November 3, 2014 Issue

I find the pleasure quotient in this year’s Food Issue noticeably skimpier than in previous years. The prose is still delicious, but it’s used to express anxiety rather than food love. John Lanchester’s “Shut Up and Eat” sets the tone. He writes, “Most of the energy that we put into food, I realized, isn’t about food; it’s about anxiety. Food makes us anxious.” Other pieces in The Food Issue illustrate Lanchester’s point. Michael Specter, in his “Against the Grain,” writes about “gluten anxiety” (“Gluten anxiety has been building for years, but it didn’t become acute until 2011, when a group led by Peter Gibson, a professor of gastroenterology at Monash University and the director of the G.I. unit at the Alfred Hospital, in Melbourne, seemed to provide evidence that gluten was capable of causing illness even in people who did not have celiac disease”). Dana Goodyear, in her “Élite Meat,” says, “More than any other food, meat focuses cultural anxieties.” She goes on:

In the seventies, beef caused heart attacks; in the eighties and afterward it carried mad-cow. Recent decades have brought to light the dark side of industrial agriculture, with its hormone- and antibiotic-intensive confinement-feeding operations, food-safety scares, and torture-porn optics. The social and environmental costs, the moral burden, the threat to individual health—all seem increasingly hard to justify when weighed against a tenderloin.

And when pleasure is expressed, as it is in Adam Gopnik’s “Bakeoff,” it’s never whole-hearted. Gopnik undercuts his sensuous description of the Cronut’s taste (“intensely sweet, interestingly textured, almost unbearably rich in ‘mouth feel’ ”) with the later observation that it “sits right on the edge of being slightly sickening.” David Owen’s excellent “Floating Feasts,” an account of his cruise on the Royal Caribbean’s Oasis, includes a section on Norwalk virus.

And yet, there are pleasures in this anxiety-ridden Food Issue: Jiayang Fan’s “Bar Tab: Drunken Munkey” (“a Bollywood flick plays, the churidar-outfitted waitstaff deliver railroad chicken on placemats mapping British India”); the delightful last paragraph of Gopnik’s “Bakeoff,” in which he imagines Antonin Carême, the early nineteenth century chef, standing in line for a Cronut (“One sees him outside, waiting for hours, furiously scribbling new ideas for pièces montées—perhaps a triumphal procession in pastry, with a temple of Art and Appetite made of pretzel croissants, blessed by Love in the form of three or four crusty Cronut Cupids, smiling down, for novelty’s sake”); the superb noticing of “the milk coming out of a white rubber hose that was un-pinched when you lifted the metal paddle,” in Chang-rae Lee’s “Immovable Feast”; and – my favorite – Rivka Galchen’s wonderful description of the operation of an ice-cream bar vending machine, in her “Medical Meals” (“Mike and I would listen to each coin fall. Then came a whirring sound as the freezer chest opened slowly, like a vampire’s coffin. A robot arm descended, suctioned up glycerides on a wooden stick, then released the treasure into the dispensing slot of the machine. ‘I’m so glad I’m here,’ Mike would say”).

But none of the above is comparable to the double bliss of reading delicious prose describing delectable eats, e.g., Lauren Collins, in the 2012 Food Issue, writing that a bite of Poilâne miche “reverberates in the mouth for a few seconds after you’ve swallowed it, as though the taste buds were strings” (“Bread Winner,” The New Yorker, December 23, 2012). Next year, less anxiety and more food love, please.

November 22, 2010 Issue

Of the various thematic issues that the magazine publishes each year – The Money Issue, The Travel Issue, The Fashion Issue, The Technology Issue, etc. – my favorite is The Food Issue. Why? I think it has a lot to do with my love of description – sensual description, description of process, description of place – that is often abundantly present (sometimes in heady combination) in food writing. Here are just a few examples – all from previous issues of The Food Issue – of what I’m talking about:

There were hints of tobacco and molasses in it, black cherries and dark chocolate, all interlaced with the wood’s spicy resin. It tasted like some ancient elixir that the Inca might have made (Burkhard Bilger, “Extreme Beer," The New Yorker, November 24, 2008).

Earlier this summer, I accompanied Isabella on a trip to visit the old pear tree. We drove into a mountainous region above the town of Piertraunga, a land of thick woods with small farms in the valleys. Stone houses where the landowners had once lived, many of them now abandoned, sit on the tops of hills. The old orchards are gone, but the landscape is dotted with a few rugged arboreal survivors: almonds, olives, and pears (John Seabrook, “Renaissance Pears," The New Yorker, September 5, 2005).

With its rustic, nicely browned crust and the crunchy protruding brambles that developed as the dripping baked on, the cut sekacz revealed a buff-gold cake that had seductively dense sweet-smoky and slightly ripe overtones (Mimi Sheraton, “Spit Cake,” The New Yorker, November 23, 2009).

When Joel cracked eggs, his fingers were as loose and precise as a jazz guitarist’s. He held one egg between his thumb and his first two fingers, another curled against his palm. He rapped the first egg on the rim of the pan, twisted it into hemispheres, and opened it as cleanly as if it were a Faberge Easter egg. As the spent shell fell into the trash, he shuttled the second egg into position, as if pumping a rifle. He was proud of this little move. It saved him about a second versus having to grab an egg from the bin. If he cracked six thousand eggs a week, the move saved him about an hour; in a year, it saved him more than a week (Burkhard Bilger, “The Egg Men,” The New Yorker, September 5, 2005).

