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March 30, 2005
Everything is conspiring to fuel (I almost said "feed" but then felt corny but then felt that I had to say that I almost said it anyway) my current obsession with food writing. I have Many Deep Toughts on John Thorne and Patience Gray, to be published at a later (but not to worry, not too much later) date, and now, via aldaily, a link to this article in The New Yorker, which is to my mind interesting less for its book reviews (although I want to read them all now) than for its profundities on the subject of food writing, including a distinction between the "mock epic" and "mystical microcosmic" schools and this passage, with which the article closes:
The metaphors of food are so closely tied to our sensations that they must be elevated to ring out. That would explain why good food writing, by cook or critic, has been so expansive in theme. All animals eat. An animal that eats and thinks must think big about what it is eating not to be taken for an animal. This largeness of vision (�I write of hunger,� Fisher said flatly, when tasked with writing about food) seems to have become harder to achieve, perhaps because the subject has become so specialized.There is too much food in most food writing now�too much food and too little that goes further. When Liebling and Fisher wrote, they gestured from plate and glass to something bigger, outside the dining room�to France, or to appetite itself�and the gesture carried instantly, because there was little else in the room to absorb it. These days, the old twin circles (the family around the table, the cosmos beyond) have been supplemented by so many other circles of attitude that the writer points from the plate to�another writer. Like so many other subjects, food writing is constricted within these ever-tighter circles of opinion, when what we want from it is ever-broadening metaphors of common life. Metaphor is social and shares the table with the objects it intertwines and the attitudes it reconciles. Opinion, like the Michelin inspector, dines alone.
Posted by Miki at March 30, 2005 03:08 PM