Abundance

Abstract

Abundance Adrienne Su (bio) Back when flank steak was cheap and unpopular,I could stir-fry shreds of it with heaps of ginger,a bunch of cilantro, and a little sherry.Slicing was tedious with my one knifebecause the knife was as cheap as flank steak,but my wrists were young and my guests hungry in the grateful way students are hungry.Nothing served to them could be unpopular.I knew nothing of grass-fed steak.Everything grew in stores, from chicken to ginger,and we were happy. Later, attuned to farms and knives,I learned that a flank steak is as rare as fine sherry because a cow yields so few and, like sherry,flank steak had come into fashion. My hungryparents had often transformed that cut by cleaver,manna from the meat case, like the also unpopularpork butt, provided they could track down ginger.That's how we lived in a house full of food: pepper steak, red-cooked pork, beef lo mein. We never stakedout dishes as our own. My mother sharedrecipes with any who asked, and offered ginger.I know she's not the reason the nation is hungryfor what it once ignored, but taste moves from neighborto neighbor until a city is converted. Ginsu knife [End Page 9] ads gave us fake karate chops, then professional knivesin home kitchens, after which no one wanted to serve steak—at least, no one who had embraced the unpopularon principle. You can still buy cooking sherrywhen rice wine eludes you; it's priced for hungrystudents. Kroger and Walmart carry ginger. I don't long for the obscurity of fresh ginger,nor for fuller ignorance of animal lives,and I still have friends who are always hungry.I must be missing the secret of flank steakand the necessity of preserving ginger in sherryfrom that age when Asian food was unpopular, so unpopular that ginger happened only in gingerbread.But in those days, if all you had was cheap sherry, a knife,and a supermarket flank steak, you would never go hungry. [End Page 10] Adrienne Su Adrienne Su teaches at Dickinson College. Her fifth book, Peach State, is forthcoming from the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2021. Poems from it have appeared in Bennington Review, Cincinnati Review, Georgia Review, Massachusetts Review, the New Yorker, Poem-a-Day, Poetry, and Best American Poetry. Copyright © 2020 University of Nebraska Press