AN ABC OF FOOD WRITING
“FOOD AND cooking,” proclaimed the theologian and cookbook writer Robert Farrar Capon in 1989, “are not low subjects.” Rather, he added, they are “among the richest subjects in the world. Every day of our lives, they preoccupy, delight, and refresh us.” Indeed, he concluded, “Food, like all the other triumphs of human nature, is evidence of civilization.” Composing a preface to the second edition of his best-selling The Supper of the Lamb, Capon was riding the crest of a wave of food writing that gathered strength throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, and has turned into a tsunami of food memoirs (“foodoirs”), chef’s bios, cookbooks, gourmet magazines, and culinary essays.
Capon’s modern and modernist precursors, as we’ll see in this anthology, include such notable figures as Alice B. Toklas and Ernest Hemingway, M.F.K. Fisher and A. J. Liebling. His contemporaries and descendants are equally distinguished: Calvin Trillin, Anthony Bourdain, Adam Gopnik, Michael Pollan—and on and on, as our table of contents reveals. And we might also number among them the writers of food films (Babette’s Feast, Like Water for Chocolate, Ratatouille, Big Night, Julie & Julia) and food television shows (Iron Chef, Molto Mario, Bizarre Foods, No Reservations) along with the matriarch of such gastronomic “infotainment,” the great Julia Child herself. But we might also include the authors of a little brightly colored cardboard children’s book (aimed presumably at a preschool readership) titled My Foodie ABC: A Little Gourmet’s Guide.
“Foodie: a person with an avid interest in the latest food fads.” “Gourmet: A gourmet is a person who has sharp and refined tastes and is an expert in the art of food.” Along with definitions of “chanterelles,” “dragon fruit,” “farmer’s market,” “jicama,” and “locavore,” these are just a few of the bits of wisdom that My Foodie ABC seeks to impart to hungry little cosmopolites. If they’re watching Iron Chef or Top Chef as mom reads to them, so much the better. But with-it though they are, their fascination with food dates back not just to the chorus so famously sung in the sixties musical Oliver!—“Food, glorious food!”—but to much writing intended for what one critic has lately called “voracious children”: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Raggedy Ann and Andy in Cookie Land, Little House on the Prairie, Alice in Wonderland, and, needless to say, such fairy tales as “Hansel and Gretel” and “Snow White.” Children love rivers of ice cream, gingerbread houses, little cakes that say “Eat me,” and even sometimes (to their sorrow) poisoned apples.
Can it be that, when we brood on food, glorious food, we are all children? We long for its deliciousness, fear it, taste it in our dreams, dream of its pleasures, and always, always write about it. For food evokes words; we enjoy speaking about food and taste almost as much as we enjoy eating itself. Indeed we can hardly eat without talking about it. Eating words may have been, after all, our earliest words. Consider the forbidden fruit in Eden! Consider also the secrets of fire stolen by the culture hero Prometheus, who made cooking possible! This collection of food writings focuses on contemporary “eating words” but finds its origins in biblical and classical times. We represent a passage from the Old Testament to dramatize the culinary choices and taboos that have always marked eating practices in cultures around the world. Just as ancient Jews were urged to forgo meat with milk and to renounce pork, Hindus were taught to abrogate beef, Muslims to renounce alcohol and pork, and Zoroastrians to subsist on raw vegetables. But similarly, classical Greeks were taught by Socrates and his disciple Plato to reject the material pleasures of eating. In the Gorgias, Plato reports Socrates declaring that “the art of cookery” is as low as “the art of rhetoric.” It is to this view that Father Capon, the Episcopalian priest cum cookbook writer, responds when he insists that food and cooking are not “low subjects.”
Historically, however, writers about food have been ambivalent. Cooks, usually women, have until the twentieth century been sequestered in kitchens, sometimes structures entirely separated from aristocratic households, sometimes basement bastions below bourgeois homes, and sometimes humble hearths in peasant cottages. Food itself, while a source of delight, also reminds us—as Plato noted—of our materiality. As human beings we both have and are bodies, and the food that enters so pleasurably between our lips exits, more degradingly, as excrement. Along with the great French gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, we may extoll its spiritual pleasures—its insubstantial “taste.” But, like Plato, we must concede its appeal to our animal nature. And although food writing has from the start been generically diverse, as we shall see throughout this anthology, such ambivalence toward eating and cooking has given the vast literature of gastronomy a special flavor. From the start—in Western culture going back to biblical and classical writers, and in, say, Chinese society to comparable early texts—this writing has been sometimes separately and sometimes simultaneously instructive, mythical, celebratory, and political. From the twentieth century onward, though, such writing has been perhaps even more mainstream than these specific categories suggest, for food has in the last century or so become central to the literary genres that we hold in the highest esteem—the novel, the poem, and (especially as it appears on film and video) the drama.
