November 2, 2015 Issue (The Food Issue)

This week’s Pick of the Issue – The Food Issue (no less) – is a contest between six pieces: Nicolas Niarchos’s "Bar Tab: Dutch Kills"; Calvin Trillin’s "In Defense of the True 'Cue"; Dana Goodyear’s "A New Leaf"; Nicola Twilley’s "Accounting For Taste"; Michael Specter’s "Freedom From Fries"; and Lauren Collins’s "Who's To Judge?" To help me decide the winner, I’m going to apply the “thisness” test. “Thisness,” you’ll recall, is “any detail that draws abstraction towards itself and seems to kill that abstraction with a puff of palpability, any detail that centers our attention with its concretion” (James Wood).

First up is Niarchos’s terrific "Bar Tab: Dutch Kills." It’s only two hundred and thirty-two words, but what words! It has the concentration of great poetry. Here are two excerpts:

Behind a brown door on a blasted section of Jackson Avenue, a whip-thin saloon that bears the neighborhood’s name is bringing back a version of the past, with the clink of hand-cut ice in tumblers and the waft of freshly cut orange peel.

“Refreshing? You’ll have a Penicillin”—lemon and ginger layered with Islay Scotch. “This is the Bee’s Knees”—a citrusy gin cocktail—“but I added strawberry juice.”

With the clink of hand-cut ice in tumblers and the waft of freshly cut orange peel – how fine that it is. The best food writing, for me, is grounded in details that appeal to the senses. After all, as Nicola Twilley says, in her excellent "Accounting For Taste," “Alongside sex, eating is one of the most multisensory of our activities.” 

Calvin Trillin would no doubt agree. His superb "In Defense of the True 'Cue" chronicles his visits to a variety of pungent North Carolina barbecue joints, e.g., Stamey’s, Cook’s, the Lexington Barbecue, and Allen & Son. My favorite passage is this description of a smokehouse:

The pitmaster arrives at three or four in the morning to start up the pasteboard boxes normally used as kindling. (More pasteboard boxes, flattened out, cover the meat, in order to keep the heat on and the ashes off.) He has to feed wood into the firebox continually. He has to shovel burning coals out of the firebox and spread them under racks of pork every fifteen or twenty minutes. This goes on for about ten hours. “It ain’t too awfully bad,” Brandon Cook, of Cook’s Barbecue, in Lexington, said of the routine, as we watched him arrange coals under some pork shoulders. To me, it looked bad enough to make me wonder why so many barbecue people, including Cook, choose to join the family business. Watching your father or your grandfather tend a pit for a number of years seems like something that would inspire you to go into, say, insurance sales.

I like that parenthetical “More pasteboard boxes, flattened out, cover the meat, in order to keep the heat on and the ashes off” - thisness par excellence.

Dana Goodyear’s "A New Leaf" is about creating a new cuisine based on seaweed. It’s endlessly quotable. It begins and ends spectacularly. Here’s the beginning:

I stared for a while at the placid face of Long Island Sound before I could make out Bren Smith’s farm. It was a warm, calm morning in September. Sixty buoys bobbed in rows like the capped heads of synchronized swimmers. It wasn’t until Smith cut the engine of his beat-up boat, Mookie, that I knew for sure we had arrived. The farm, a three-acre patch of sea off Stony Creek, Connecticut, starts six feet underwater and descends almost to the ocean floor. From the buoys hang ropes, and from the ropes hang broad, slippery blades of sugar kelp, which have the color and sheen of wet Kodak film.

It ends with Goodyear diving in the kelp:

Now kelp was everywhere, ochre-colored, thirty feet tall, flailing like tube dancers outside a car wash. Three bright-orange Garibaldi fish swam past, then a group of opaleye, then five kelp bass. I came up to the surface and dove down again, plugging my nose with one hand and using the other to pull myself down the length of a plant. The water was milky with kelp slough. Southern sea palms swooshed and swayed as the waves tumbled over them. At the surface, Ford held up a loose piece of kelp, shaggy and decrepit with a small holdfast—it was sporifying. “More spores,” he said. “Go, go, go.”

