The Food Writing Life

Back in December, Dave Eggers, writer and writing instructor, wrote a short opinion piece in the Washington Post discussing “ the writing life”. Echoes of both Joan Didion and George Orwell’s essay, ‘Why I Write’ came to mind. However, Eggers’ piece was a little less serious and leavened with humor. No doubt, he, like Orwell and Didion, is serious about his craft but he also acknowledges the hiccups and doldrums that grace his “writing days”. Rather, than brood, he muses on the trials and tribulations of being a writer. How it is not “easy come, easy go”, when it comes to constructing the perfectly powerful sentence, to completing an article (on time), or even finishing a novel that one day will be considered a tour de force.

 

Reading Eggers piece made me laugh as well as reminded me of some enduring truths that exist amongst the writing milieu – namely our daily routines. While I would like to think that I sit pensively at a desk or a café all day long constructing words of wisdom about life, its own trials and tribulations, inanities and tragedies, fleeting romances,  implications and greater significance, I am afraid I do not. And with food writing, I find it even more difficult since the distance between the plate and pen are often out of reach.

 

This is the trick with food writing and one that I constantly battle with…. daily. Since I am not cooking, tending my garden (I have one plant), milking cows or herding sheep everyday but sitting on my derrière chained to a desk, thinking about food and its greater implications, all the while I sip copious amounts of tea and coffee and even occasionally forget to eat!

 

Then I sit back and think the whole food-writing thing is a farce and I, myself, am a faux food writer who over intellectualizes food rather than gets her hands dirty.

 

“Oh shit! I missed the farmer’s market because I was working against a deadline, meeting with an editor, or in general have too much work to do”

 

I find these “hiccups” part of my quotidian writing life and it worries me. I call food my muse or métier when in fact it could not be farther from me. This is madness, I think, and I should just quit the whole thing and be honest with myself.

 

But I am honest with myself and therein lies the trick of being a good food writer: honesty - that word that every writer should put under his or her pillow at night whether they write about food, the Middle East, or short story fiction.

 

Honesty must be part of a food writer’s daily gruel and grind. If there is integrity in your writing, if you are able to look the dead fish in the eye, gut it, poach it, and eat it, then your writing will not suffer. Actually, it will go in the opposite direction, making various connections from the experience of your first day in the Valle D'Aosta with strangers who quickly became friends, the trout monger at the foot of the mountain, who with a diligent whap whap and strong iron rod, handed you four fresh and recently departed river trout, and how you learned to gut a fish and to not squeal, to eat it, and to witness  a culinary wizard ask for the skins so she could make fume and to think that this is really cool.

Suddenly, this memory will surface, after your fifth cup of coffee one fine day or depending on the time, a stiff glass of wine. The important part is whether you remember it not just vividly but honestly. This will allow you to convey some truth about that unique experience rather than just paint a pretty and appetizing picture.

 

And this is the real merit and pleasure of taste when it comes to food and probably a food writer’s best ally besides appetite: experience - how we remember things, how we make them our own and how we continually draw upon them and incorporate them into our daily writing life whether we are sometimes cognizant of it or not. Experience has that Proustian tick working its way under our bellies and into our subconscious allowing something to catch and take hold. 

 

Here, you ( i.e. the food writer) begin to see how honesty and experience work together and function as the pillars of your daily writing life. They allow you to go beyond the daily motions of life and especially as a food writer, they allow you to go beyond your taste buds, down through your gut until they begin to rest somewhere in the back of your head until one glorious writing day, this small sliver from the montage of your strange and ever-evolving life will resurface oddly re-grounding and reconnecting you to the plate, even if you happen to be sipping coffee and indulging in cigarettes.

 

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