My mother was making $135 a week but she had resilience and imagination. She might take frozen vegetables cook them with garlic onion and Spam and it would taste like a four-star dinner.

The food in such places is so tasteless because the members associate spices and garlic with just the sort of people they're trying to keep out.

They eat the dainty food of famous chefs with the same pleasure with which they devour gross peasant dishes mostly composed of garlic and tomatoes or fisherman's octopus and shrimps fried in heavily scented olive oil on a little deserted beach.

What garlic is to salad insanity is to art.