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Food & Fiction - A Great Event

Food & Fiction – A Great Event

Last Wednesday, four New York authors and an assembly of students, food enthusiasts, the curious and the inspired met for a panel discussion of food and fiction, at the College of Technology in Brooklyn. The readings and topics discussed could not have been more interesting.

Kate Christensen read from her novel, The Epicure’s Lament , the story of a man whose relationship with food defines him in life and possibly death. I don’t want to spoil the novel for those who seek it out (and I do highly recommend it for those out there who love food and fiction, and who need a beach read). But I will say that those who love MFK Fisher will certainly love Christensen’s writing, especially the passages that connect the main character, Hugo Whittier, to the food he is preparing, or thinking about preparing. As a novelist, her prose has been compared to that of Nabokov,no light praise. It was a feast for the ears.

Paulette Licitra, author, chef and editor of Alimentum: The Literature of Food, read from a previously published, longer piece that again connected food and passion, in this case, the denial of food as part of the
denial of passion and therefore sin. In our fat/thin, excess/deprivation world, Licitra’s story took us back into the time when desire was a despicable state, and food was often to be blamed.

Tim Stark, farmer & author, read from his creative non-fiction essay recounting how he became NYC’s most famous purveyor of sublimely beautiful heirloom tomatoes. Not only are his tomatoes the best in town (really) , his essay was just as good as his tomatoes, his prose just as sublime. He is a great writer.

Fred Kaufmann, CUNY Professor of English and author of the upcoming non-fiction tome A Short History of the American Stomach, (due out in stores in May 2007) threw a wrench into the clockworks as he read from the chapter ‘Puritan Puke’. An avowed anti- foodie, Kaufmann took us into the digestive track of the American psyche, all the way to our Puritan roots. Dissecting the food we eat, don’t eat and often purge, he tied together the long history of “the American bounty” and how Americans from the time of the Puritans until the present day relate and consume that bounty.

A lively discussion ensued – what is it that we expect from
food? Why do we seemingly worship it and hate it at the same time? When is too much too much? Why do we eat the foods we eat? What is future of food? Who makes the food? Why are we so fat in America?

Kaufmann, who ties many of our current food habits, including gorging and purging, to the Puritan past was blunt. Like it or not, we all have a little Puritan in us. Body fat, once a sign of the sin of gluttony, is now a sign of poverty – yet both retain the notion that the individual is morally responsible for his/her condition. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps, purge the devil and go on a diet.

Licitra countered that some of us enjoy food the way that others enjoy art and music, an idea that permeates her work. But the fact is that food is essential for living, and the way we write about it reflects how we think about it.

For Christensen, as part of her character’s ties to life, food is the staff of life, albeit a sometimes very dressed-up staff. All the writers agreed that food is part of the mystery of life and reflects our connection to something beyond life, even if we are not always aware of how we react to it.

For Stark, food is real and tactile and alive; after all, he grows it from seed, nurtures it, harvests it, transports it and then sells it – an ancient occupation that seems alarmingly modern when one is in the local grocery store looking at pink tomatoes and wondering why they are not red.

While many in the audience seemed comfortable about their relationships to the food they eat, for Kaufmann food remains a conundrum, a puzzling aspect of human social behavior that we in America use to telegraph our beliefs and our often schizophrenic social mores. And that is precisely why authors often turn to food as a metaphor for the time, as part of the rich tapestry of life, as though longing for a lost love or regretting a current one. Food evokes primal passions in all of us.

A Long History of Satire: Writers from the past, such as Petronius, used food to construct social satires; who can forget the descriptions of the food at an excessive Roman banquet, with its imported figs and stuffed dormice. Modern satires abound; in the animated film The Triplets of Belleville, the body types seen lolling and undulating about the metropolis are certainly a blunt commentary on what is now an acceptable body image in the US, those obese body types that are shocking to almost everyone else in the world. How did the Puritans get so fat, and how have writers dealt it over time?

As someone who comments constantly on the food habits of New Yorkers, I had to ask myself what is my relationship to food? I am obsessed . But why?Part of it stems from having once suffered from exposure severe enough to almost kill me, during which time I fantasized about tater tots and tacos and lemonade and roast chicken and chili and myriad other dishes. But part of it comes from the unnecessarily large family I am part of, which assembled always around the stove or the grill or the campfire and cooked food as an activity. We had gardens and fruit trees and sometimes a goat.Collecting and preparing the food were part of the process. We never ate pre- packaged snack food, unless we were at someone else’s house. That is, not until I was in High School and my parents, busy with work and now flush with more disposable income, began purchasing things in boxes and cans and cartons, items that we now know are filled with high fructose corn syrup, palm oil and sundry other nasty ingredients. I escaped unharmed, but my younger brother, who was practically raised on empty calories, ballooned one summer into a shape never before seen in out family. My grandmother put him on a “Mediterranean diet”, grilled meat, salads and water – no soda, no snack cakes, no French
fries.He regained normal size, but some of his friends weren’t so lucky.

The evening at the College of Technology taught us all that our food choices are complex and emotional and are determined by a variety of factors. Fiction writers use this to evoke in the reader deep, primal emotions. And we should all read more.Read, people!

Tags:   diets, fiction, fred kaufmann, high fructose corn syrup, kate chistensen, paulette licitra, stomach, tim stark