I provide these examples to give some idea of what I look for, what I appreciate, when I read food writing. I regret to say that I found the servings of it rather meager in this week’s The Food Issue. I confess I merely skimmed Burkhard Bilger’s revolting “Nature’s Spoils.” It appears Bilger has reverted to his pre-New Yorker "Noodling For Flatheads" grossness. I found the introductory paragraphs of “Lauren Collins’s “Burger Queen” unpalatable. Am I the only country hick who doesn’t know who Jay-Z is? Should I be interested in a “gastropub” where the Jay-Zs of this world get special privileges and the great unwashed rest of us have to line up? The Spotted Pig’s elitism turned me off, and I quit reading about it. Later, I reluctantly went back and finished the piece. There are one or two felicitous sentences in it (e.g., “When Bloomfield peels a carrot, she holds it out in the palm of her hand, like sheet music”), but none of the succulent detail about food, kitchen reality, or geographic place that I crave. The New Orleans roadhouse in Calvin Trillin’s “No Daily Specials” is more my speed. But Trillin’s piece lacks zest, seems bland. I would’ve appreciated less information about who sat with him at his table, and more about what Mosca’s Chicken a la Grande actually tastes like. As for Jane Kramer’s “Down Under” – there isn’t an inspired sentence in the whole thing, unless you get your thrills from lines like “Late last spring, I asked Nach Waxman to give me a capsule history of root vegetables.” Laura Shapiro’s “The First Kitchen” is straight history written entirely in the third person, and my eyes could not skim-read it (and be done with it) fast enough.

That leaves Chang-Rae Lee’s memoir “Magical Dinners.” I’m pleased to report that it’s a wonderful piece of writing. Lee’s details – which include the parquet wood flooring in his family’s New Rochelle apartment (“its slick surface faintly lemony and then bitter, like the skins of peanuts”), the light-gray leatherette (“stippled like the back of a lizard”) that covers the seats of their Beetle, the result of prying open the roof of a Hot Wheels car with a hammer (“the enamel paint flaking off from the twisting force and gilding my fingertips”), gu jeol pan (“a nine-compartment tray of savory fillings from which delicate little crêpes are made”) – beautifully accrue; his food descriptions are delectable:

… but always there is a fried egg, sunny-side up, cooked in dark sesame oil that pools on the surface of the bubbled-up white in the pattern of an archipelago; try one sometime laced with soy and sweet chili sauce along with steamed rice, the whole plate flecked with toasted nori. It’ll corrupt you for all time.

“Magical Dinners” is delightful! It has whetted my appetite for more of Chang-Rae Lee’s factual writing. Until now, I’d associated him only with fiction. I hope he continues in the nonfiction vein. He appears to have a knack for it.

March 15, 2010 Issue

I’m fascinated by the strategies that great writers use to make fictional reality appear real – sometimes so real that it appears to be, in John Updike’s memorable phrase, “the thing itself.” One such strategy, powerfully advocated by the realist critic James Wood, is free indirect style. Wood, in his How Fiction Works (2008), describes its effect: “The narrative seems to float away from the novelist and take on the properties of the character, who now seems to ‘own’ the words. The writer is free to inflect the reported thought, to bend it around the character’s own words.” Wood has long admired this style. In “What Chekhov Meant by Life” (included in Wood’s 1999 essay collection The Broken Estate), Wood says of Chekhov, “He sees the world not as a writer might see it but as one of his characters might.” In “At Home in the World” (The New Yorker, February 5, 2001), he says, “In Tolstoy’s fiction, as in Chekhov’s, reality appears as it might appear not to a writer but to the characters.” At the same time as Wood has advanced this notion of fictional reality, he has argued against (rightly, in my opinion) magical realism (see “Toni Morrison’s False Magic” in The Broken Estate), and what he aptly calls “hysterical realism,” a style of writing “not to be faulted because it lacks reality – the usual charge – but because it seems evasive of reality while borrowing from realism itself” (see “Hysterical Realism” in his 2004 collection The Irresponsible Self).

Now, in a piece called “Keeping It Real,” in this week’s issue of the magazine, Wood trashes “the rather lazy stock-in-trade of mainstream realist fiction,” including “such basic narrative grammar” as “the cinematic sweep, followed by the selection of small, telling details,” “the preference for the concrete over the abstract,” vivid brevity of character-sketching,” and several other mainstays of conventional fictional narrative. “Keeping It Real” is a review of two realist works: David Shields’s Reality Hunger: A Manifesto and Chang-Rae Lee’s new novel, The Surrendered. Wood pans them both. He says of Shields’s book, which is an argument for realism, that, “His complaints about the tediousness and terminality of current fictional convention are well-taken.” But he goes on to say that Shields’s “unexamined promotion of what he insists on calling “reality” over fiction, is highly problematic.” Wood provides only one extended quote from Reality Hunger, and based on my reading of it, I would have to say that it’s hard to judge whether Wood’s use of “rant” and “imprecise and overwrought” to describe the book is fair or not.

With respect to the other book under review, Lee’s The Surrendered, Wood provides only snippets of quotation. So again it’s difficult for me to form my own impression regarding the quality of its writing. Apparently it’s a far-ranging narrative (Manchuria, 1934, the Korean War, 1950, New York City, 1986, and ending with a pilgrimage to Italy). Wood says it is “utterly conventional,” “stagy, even bookish, a livid libretto.” But he also says it has many scenes that are “piercingly evoked” and that it is “spacious in design and reach.” In what are perhaps the most memorable words of the review, Wood calls The Surrendered “this slabbed magnificence.” He doesn’t say whether it or any part of it is written in free indirect style. Given Wood’s intense fondness for such a style, I suspect that if there were any evidence of it in the book, Wood would have mentioned it, and that he wouldn’t have been so quick to condemn the novel as “utterly conventional.” I confess I’m not familiar with Lee’s writing. But Wood’s review has aroused my curiosity about it. I see there are several stories by Lee in The New Yorker archive. I intend to access one or two of them and check out for myself what kind of fiction writer he is.