What Do You Want From Food Writing?
Excerpts from a lecture, as well as a sincere question.
In a 2013 essay on the Anya von Bremzen’s book Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing—our current Book Club pick—Gary Indiana begins:
Since the decline of the pastoral lay, food writing, with its single-minded focus on the gratification of a primal urge, has become the genre closest to pornography in contemporary literature. Like pornography, food writing’s basic vocabulary relies on an insatiability that has nothing to do with literary taste, but with the instant stimulation of desire.
He goes on to call Anthony Bourdain the “Ron Jeremy of gastronomy,” referring to him as “Anthony ‘I’ll eat anything’ Bourdain.” Indiana’s criticism of contemporary food writing mimics Molly O’Neill’s 2003 Columbia Journalism Review oft-cited (at least by me) piece “Food Porn,” but with a bit more bite. Indiana had no skin in the game of food media; he was a literary writer and critic. (You can find the review in Fire Season, a collection of his nonfiction.)
What’s interesting here to note is that what Indiana wants to find in food writing is humor, but also suffering. Aside from Bremzen, whose book is being reviewed, Bourdain, who is mocked, and Jamie Oliver, who is compared to the porn star James Deen, the only person whose food writing is praised here is M.F.K. Fisher’s, whose “best writings,” Indiana writes, “describe periods of economic depression and wartime rationing.” He’s referring to How to Cook a Wolf. The common food writing that is “pitched to well-off consumers of luxury goods” is derided.
This review has been interesting to me because (1) I’m always interested in how food writing is perceived as beneath most literary writers and (2) I think it’s silly to see food writing as only reaching grand heights when the author is chronicling a despair.
But I do think it gives us a good framing for looking at how food writing as evolved into what it is today, because what Indiana notes about what elevates the work of Fisher and von Bremzen isn’t just the despair, and I think in that there’s the real lesson: Indiana praises the presence of larger political, economic, and cultural forces in the writing itself that brings it beyond what von Bremzen herself has termed the “yum-yum” of food media.
*
Food writing as a genre is quite young, especially in the public imagination.
Ligaya Mishan writes in, “What We Write About When We Write About Food”:
Notably, “food writer” didn’t truly enter the American vernacular until the early 21st century in the wake of “Kitchen Confidential” (2000), Bourdain’s coruscating behind-the-scenes exposé of his own life as a chef running a restaurant. Although the book was in part a testament to the unseen labor that goes into every dish, the main takeaway for many readers was Bourdain’s advice never to order fish on a Monday (because it may be left over from a Friday delivery). They identified with the customers — rather like readers of Upton Sinclair’s 1906 social-realist novel, “The Jungle,” who were more outraged by the prospect of tainted food on their plates than by meat packers forced to work in filthy and dangerous conditions.
*
If I never hear about the tangerines on the radiator again, it will be too soon. M.F.K. Fisher—Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher—has become, for food writers at least, a cliché. Yet she is still the only food writer most literary people know by name and reputation: Like Indiana, or John Updike, who called her the “the poet of the appetites,” and W.H. Auden, who said, “I do not know of anyone in the United States who writes better prose.” That is, until Bourdain.
Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher was born in California in 1908 and spent a lot of her time in France—of course. Sadie Stein, writing in her essay “Serve It Forth” in the anthology Women on Food, notes that Fisher did technically invent the genre of “humanistic-gastronomic writing.”
Stein argues that Fisher’s true subject isn’t food, but herself, and that her writing doesn’t inspire her to eat—this is precisely why Indiana claims to like her writing, because it’s not just pointed at inciting hunger.
It’s an interesting argument and gets at a tension in what food writing gets to be, considering the varied desires and knowledge levels of the audience: Can food writing not make people hungry, but enliven them politically, culturally, or emotionally? As Mishan notes, readers tend to identify with customers, not workers, even when reading about labor in restaurants or meatpacking. This is a bind for the food writer who would like to consider more than just gustatory pleasures.
And so, what do you want from food writing? Can it both inspire hunger and thought?
This is excerpted from a lecture I wrote called “What Is Food Writing?” I taught it as an introduction to my recent BU gastronomy class, “The Food Essay,” which wraps up this week. I’ll be sharing my notes on teaching in a forthcoming Monday piece.
The Monday 3 p.m. EST
WEEKLY SALON
is on Discord.
All paid subscribers are invited to join the channel, titled TOMATO TOMATO—tomato, to-mah-to—where you can feel free to use the channels for book, podcast, and cooking recommendations on an ongoing basis. We have a channel, too, for co-working, as well as one for work questions—and, of course, miscellany.