That kelp description – “ochre-colored, thirty feet tall, flailing like tube dancers outside a car wash” – is inspired.

Nicola Twilley’s "Accounting For Taste," is a report on fizz-enhancing cans, sonic potato chips, and other sensory marketing innovations. This is the first piece by Twilley that I’ve read. She seems right at home in this heavy-hitter Food Issue lineup. I like her use of “I,” particularly near the end, when she says,

I knew this particular trick of Spence’s—I had watched him perform it multiple times—but it still worked on me. With only a change in the background music, the deep-brown beer had gone from creamy and sweet to mouth-dryingly bitter.

Michael Specter’s "Freedom From Fries" is about fast casual dining at places like Sweetgreen, Lyfe Kitchen, Chipotle, Five Guys, and Shake Shack. Specter always gets to me with his “visit” sentences, e.g., “A few weeks ago, I drove from Chicago to the suburb of Oak Brook, where McDonald’s has its global headquarters.” I find such lines addictive. I read them and think, Okay, I’m with you. Let’s go! Over the years, I’ve vicariously accompanied Specter to a lot of interesting places – Luanda, Mount Vernon, Maharashtra, Shenzhen, on and on.

Lauren Collins’s "Who's To Judge?" is an examination of how the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list is compiled. Collins says, “The 50 Best, which is as much about a sort of competitive hedonism as it is about connoisseurship, is the restaurant guide its era demands—edible clickbait, a Baedeker’s for bucket-listers.” The list strikes me as a game for the one percent. I’m not interested. But I read the article because it’s by Collins, author of the extraordinary "Angle of Vision," and such first-rate food pieces as "Fire-Eaters," "Bread Winner," and "The King's Meal." I’m glad I stuck with it, because the last section, in which Collins describes the best restaurant she ever went to, totally redeems the piece. She writes,

The snapper came raw, sliced open and cross-hatched. We pulled chunks from the grid, like puzzle pieces, and dipped them in soy sauce. A waiter wearing a marinière and a sailor’s cap brought Almaza beer in mugs with salt on the rim. We ate hummus, then we swam. We ate sabbidej mtabbal—squid cooked in its ink—and swam again. I have no idea what the restaurant was called, but I can taste it.

And now, as I close the magazine, I ask myself what’s my takeaway? What is the Food Issue afterimage that lingers in my thoughts? I confess I find myself thinking of that layered lemon-and-ginger-Islay Scotch Penicillin cocktail at Dutch Kills. That clinches it. Here’s to you, Nicolas Niarchos! Your tantalizing "Bar Tab: Dutch Kills" is this week’s Pick of the Issue.

Postscript: Also in this week’s issue, Dan Chiasson reviews John Updike’s Selected Poems. I’ll post my comment on this absorbing piece next week.

June 1, 2015 Issue

Pleasures abound in this week’s issue – Richard Brody on Samuel Fuller’s Pickup on South Street (“Fuller’s pugnacious direction and his gutter-up view of city life romanticize both the criminal code of honor and the jangling paranoia of global plots; his hard-edged long takes depict underworld cruelty with reportorial wonder as well as moralistic dread”), Emma Allen on a cocktail called What the Doctor Ordered (“The rum made it taste like a mind-bending root beer”), Lizzie Widdicombe on Uber for helicopters (“The helicopter made its shuddering descent. Legs shook; sippy cups spilled. Marcy said, ‘Wow! I love this part!’ The pilot yelled, ‘Touchdown!’ ”), Nick Paumgarten on the end of Vin Scelsa’s “Idiots Delight” (“After ‘Goodnight Ladies,’ Scelsa signed off: ‘Thanks for your ears. I love you all’ ”) – but for me its most piquant delight is Dan Chiasson’s review of John Ashbery’s Breezeway (“These poems conjure a massive mental errata slip made up of what they almost say and nearly mean”). Chiasson is on a roll: four reviews this year, so far – all brilliant!

