Philosophy of Food and Cooking, Writing and Life

Windows of Fauchon in Paris (Photo credit: C. Bertelsen)

Writing about food these days is hot. Some call it the new pornography, stirring up unsavory images of sleazy writers wrapped in beige raincoats, whacking away at keyboards. Gossip columnist Liz Smith gets into the act with her brittle, biting prose in Dishing, where she comes right out and says that reading about food is like reading about sex; it’s safer than the actual act. And journalist Linda Ellerbee opens her mouth and spews diamond-like, glittering word pictures in her Take Big Bites.

Just two of the latest books by writers not usually thought of as “food writers,” these books are good, yes, even if the authors are taking advantage of the explosion of books about food. Why a country that prides itself on efficiency and speed and no-fuss, the inventor of food that is about far away from Mother Earth’s bounty as Pluto is from the Sun, wants to read about food and oogle beautiful pictures of it instead of cooking it or even eating it, is a marvel indeed. A real mystery.

But for the writer knowledgeable about food, there’s a gold mine waiting to be panned, a mother lode from Mother Earth. Armed not with a shovel, but instead Gary Allen’s delicious book, The Resource Guide for Food Writers, and Diane Jacobs’s even tastier tome, Will Write for Food, and years of eating experience, not to mention writing experience, a writer might be able to turn out the kind of work that the legendary food writer, M. F. K. Fisher, did. But, after all as the old adage goes, “You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.”

The kicker is how to translate a chemical reaction—taste—into words, both coming from the tongue-brain connection, interestingly enough. I think it takes a person capable of deep spirituality to write the kind of lasting food writing, a person who recognizes that eating is a sacred act. That’s why all the witty writing abut dieting will never get out of the storage basement in many libraries in the future, or worse, will be deleted from the database, obliterated into unconnected “0s” and “1s” and swallowed up forever.

Storytelling at root, that’s food writing, and it’s all meat for food writers. Awakening memories percolate underneath food-related stories, and not always sweet memories, for not everyone’s mother or grandmother stirred the pot with happiness. Many adults sadly recall Grandma chasing them out of the kitchen, swishing the air with a wooden spoon raised high like a bull whip. But they’d like to dream of better times anyway, to live vicariously through the families who, contrary to Tolstoy’s famous first liner in Anna Karenina, appear happy all the time. How much longer food writers will be able to mine Italian family myths of happiness remains to be seen. Novels like Adriana Trigiani’s Big Stone Gap portray the archetypal huge Italian family chewing joyfully together around the groaning table, refuting Louise DeSalvo’s Crazy in the Kitchen, chock-full of essays about her tormented Italian family.

Writing about food means writing about much more than mere digestion or family history or where to find the plumpest tomatoes or pristine carrots. Everyone eats. Eating really is universal and reduces life to a common denominator. In ancient times, the saying goes, once two people ate together, no longer were there strangers sitting at the table. In today’s world, stuffed with distrust and rising xenophobia, food may be the only common ground left to us.

© 2008 C. Bertelsen

Enjoying pork knuckle in Munich (Photo credit: C. Bertelsen)