A LITTLE HISTORY OF FOOD WRITING
WRITTEN RECIPES for dishes as quotidian as bread or as exotic as the Byzantine monokythron (meaning “one-pot meal”) began to appear centuries ago. The biblical book of Ezekiel offers relatively vague instructions for a sort of sprouted grain bread that was to sustain the Israelites during a siege of Jerusalem: “Take thou . . . wheat, and barley, and beans, and lentiles, and millet, and fitches, and put them in one vessel, and make thee bread thereof.” Hopefully, this would sustain countless victims of the Roman siege. The far more specific recipe for the monokythron is also more elaborate, calling for (among other ingredients) “four hearts of cabbage . . . a salted neck of swordfish; a middle cut of carp; . . . a slice of salt sturgeon; fourteen eggs and some Cretan cheese” along with “a bit of Vlach cheese and a pint of olive oil, a handful of pepper, twelve little heads of garlic and fifteen chub mackerels.” Presumably this would feed many hungry courtiers.
Even while collections of recipes explained culinary practices to literate cooks (of whom there can’t have been that many until quite recently), physicians and moralists enjoined diners to watch what they ate. Beyond the food taboos outlined in religious texts from many cultures and the generalized aversion to the materiality of digestion itself expressed by Plato, clerics around the world often preached the virtues of abstinence while denouncing the fleshly pleasures of the table. Some writers, like Petronius in his Satyricon, satirized the vulgar excesses of the nouveau riche. Others, like Horace and Plutarch (and countless Hindu and Buddhist thinkers), decried the slaughter of animals for food, exclaiming, as Plutarch does in our selection here, that “I rather wonder both by what accident and in what state of soul or mind the first man who did so, touched his mouth to gore and brought his lips to the flesh of a dead creature.”
Even among ordinary, non-philosophical folk, fasting has as long a history as feasting: Jews abstain from eating on Yom Kippur; Catholics reject luxurious foods during Lent and for centuries renounced meat on Fridays; Muslims fast daily, from sunrise to sunset, throughout the month-long observance of Ramadan; Hindus similarly fast during a number of religious festivals. And of course Puritan thinkers regularly and vehemently denounced gluttony (which they often associated with Catholicism); warned one writer, “Be very careful and circumspect in taking thy food, bridle thine appetite.” That the delights of the table were temptations to be avoided by all good Christians was a view that persisted in Anglo-American society well into the early twentieth century. In such classic novels as Oliver Twist and Jane Eyre the young protagonists are scolded for their hunger, and even Miss Temple, Jane’s kindly teacher, is rebuked by the hypocritical clergyman Brocklehurst when she offers her charges a lunch of bread and cheese after their breakfast has been burned. “Oh, madam,” intones the (personally well-fed) preacher, “when you put bread and cheese, instead of burnt porridge, into these children’s mouths, you may indeed feed their vile bodies, but you little think how you starve their immortal souls!”
“Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?” “Yes, by Saint Anne, and ginger shall be hot i’ the mouth too!” With these famous words, Shakespeare’s Sir Toby Belch and his sidekick Sir Andrew Aguecheek rebuke the puritanical Malvolio in Twelfth Night. While Malvolio, a bourgeois steward in a grand household, represents the culture of fasting, these two raffish aristocrats yearn to celebrate feasting. And such celebratory feasting has its roots not just in the desire for culinary pleasure but also in myth, magic, and metaphor. For the origin of food has often been attributed to the divine interventions of the gods. Such fire-bringers as Prometheus, in Greek culture, have long been extolled as culture heroes who enabled humble peasants to transform the raw to the cooked. At the same time, foods themselves have often been incarnated as gods. The Aztecs worshipped corn, a sacrificial lordly being who gave himself up to the kettle to be cooked yet was eternal. Christians, for their part, worshipped a mystical rabbi who claimed that his flesh would be their bread, his blood their wine. And countless fairy tales, along with theological works, extol the virtues, charms, and claims of enchanted or enchanting victuals.
