipped and stored under refrigeration’. The important thing is that, at the moment of purchase, a consumer should deem the tomato red and perfect, even if it is left to spoil after it reaches the salad drawer at home.