It would be perverse to say that I enjoyed Michael Specter’s "Extreme City," an account of a recent visit he made to Luanda. The inequality it describes is appalling. But I do relish it as writing. I like going (vicariously) where Specter goes. He’s always out and about, nosing around, seeing what’s to be seen. He says, “One afternoon, I visited Tako Koning, a Canadian petroleum geologist, who lives on the seventh floor of an older building in the center of Luanda,” and I’m right there with him. He says, “One day, I had lunch at Oon.dah, on the first floor of the Escom Center,” and I’m happy to tag along. Specter’s pieces afford the experience of first-person access. The payoff is readerly bliss.

Journeys and Visits

“Journey” and “journalism” share a linguistic root. I often think of this when I read The New Yorker. Each of its fact pieces is a sort of journey, or at least a visit. This year, the magazine took me on some amazing armchair trips: to Delaware Bay to see horseshoe crabs (Ian Frazier, “Blue Bloods); to Oaxaca, Mexico, to explore one of the deepest caves in the world  (Burkhard Bilger, “In Deep”); to the Commissariat à l’Énergie Atomique, in the south of France, to view ITER, “the most complex machine ever built” (“Raffi Khatchadourian, “A Star in a Bottle”); to the Cairo Police Academy to see the trial of twenty-one Muslim Brotherhood leaders (Peter Hessler, “Revolution On Trial”); to Berlin’s Berghain, “the most famous techno club in the world” (Nick Paumgarten, “Berlin Nights”); to a café in Kiev, as Russian tanks mass on Ukraine’s northern and eastern borders (Keith Gessen, “Waiting For War”); to Aspen, Colorado, to view the construction of the Shigeru Ban-designed Aspen Art Museum (Dana Goodyear, “Paper Palaces”); to the Studio City neighborhood of Los Angeles to visit the Soylent headquarters (Lizzie Widdicombe, “The End of Food”); to a convention center in Villa Park, a western suburb of Chicago, to attend a conference of fast-food workers (William Finnegan, “Dignity”); to the Ebola wards of the Kenema Government Hospital, Sierra Leone (Richard Preston, “The Ebola Wars”); to Washington State University’s Bread Lab, in Mount Vernon, to gain a better understanding of the role of gluten in our diet (Michael Specter, “Against the Grain”); and many more.

I’ll soon be compiling my “Best of 2014” list. Expect to see at least a few of the above-mentioned “travel” pieces on it.

Credit: The above artwork is by Istvan Banyai; it appears in the March 24, 2014 issue of The New Yorker as an illustration for Nick Paumgarten’s “Berlin Nights.”

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.

August 25, 2014 Issue

Inspiration – that “shimmer of exact details” (in Nabokov’s memorable phrase) – is one of the essential ingredients of great writing. What passages in this week’s issue bear the mark of inspiration? I find at least three:

A tiny park mouse frantically circled the flower-box perimeters. To the west, the night sky was lit up with L.E.D. slingshot helicopters, set aloft by hawkers on the Square. – Hannah Goldfield, “Tables For Two: The Pavilion Market Café”

Unlike the work of Beckett, who has obviously had a large influence on him, Kelman’s writing has almost no metaphysical dimension, as though metaphysics were offensively luxurious—brocade for the bourgeois. There is an atmosphere of gnarling paranoia, imprisoned minimalism, the boredom of survival. – James Wood, “Away Thinking About Things”

One great pleasure of the Bowl is the sense of a spell being cast, and it happened here: in the third movement of the Mahler, when a ghostly klezmer band files by, seven thousand leaned in, their red wine and grilled chicken neglected, their motionless heads etched by the light pouring off the stage. – Alex Ross, “Under the Stars”