Some of the foods they depict may have been what have been called “entheogens,” substances containing consciousness-transforming chemicals—for instance, peyote and magic mushrooms. Some foods are imaginatively portrayed as seductive but dangerous, like the gingerbread house in “Hansel and Gretel,” to go back to children’s literature. Others, as in our selection from Rabelais, inspire extravagant cases of fabulous gluttony. And others are love potions, poisons, strengthening medicinal drinks, as well as lotus roots that lead to lassitude and wines that foster joy. From Homer to the Brothers Grimm, from Virgil to Hans Christian Andersen, from the Child Ballads to the verses of the Romantic poet John Keats and, more recently, the tales for children of Johnny Gruelle and Roald Dahl, writers have focused on foods that are, as Coleridge put it in “Kubla Khan,” “honey-dew” and “the milk of Paradise.”
Starting in the eighteenth century and on into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, however, authors working in the new, more realistic genre of the novel began to turn their attention from culinary magic and mystery to everyday reality. The food for which Oliver Twist and Jane Eyre yearn is quotidian food, daily bread: Oliver wants more porridge; Jane savors seed cake. And such ordinary food plays a central, celebratory role in famous works that precede or descend from the books in which Oliver and Jane star. Published in the mid-eighteenth century, Fielding’s Tom Jones, for instance, features a famous literary seduction in which two lovers supping at a tavern slurp and suck and lick their way through a meal into bed. Published in the early twentieth century, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse dramatizes a festive dinner party whose centerpiece is a savory casserole of boeuf en daube—a classic French beef stew. The narrator stresses not so much the succulent dish itself as the way it brings the diners together in a culinary communion of delight, momentarily obliterating any conflicts or strains among them.
Modern food writers, arguably, have been influenced by such seemingly ordinary fare. When William Carlos Williams wrote a notoriously plaintive verse note to his sleeping wife, explaining that he had gobbled up the plums she was keeping in the icebox for breakfast because they were “so sweet and so cold,” he initiated an entire new mode of food writing, one that would continue to celebrate in lyrical verse and prose the very essence of daily eating. And when the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg explored “A Supermarket in California,” through which he was guided by his great spiritual precursor Walt Whitman (as Dante had been guided by Virgil), the magic of the daily had been confirmed. Declared Ginsberg, in one of his finest poems,
I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.
I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?
Here, perhaps, began the sorts of eating words that are so central today: words that consider economy (“What price bananas?”) along with mystery (“Are you my Angel?”), politics as well as pleasure.
READING EATING WORDS TODAY
WHAT ARE THE pleasures that so many of us currently gain from reading about food? And what are the pleasures inherent in writing about food? Both activities, to begin with, speak to the significance that eating has for us—our gastronomic appetite, our cultural memories of the table, the symbolic value we assign to the most primal of our physical needs. And since the title of our anthology—Eating Words—implies a powerful nexus of food and language, what is that relation? Food of course has always brought people together, starting with the way fire served to cook, protect, and encourage people to share common ground; and in Woolf’s novel, for instance, a marvel of cooking both produces and celebrates a life-enhancing moment. As in To the Lighthouse, much food writing speaks precisely to the ways participating in a meal creates a sense of ensemble, provoking spirited talk—nowadays often talk about food itself, the very meal being consumed, and other memorable meals. When we read about such occasions we frequently have an almost Pavlovian response: “Now that boeuf reminds me of a little bistro where, in Burgundy, I once had . . .” And if others chime in, each topping the others’ gastronomic travelogues, we join a circle of knowledge and shared tastes.
Reading about food in and of itself, outside of narrative structures, can also be an undeniably sensuous experience. It’s not merely that certain foods, such as oysters, chocolate, snake blood, bull’s testicles, and hot peppers are regarded as aphrodisiacs; any food writing can be seductive. No wonder critics have come to speak of “food porn.” Gorgeous food photography may start the juices flowing, but so do accounts of oysters by M.F.K. Fisher and Seamus Heaney, along with (among other texts we include) Walter Benjamin’s meditation on figs, Austin Clarke’s celebration of souse, and Ray Gonzalez’s ode to menudo. Given such textual pleasures, we might wonder whether food reading is a mode of sublimation, a substitute for the real thing, or conversely a doubling of pleasure, spice and condiment to the enticing ingredient or the steaming platter.
