“A Slice of Life: Contemporary Writers on Food” is a collection of essays edited by Bonnie Maranca and published in 2003. A sumptuous smorgasbord of writings about food, literature, society and culture, the widely diverse contributions demonstrate how they are all inextricably linked to how we are today, how we arrived here and how we might negotiate an uncertain future. Maranca has assembled a stellar cast of contributors, a cross-section of luminaries from many genres. Featured are legendary names such as MFK Fisher, Roland Barthes, Umberto Eco, Alice Waters, Claudia Roden, Michael Pollan, Julia Child, Isabel Allende, Susan Sontag, Anthony Bourdain, Laurie Colwin, Elizabeth David, Wendell Berry and many more.

It is a veritable feast of ideas that spark off each other and combine to give us a multilayered rendering of the role food plays in every aspect of life, how it changes over time and in relation to place, history, civilisation, fashion and the inevitable influences of politics, philosophy, art and science.

What drew me to this book was the introduction, written by Betty Fussell and titled “Eating My Words”. At the time I was debating what to call this blog and as well as suggesting a combination of both culinary and literary nourishment, the name sounded catchy. Betty Fussell is renowned in the fields of both writing and food, having been awarded the IACP’s Jane Grigson Award, Food Art Magazine’s Silver Spoon Award, James Beard Foundation’s Journalism Award as well as being listed in Who’s Who in Food & Beverage.

In an argument far more erudite and eloquent than any I could compose, she defines the philosophy that gave rise to this blog, which is that knowledge and communication are inextricably linked to language and eating, to the point where “both the particularities of food and the universality of hunger keep the speaker or writer, rooted in common ground.”

“Human life,” she writes “is so bound up with food .. to take a slice of life at any point is to cut into a full loaf, a pie, a roast, a terrine of meaning. Personal and cultural memories are so integral to eating and speaking that simply to name a food is to invoke the lifetime of a person – and a culture”.

The book is divided into six sections – Place Settings, Taste Memory, Theatres of Food, Want, Savouring Life and Body and Soul, a structure that seems arbitrary, considering that many of the essay subjects could just as well have belonged to another category.

It’s virtually impossible to do credit to all or even a decent proportion of this book (it’s around 400 pages long). Rather like hovering with an empty plate before a groaning table of tempting dishes, indecision overwhelms. If forced to pick a favourite – something so sinfully irresistible I’d have to devour it instantly – I doubt even that would be possible. Failing that, here is a selection, a degustation if you like, of offerings I found memorable. If you read the book, you’ll no doubt choose differently but it’s certain you’ll find plenty of food for thought (if you’ll excuse the pun).

“Preface: The Theatre of Food“, Bonnie Maranca

Writing about her Italian family background, where, in contrast to the canned and processed food Americans were eating at the time, Maranca was brought up on traditional Italian cuisine, like spaghetti, olive oil and fresh salads, she remarks how the flavor and the color of her grandmother’s sauce and the dishes she served it in remain vivid in her mind, something she attributes to the ‘stirring of taste memory’. A universal experience, this phenomenon is responsible for the associations of certain tastes with particular life experiences. While we tend to put it down to sentimental nostalgia (our personal remembrances of things past), researchers have now discovered there is in fact a functional link between the two brain regions that control taste memory – the insular cortex which stores memories of new tastes and the hippocampus which formulates a memory of the place and time of the experience. All very interesting but somehow thinking of it as the Proustian effect is far more pleasing. Taste memory is given its own section in the book, but it’s also threaded inevitably through many other stories. For anyone interested in learning more about this psychic “quirk” we all share, John S. Allen’s book “The Omnivorous Mind: Our Evolving Relationship with Food” explores it in detail.

“Holiday Meals” by David Mas Masumoto

Brought up in a Japanese immigrant family David Mas Masumoto reflects on his mother’s attempts to prepare traditional Thanksgiving and Christmas meals and looks at the how the blending of two cultural traditions (Japanese and American) plays out in holiday celebrations. “Traditions must evolve,” he writes, “otherwise they become acts without meaning – fossils from dead civilisations, relics of a past that only reminds us of where we were, not where we’re going.”

