The End of Something? Food and Food Writing

“…I feel like I’m comin’ in at the end of something.”

We’ve been vacationing for several weeks, and I have done no writing at all. I have, however, done a lot of reading, and visited numerous bookshops and libraries in the state of Washington and in British Columbia—the far upper corner of our country and the lower corner of Canada, what has seemed like approximately as far away as possible from my own usual haunts while still being in North America.

One of the joys of vacation is allowing myself to swallow books virtually whole. Or maybe I am swallowed by them—I escape into their worlds. Apparently I even get a particular look on my face—at one point last week I was stirring pasta over my camp stove with one hand and holding my book with the other as I read, and my husband burst into laughter at a single glance my way.

As I write, I am flying back across the country, thinking about the trip and about my many literary adventures. Andrea Barrett’s stories of scientists and travelers in her Archangel. Philip Roth’s tortured factory owner, beauty queen wife, and their rebellious daughter-of-the-sixties in American Pastoral. The series of post-Soviet emigres trying to make a life in the United States, or giving into nostalgia and betrayal in their former homeland, in the work of the young Georgian-Russian-American author Sana Krasikov.

But the last book I picked up—one I haven’t quite even begun yet—was recommended for me by a writer friend originally from California. Given what I’ve been writing about in this blog—food and culture and travel—she thought I’d enjoy the work of M.F.K. Fisher.

Russell Books, Fort Street, Victoria: "Upstairs"

So in my last weeks before the new academic year—a year that looms so near I began to dream about colleagues and students, even while camping in the Pacific Northwest—I will explore some of M.F.K. Fisher’s writings in her Art of Eating, an “omnibus” of five of her books, which I bought at the best bookstore in Victoria, Russell Books (a store so truly fabulous my children visited it twice and would happily have spent many hours there). Though the volume is a big fat tome, I couldn’t resist its “50^th Anniversary Edition!” calling to me from the cover. I had intended to pick it up at a library, but now will be able to peruse my own copy at leisure.

I have the feeling it will be a long friendship. Or so I hope. As I contemplate what kind of writing I intend to do in the coming years, writing about food and culture and travel is immensely appealing, and M.F.K. Fisher may turn out to be my guru.

Steve reminds me of how ironic this is. When I first met him and his family, almost twenty years ago, I was fresh out of graduate school and ploughing my way along the tenure track—not a time of gastronomic adventurousness. I had learned to cook in a Soviet dormitory on a hot plate, where dinner consisted of whatever vegetables I had come upon in the course of my day—mostly potatoes, onions, maybe frozen brussels sprouts, imported from Poland—boiled in a pot with water and given the somewhat elevated name of “soup.” Oh, with butter added—as a lacto-ovo vegetarian living in Moscow in 1988 I learned that butter has significant nutritional value, and I have sworn by it ever since.

Soup and bread was an elaborate meal for me in those days, especially once I started working—a Snickers bar and a pot of coffee to kill the hunger pangs were more frequent, as I sat late in my office preparing lectures and wondering when I would find time to get to the academic writing that would ensure my further employment.

My romance with Steve, in fact, began with food. He was horrified at my Snickers bar diet (though I made the argument that the nuts fulfilled my protein needs). He convinced me that he cooked dinner every night and needed the company, so I would take a break from my office to head over to his apartment, planning to return to my books after supper. The company was great, and the food was better than my own efforts, and so we became friends.

A few years later I met his family, and I became convinced that their interest in food was more of a fetish. The first night, I sat through dinner quietly, and afterward I had to ask: “so is that really what you do? You eat together, and talk about meals you’ve eaten in the past, and discuss meals you might have in the future?” “Sure,” he replied. “What’s so strange about that?”

I am coming to “food writing” late in the game. If M.F.K. Fisher was a pathbreaker, there are now millions of books and magazines and blogs in the Anglo-American world that focus on food. “Food itself,” I recently read somewhere, “is the current cultural currency.” (A sentence which strikes you—until you think about “current” and “currency,” which is simply lazy, and until you make the corrective: “Food writing is the cultural currency of the moment.”)

I take solace in a quote from one of the many introductions to The Art of Eating: “Where is the tongue, the palate that is truly grown up before thirty?” wrote Clifton Fadiman in 1954.

I left Snickers bars behind when I entered my thirties: a decade which at the time I declared as my “outdoorswoman decade,” in the early years of which I bought a pair of hiking boots and a backpacking tent and learned to camp. My goal—of hiking and camping through my thirties, exploring the wilderness once I’d mastered the tenure track—was slightly derailed by the arrival of two children when I was 34. Instead of an outdoorswoman decade, it became a maternal decade. And that is when my impatience with food turned into a fascination with nourishment.

Maybe I’m coming in at the end of something, as Tony Soprano famously said. 

But maybe I’m making my own way into a new era, having learned many things along the way—from Steve’s family and my own, from my Russian friends and my American ones, and from my children themselves. Food writing as fetish? It could be a thing.