To be sure, for some people the consumption of food can be troubling. For sufferers from a range of physical illnesses (diabetes, celiac disease, other allergies, gout) eating can actually be dangerous. To victims of such psychological disorders as anorexia and bulimia, the pleasures of the table may appear toxic. Even those possessed of healthy appetites may fear obesity or cringe at the thought of animal slaughter. And from Upton Sinclair to Eric Schlosser and Michael Pollan, American polemicists have savagely critiqued the food industry for its brutal butchery practices and unsanitary locations. Our section on the politics of food includes angry texts by these writers along with meditations by such thoughtful locavores as Carlo Petrini, Wendell Berry, and Barbara Kingsolver, all figures who consider the possibilities of sensitive agriculture and mindful eating. Perhaps we read the utopian imaginings of some of these thinkers in order to assuage the anxieties aroused by so many dystopian diatribes.
In the face of such culinary cultural complexity, it can be a relief to counter the gastronomic superego with sentences that celebrate the joys of feasting and the pleasures of the palate. Feeling guilty about eating? Read A. J. Liebling’s mouthwatering menus and get a reprieve. Think you’re being indulgent? Turn to Julia Child’s relish in sole meunière and experience digestive delight. Nothing sparks an appetite like a saucy restaurant review by Jonathan Gold, or will pique your gastronomic curiosity like the narrative of French president Mitterand’s last meal of Armagnac-soaked ortolans. Want a vicariously dangerous but risk-free experience? Join Diane Ackerman as she flirts with death during a meal of fugu, the sometimes deadly Japanese fish.
Another reason we can’t get our fill of food writing is that its stories are at once enticingly familiar and oddly unexpected, tales sometimes nostalgically evoking childhood and sometimes vibrant with surprise. Food recollections like those recounted by writers from Proust to Fisher, Clarke, and Lorde frequently send us in search of our own memories. As we read we may often anticipate a moment when the writer has his or her gastro-epiphany, reminiscence shading into a revelation that changes everything. Consuming food is our earliest source of satisfaction, and we satisfy desire with repetition. Yet, like Chang-rae Lee, who nervously scoops out the weird flesh of a sea urchin, we must learn to expand our taste and open ourselves to experimentation. We read about food to satisfy both impulses: reiteration and renewal.
These days there is much heated discussion of matters culinary; add food to the classic “big three” subjects—religion, politics, and sex. No one any longer cautions children, as some Victorian parents did, against talking about food in polite company. It’s not only a permissible topic, it’s encouraged, expected, and assumed. Everywhere you look, someone is advising you to try your hand in the kitchen (mothers no longer discourage sons from the stove), introducing you to celebrity chefs, even showing videos of fearless gastronomes scarfing deep-fried scorpions and loin of kangaroo. Food blogging is a growth industry, the Food Network is a mega-channel, food tourism is on the march, and numerous universities now have Food Studies programs (Slow Food in Italy has its own gastro-university). While one might question the reliability of Yelp and Zagat as they turn amateur diners into would-be pros, the popularity of these venues certainly implies that Every Diner has become an expert: nothing more than the possession of presumptuous taste buds seems to justify authority.
Why, more than ever, do so many writers turn to food? Some pundits believe that today we are obsessed with visual and literary representations of food because literal cooking is becoming a lost art. As Michael Pollan has argued, the rise of the Food Network “has, paradoxically, coincided with the rise of fast food, home-meal replacements and the decline and fall of everyday home cooking.” Do we in fact prefer the simulacrum of cooking to the real thing? The proliferation of gourmet food stores and trendy kitchenware shops would seem to suggest that despite (or perhaps because of) all the culinary TV shows and restaurants out there, people are still practicing knife skills and demonstrating skillet proficiency. What is certainly true, however, is that in or out of the kitchen, at the table and even in the bedroom, people are reading about, looking at, and thinking about food. Some people even get competitive at the stove, so that for them the kitchen may have replaced the boudoir as a site of performance anxiety. Certainly any serious bookstore is laden with gastronomic tomes. At Powell’s in Portland there are easily several hundred food memoirs, and over three dozen shelves bulging with culinary history. And if we had the space, we could easily triple or quadruple the size of this anthology. Consider, therefore, that the pages ahead of you constitute a delectable set of hors d’œuvres variés intended to stimulate your appetite for the increasingly rich menu of food writing.