Free Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin by Calvin Trillin

as the Italian West Indies,” Alice always says.
    “I know, I know,” I say, shaking my head in resignation. “I know.”
    But why? How did Italy manage to end up with no Caribbean islands at all? The French have islands. The Dutch have islands. Even the Danes had one for a while. The English have so many Caribbean islands that they have been hard put to instill in every single one of them the historic English gifts of parliamentary democracy and overcooked vegetables.
    “The English obviously had a lot more islands than they could use,” I say. “Aren’t they the ones who are always going on about fair play?”
    The Italians have none. Christopher Columbus—a Genoan, who taught Ferdinand and Isabella how to twirl spaghetti around their forks—took the trouble to discover the Caribbean personally before the end of the fifteenth century. Try to get a decent plate of spaghetti there now. When I happen into one of those conversations about how easily history might have taken some other course (What if the Pope had allowed Henry VIII’s divorce? What if Jefferson had decided that the price being asked for the Louisiana Purchase was ridiculous even considering the inflation in North American real estate?), I find myself with a single speculation: What if the Italians, by trading some part of Ethiopia where it’s not safe to eat the lettuce, had emerged from the colonial era with one small Caribbean island?
    I dream of that island. I am sitting in one of those simple Italian beach restaurants, and I happen to be eating fettuccine. Not always; sometimes I am eating spaghettini puttanesca. Alice and I are both having salads made with tomatoes and fresh basil and extra virgin olive oil and the local mozzarella. That’s right—the local mozzarella. (The residents, descendants of peasants who had managed to coax already-stuffed eggplants from the cruel soil of Calabria, would scoff at the notion of having to import mozzarella.)
    The sea below us is a clear blue. The hills above us are green with garlic plants. The chef is singing as he grills our fresh
gamberos
. The waiter has just asked us the question that sums up for me what I treasure about the Italian approach to drinking wine: “You won raid or whyut?” I say “whyut,” and lean back to contemplate our good fortune in being together, soaking up sunshine and olive oil, on my favorite Caribbean island, Santo Prosciutto.
    Then the proprietor of our hotel stops by our table to inform us that, because of a disastrous drop in the lira, our stay will cost a quarter of what we would have paid for those resorts Alice was reading about in the brochures.
    “Benissimo,”
I say, and ask him if he’d like to join us for a glass of whyut.
    1986
Unhealth Food
    “Am I the only one worried about how unhealthy the people who work in health food stores look?” I said to my wife, Alice, one day. I described, in some detail, a clerk I had just encountered in a health food store—his sunken chest, his quivering hands, his ominous pallor, the dun-colored tint to his wretched little wispy beard.
    “Calm down,” Alice said.
    “Why isn’t there a Whole Grain Defense Committee working toput some meat on their bones?” I said. “I’m beginning to think those Washington soothsayers are right about how uncaring Americans have become. Dozens of customers a day must walk right by this quasi cadaver, and not one of them is willing to get involved even to the extent of calling 911.”
    “What were you doing in a health food store anyway?” Alice asked. “You’re always saying that health food makes you sick.”
    “I was on a mission of mercy,” I said. “A friend of mine who lives in a place that lacks the shopping resources of this great city had run out of soy waste.”
    “You know very well there’s no such thing as soy waste,” she said. “Why do you keep going on about soy waste?”
    “Soy waste, granola dust, pure extract of tree stump—what’s the difference what