“Writing in Restaurants” by Jay Parini

This piece evokes Paris for me and the cafés like Les Deux Magots and the Café de Flore where expatriate Americans congregated in the 20’s, 30’s and 40’s scribbling, drinking, smoking, philosophising and making history. Parini’s ideal for “the right place to work” is not necessarily Paris, just somewhere he can sit “undisturbed for hours on end with books and manuscripts piled up around me”. Quiet solitude, for him, is unconducive to the muse. It’s not so much café society he craves as somewhere he can be aware of “the distant clatter of dishes, the purr of conversation, the occasional interruption of a friend” – a kind of “white noise” that provides a warm blanket of connection to others. “Writing”, he says, “is a desperately lonely activity” and the non-intrusive background noise of a restaurant or café softens the edges, provides “a human web”. It gives him “a delicious sense of being alone within a communal context”. I know what he means. Libraries are good for this too, I’ve found, especially university libraries where, whenever you lift your head in anticipation of the next lightning bolt of wisdom, you see all around you, but at a civilised remove, other souls similarly engrossed in the eternal search. 

“Don’t Squeeze the Tomatoes” by Charles Simic

What better food to write about than the tomato? And not just any tomato, but the perfect tomato. To the extent that we can achieve perfection in anything, the tomato in its prime comes close. Vine ripened, just picked, warm from the sun, the full round redness of it a promise of the succulence within – a far remove from the pale facsimiles on offer at the supermarket or slapped in the middle of a sandwich. The difference between the latter and the ideal, Simic says, “is like the difference between reading about sex in a high school pamphlet and actually doing it.”

Taste memory of tomatoes past takes Simic back to his boyhood when his mother would bring tomatoes back from the country for sauce making, so many that every available surface in the house, including the piano, was taken up with them. Before they made it into the sauce, Simic indulged himself unrestrainedly. “I’d devour them, the way one devours an apple. I’d take a bite, sprinkle salt on the deep red pulp and then take another voracious bite.”

Biting into a ripe tomato is one of the sensuous joys of life that I too discovered as a child. In a good example of taste memory, reading this article catapulted me back to the kitchen of my best friend who lived next door. Our favourite treat was nicking the freshly delivered loaf of bread from her parents’ breadbin. To confess I remember the days when bakers delivered bread to the doorstep proves I’m as much a relic as the horse and cart but being coy about my age at my age is pointless. Just outside our front doors sat metal tins into which the baker placed the bread, naked as the moment it came out of the oven, no modest sash of tissue paper around its middle, no stifling cellophane or plastic covering (heaven forbid), just the warm, faintly steaming yeasty scented loaf. Joan and I, fresh loaf in hand, would hack off a couple of thick slices, slather them with butter then top them with slices of tomato fresh from the veggie garden. Generously showered with salt, this humble treat was irresistible. It was something to do with the combination of the crunch of the crust, the softness of the bread, the richness of the butter and the luscious salty sweetness of the tomato, an effect only achievable with the freshest white bread, the creamiest butter and just picked tomatoes. We didn’t know it then, but we were trailblazers in the adoption of the Italian bruschetta into Australian cuisine.

Simic goes on to recall a loathsome sounding example of science shouldering its way into the vegetable garden – a creation called the FLAVR SAVR tomato, the first genetically engineered whole food to be licensed for human consumption. Simic’s article was first published in 1994, around the time when the FLAVR SAVR was about to be launched in stores. Engineered not to rot, it was being touted by its manufacturers as a miracle, equivalent to “turning water into wine”. Whatever its presumed benefits, Simic is violently opposed to the concept. “A ripe tomato out of season is a marvel. A deathless tomato is a blasphemy.” The search for perfection, Simic notes, whether the divine perfection St Thomas Aquinas aspired to, or tomatoes that never die, is not only fruitless but ripe with opportunities for “humanity to stick its nose where it doesn’t belong”. As succinctly worded a critique of genetic engineering as I’ve come across.

“Plight Du Jour” by Jay Jacobs

Jay Jacobs was Gourmet Magazine’s restaurant reviewer from 1972 to 1986. A food writer of some repute, he notes with ironic bemusement the innocuousness of this, given his upbringing. Although fancying themselves masters of the epicurean and culinary arts, his parents were anything but. His father, “inhaled Russian caviar, Cuban cigars, old cognac and ripely odoriferous French cheeses on the rare occasions he was solvent” and his mother “could boil water without noticeably diminishing its flavor, but that was about the extent of her culinary skills”. From this inauspicious start, his gastronomic life “took a turn for the better” when at the age of ten he went to live on a farm in the Pocona Mountains of eastern Pennsylvania. Here he “got his first lessons not only in how real foods smelled and tasted, but in the genesis and nurture and often brutal realities of their production and preparation for the kitchen”.

