I am looking at a tall, white mound on the dinner plate that the waiter has just placed in front of me.
“Is there anything else I can get you?” he asks.
“How about what I ordered?” I think. Instead, I thank the waiter and he departs.
“I thought I had ordered baked stuffed haddock, mashed potato, and asparagus,” I say to Allison, who has graciously accepted my invitation to a fancy restaurant in Portland for our wedding anniversary. I look at her plate and see a seared salmon fillet laid across a bed of spinach. I look at mine and see a small hillock. I start to poke and probe the hillock with my fork. I dislodge something firm and green from the bottom.
“I found my asparagus,” I say.
“It’s called vertical presentation,” Allison says, pointing to the mound. “How odd, but I only learned about it myself from Shirley when I visited her a few days ago.”
Shirley is a friend of the family who lives in a senior retirement community in a nearby town.
“What is vertical presentation?” I ask, as I send my spoon into the mound to take a core sample.
“It’s a way of presenting food,” Allison says. “You just stack everything you are serving on top of each other. Shirley said the kitchen just got a new cook and he started serving meals that way. The residents hate it and want him to stop.”
As a child, I needed to keep the food on my plate separated. I didn’t like it when the carrots touched my applesauce. I’m not sure how my younger self would have responded to vertical presentation. Convulsions?
“Shirley says,” Allison continues, “that she thinks people are upset because they have lived through a lot of societal change and are drawing a line in the sand when it comes to how they eat dinner.”
“Change is hard,” I say.
I stab my fork deep into the mound, excavate a large chunk, and place the whole thing into my mouth.
“What’s it taste like?” Allison asks.
“Mashed potato, baked haddock, and asparagus,” I reply.
***
Because I enjoy studying history and how events pile up on top of each other to mold the future, the following day I research the origin of vertical food presentation and discover it is a relatively new achievement in human cultural evolution. The Bronze Age occurred 5,000 years ago, but the era of vertical presentation began in the 1980s. According to one source, “vertical presentation, as opposed to landscape style, adds elegance and luxury to the dining experience.” It says nothing about sparking fork-armed rebellions at senior retirement dining halls around the country.
What I do admire about vertical presentation is that it startled my assumption that the only possible way to serve food on a plate is side by side. I like to be startled, to have my reality questioned. I wonder if vertical presentation could have practical applications in other areas of life. After much thought, all I could come up with is dog walking.
I walk two dogs and the shoulder along Cundy’s Harbor Road is very narrow. There isn’t much room for all of us to stay out of harm’s way. Vertical presentation thinking leads me to imagine walking one dog with the other one — the top dog — somehow attached to the bottom dog. But I ponder this idea for about as long as it takes to read the word “ponder,” because somewhere in the world there must already be a similar-looking circus act that stars Pietro the Clown and his amazing dachshunds, Spritz and Fritz. They would sue me for copying their act, and I would lose a pile of money.
Then I have a revelation about how I can make the most of vertical presentation thinking …
Thank you for reading all these words, which I have created by placing letters side by side. Know that I also spent considerable time vertically arranging the sentences and ideas to form an elegant mound for you to dig through and chew on.
Bon appetit!