Postscript: My admiration for Michael Specter’s work continues to grow. His “Seeds of Doubt,” in this week’s issue, is a masterly dissection of Vandana Shiva’s emotional arguments against genetically modified crops. Specter not only quotes scientific studies (e.g., “According to a recent study by the Flemish Institutue for Biotechnology, there has been a sevenfold reduction in the use of pesticide since the introduction of Bt cotton; the number of cases of pesticide poisoning has fallen by nearly ninety percent”); he also talks to farmers (“The first thing the cotton farmers I visited wanted to discuss, though, was their improved health and that of their families. Before Bt genes were inserted into cotton, they would typically spray their crops with powerful chemicals dozens of times each season”). Specter’s use of evidence to lance Shiva’s arguments is impressive. His conclusion that Shiva’s statements “are rarely supported by data, and her positions often seem more like those of an end-of-days mystic than those of a scientist” appears irrefutable. 

May 19, 2014 Issue

I know I should be more interested in Michael Specter’s subjects. But science has never been my strong suit. And his style – mostly third-person with the occasional first-person-minor passage thrown in – didn’t grab me. But recently, his authorial “I” has begun to bloom. For example, in his excellent "Climate By Numbers" (The New Yorker, November 11, 2013), he visits the Climate Corporation in San Francisco:

I picked up a cranberry-flax-oatmeal cookie and a bottle of coconut water, and was led to the Ptolemy Room, one of many glass-walled conference areas, all named for famous scientists, many of whom had some theoretical connection to the work of the Climate Corporation.

And in his "The Gene Factory" (The New Yorker, January 6, 2014), his style has moved to about midway between first-person minor and first-person major (“While I was in Shenzhen, I saw a display that described B.G.I’s plans,” “I arrived in Shenzhen the day after Typhoon Usagi had shut down much of Southeast Asia,” “I saw no lava lamps, nobody wore headphones or Crocs or moved through the building on a skateboard, a pogo stick, or a unicycle,”  “At lunch, Zhang pushed a small pot of yogurt toward me,”  “While I was in Boston, I met with Flatley”).

Specter’s absorbing "Partial Recall," in this week’s issue, continues the trend. The piece is about Daniela Schiller’s research into emotional memory. Specter visits Schiller in her office:

We were sitting in her office, not far from the laboratory she runs at Mount Sinai, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. It was an exceptionally bright winter morning, and the sun streaming through the windows made her hard to see even from a few feet away.

“Partial Recall” describes various forms of memory (“procedural memories,” “emotional memories,” “conscious, visual memories”); it talks about “consolidation” (the process by which new experiences become “imprinted onto the circuitry of the brain”) and “reconsolidation” (under certain circumstances, as a result of recall, old memory undergoes changes as it retraces the pathways in which it originated). But, for me, the most enjoyable parts are Specter’s journal-like entries, e.g., “On a particularly harsh winter morning in February, I joined Schiller and one of her postdocs, Dorothee Bentz, at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine’s Brain Imaging Core”; “Not long after my fear test, I took the train to Philadelphia to speak with Edna Foa, who is the director of the Center for the Treatment and Study of Anxiety, at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School”; and most memorably, “I had come to his [Sigmund Schiller’s] house, in this sunny spot between Ben Gurion Airport and the Mediterranean coast, for an unlikely reason: not long ago, after decades of unwavering silence, Schiller spoke about his Holocaust experience.”

Specter’s journalistic “I” isn’t in the category of such first-person major stylists as John McPhee and Ian Frazier. But it appears to be moving in that direction. And that’s a positive development. For me, the presence of the authorial “I” brings the page alive. The observer becomes a participant; reporting becomes experience. 

Postscript: Two other pieces in this week’s issue that I enjoyed enormously are Alec Wilkinson’s "A Voice from the Past" and James Wood’s "The World As We Know It." Wood’s piece touches on the homelessness theme of his brilliant “On Not Going Home” (London Review of Books, February 20, 2014), which is the subject of a review I'm currently working on for this blog. I’ll post it in the next week or so.