Why we were there

I’ve been re-reading Ruth Reichl’s “Save Me the Plums,” a memoir on her journey to and experience as editor of the venerable magazine Gourmet. Reichl was editor from 1999 until the magazine closed in 2009. It’s a wonderful read, at least for a food enthusiast (I won’t go as far as calling myself a foodie) and journalist like me. It gives a glimpse of the world beyond the pages, behind the delicious looking photographs, the kitchen-tested recipes (sometimes revised up to five times in their fabulous in-office kitchens before getting in the magazine).

I read the chapter “Why we cook” the other day, about their experience on Sept. 11, 2001 – the day the world order changed totally. Reichl writes about coming in to an eerily empty office and finding everyone gathered in front of the TV in the conference room, as planes crashed into one and then the other tower of what was then the world’s tallest buildings, the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center.

While she managed (after four hours on what was usually a 10-minute drive) to get to their home outside the city where her husband, a journalist, had taken their son and some of his classmates, she decided the next day to go back to the city – to cook: “We’ve got eight kitchens at Gourmet. And somebody’s got to feed the firefighters.”

So she went back to the city, husband and son as well, and joined the massive effort among restaurateurs and chefs and all sorts of volunteers to prepare meals for the firefighters and other first responders. On that first day she brought “great trays of chili, cornbread, lasagna and brownies” to Ground Zero, going through checkpoints, along streets that were dust and rubble: “It was a bombed out war zone, a zombie space that no longer resembled any New York I’d ever known.” One exhausted, dust-covered firefighter took a bowl of chili, turned to her and said, “Thank you for this taste of home.” And since then, her Thanksgiving Turkey Chili has had pride of place on her family’s Thanksgiving table.

I write about that because, as we commemorate People Power this week, I remember similar efforts in February 1986. As people trooped to EDSA starting on the evening of Feb. 22 to protect the