Travel

If you ford a river with the crowd, the crocodile cannot eat you.
         –Malagasy proverb

My husband, Bill Rollnick, and I were part of an American Red Cross team traveling to Madagascar to help implement the global Measles and Malaria Preventive Initiative. In October, our team was part of a joint partnership led by the American Red Cross, the United Nations Foundation, UNICEF, CDC, WHO and the Malagasy government in which millions of Malagasy children, ages 9 months to 5 years, received measles vaccine, Vitamin A, de-worming medicine and insecticide-treated mosquito nets.

Lucky for me, every few years I go to Antibes, France with my family. When that happens I feel compelled to photograph almost everything I eat, before I eat it. There are two reasons for this ritual: One, French food is so gorgeous it's just begging to be photographed. Two, photographing it is almost my way of saying grace for and being mindful of the bounty of food (and, trust me, it's bountiful) I'm about to consume. Food is fleeting. The photos are forever.

For the last two trips I've posted these collections on Facebook and have received a really positive response. It sometimes amazes me how much pleasure people take in looking at photographs of food they can't taste, but I suppose that goes hand-in-hand with people who love TV shows about food they also can't taste (see: The Food Network). 

1. When I arrived in Antibes, my mother had picked up some peaches and strawberries at the daily open-air market in  Antibes. Those strawberries were some of the sweetest I'd ever tasted, and after that the purchase and immediate consumption of them became a daily ritual.

New York’s Café Buloud is a divine restaurant, and it is nearly impossible to order an ordinary meal. We were there the other night – our feast before the simpler joys of summer in Martha’s Vineyard. Saltimbocca Alla Romana was on the menu. Oh Boy! I haven’t seen that on a menu in years! What we received was delicious - stew sized chunks of veal in a thick, dark brown sauce with sweetbread tidbits and a small piece of prosciutto off to the side as an afterthought.

A few tiny green specks, which I fantasized to be sage, were stirred in the gravy… Delicious but disappointing! Time to go back to the 1960’s and a summer spent in Roma living in my painter’s studio just off the Piazza del Popolo, where Marcello Mastroianni would come for his espresso and we all lived La Dolce Vita! “Living” meant buying groceries in the Italian style – Every morning, going from shop to shop fingering the produce, chatting up the butcher, and bargaining in Italian.

Walking at a brisk pace down the narrow roads of Florence, on my final night in the city before leaving for Rome, I found myself skipping the turn to my apartment, for something much more appetizing than a healthy amount of sleep – in fact something much more unhealthy—a croissant filled with chocolate.

But shh…it’s a secret, and no one is supposed to know.

The secret that I speak of is that of the secret bakeries that fill the back alleyways of Florence, Italy. But to learn of the secret locations, you need not read about them, seek them out, or stumble upon them. No, it takes something much more simpler than this to learn of the secret bakery locations – your nose, and not a very strong one at that.

Walking at a brisk pace down the narrow roads of Florence, at a distance of four blocks away, the smell of fresh bread, pizza, and chocolate lurked through the streets like a night prowler searching for it’s prey. Like a textbook kidnapping, the bakery smell took my ability to make a conscious decision to go straight home.