The experience which he described as “a revelation … with its straightforward, uncomplicated flavors of earth and air and sunshine and rainwater” shaped him. He came to not only appreciate the glories of food, but to understand the art of food writing, a skill he took to an unsurpassed level, as can be seen in this lyrical passage – “Judiciously applied quantities of gently sauteed garlic … lent subtle pungency to the orchestration, as did olive oil, oregano, rosemary, mushrooms, tomatoes and onions. The dish resonated with a vibrancy I could no more have imagined than I could a previously unknown color. It contrasted textures and aromas I’d never before experienced; it was the mucilaginous product of elderly, flavorsome flesh, gently braised on the bone until it fell away at the touch of a fork, releasing clouds of seductive perfume.”

“From Our Kitchen to Your Table” by Anthony Bourdain

Best described as a cautionary tale, this is a word to the unwise from one who knows. Bourdain, who worked as a chef in New York for ten years before rocketing to fame as an author, TV host and celebrity sans pareil, here throws the kitchen door wide open so diners can see for themselves just what goes on in the culinary underbelly and more importantly what goes into the dishes they’re eating, news that may come as a nasty surprise. Although directed at New Yorkers, his disclosures no doubt apply to any big city. There are many eyebrow-raising revelations that will make you think twice about ordering fish on any days other than Tuesday to Saturday, choosing chicken, ever going anywhere for brunch, or eating in a restaurant where the owner, chef and a “bored-looking waiter” are sitting among empty tables talking about soccer or football or doing anything but being rushed off their feet catering to a hungry crowd. It’s funny, witty, and very much worth reading.

It was in fact the bones of this article that propelled Bourdain to fame. In a tale certain to either raise resentment or inspire struggling writers, after many futile attempts to make it as an author, his mother suggested he submit his essay about working in kitchens to The New Yorker. They loved it and published it as “Don’t Eat Before Reading This” in the next issue. This led to a publisher asking him to make it into a book, which he did. “Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly” was published in 2000 and became an instant bestseller. And the rest was history.

A few quick “sound bites”

From “Naturally” by Michael Pollan (Supermarket Pastoral)

“Just look at the happy Vermont cow on that carton of milk, wreathed in wildflowers like a hippie at her wedding.”

From “The Crisis in French Cooking” by Adam Gopnik

“After several months of painstaking, tie-staining research, I think that the real problem lies in the French genius for laying the intellectual foundation for a revolution that takes place somewhere else.”

“… the insistence on national, or local, tradition – on truth to terroirs – can give even to the best new Paris restaurants a predictability that the good new places in London and New York don’t share”

“A fossilized metropolitan tradition should have been replaced by a modernized metropolitan tradition, yet what took its place was sentimental nationalism.”

“It was the invasion of American fast food, as much as anything, that made the French turn back to their own tradition and, for the first time, see it as something in need of self-conscious protection.”

From “In Memory’s Kitchen” by Cara De Silva

“Food is who we are in the deepest sense, and not because it becomes blood and bone. Our personal gastronomic traditions – what we eat, the foods and foodways we associate with the rituals of childhood, marriage, and parenthood, moments around the table, celebrations – are critical components of our identity. To recall them in desperate circumstances is to reinforce a sense of self and to assist us in doing battle to preserve it.”

From “Last Year I Ate” by Nigel Slater

“Deciding on a diet is only marginally more difficult than choosing a chocolate from a box of Black Magic. “

“Virtually none of the diets I came across were even remotely compatible with good eating.”

From “Edible Écriture” by Terry Eagleton

“Words issue from the lips as food enters them, though one can always take one’s words back by eating them. And writing is a processing of raw speech just as cooking is a transformation of raw materials.”

“Fast food is like cliché or computerese, an emotionless exchange or purely instrumental form of discourse; genuine eating combines pleasure, utility and sociality, and so differs from a take-away in much the same way that Proust differs from a bus ticket.”

“Food is what makes up our bodies, just as words are what constitute our minds, and if body and mind are hard to distinguish, it is no wonder that eating and speaking should continually cross over in metaphorical exchange.”

Conclusion

Trying to take small bites of this book is an exercise in self-restraint. Like sharing a luscious dessert, the temptation to scoff it all down in one piggish gobble is hard to resist. It’s more a book to be dipped into every now and then, when the mood takes you. Or, if you’re a food writer, as a source of inspiration for your own work. And of inspiration, there is an abundance.