Eating as Memory, Writing as Record

It’s as simple as a broken baguette with goat cheese. Sautéed eggplant smashed with roasted garlic, basil, and sundried tomatoes. Bright yellow curry vivid against a white porcelain bowl. It is a smoothed tablecloth, the snapping of a plum’s skin under your teeth, your mother’s hands. It is sensation, communication, sociology. It is me remembering you every time I bite into a grilled cheese sandwich.

Food has the ability to open lines of communication, comfort, heal, and nourish. As famous French epicure Anthelme Brillat-Savarin said, “Tell me what you eat, I’ll tell you who you are.” What we eat and how we eat it is symbolic of where we came from, our value system, our personality, even how we relate to others. I write about food because it is a comfort and a pleasure, and because writing about food is writing my memory.

I’ve been putting pen to paper for as long as I can remember. I recently found a notebook of some of my earliest stories, and even then, my future writing faults and strengths peek through misspellings and story lines which read like Nancy Drew on vacation with the Boxcar Children. I’m a sucker for commas in a series and alliteration. I may edge on excessive, Dickensian sentences. I’m horrible at plot and worse at dialogue. But description. Exposition. Rhythm. Words and the way they sound together. You’d think I would have settled for poetry, but too much exposure to bad poetry at an early age turned me off. And though short fiction is the genre closest to my heart, at the painful rate of maybe two completed short stories a year, it didn’t seem like a reliable life option.

As a young writer, finding your niche can be as easy as knowing that you need to breathe, or as complicated as knowing that you love to write and need to write but don’t know what it is you like writing best. I used to joke that my three favorite things in life were eating, writing, and traveling, and I wanted a job that would pay for all three. I made this joke for so long that when the time came to start thinking about what I wanted to do after college graduation, I didn’t seriously consider food writing as a legitimate pursuit. It was the job I’d do if I didn’t have to worry about money (though for a long time, there was a toss up between food writing and starring in Cats). I didn’t think about the fact that in High School I had a subscription to Saveur rather than Cosmo, that my favorite thing to do in other countries was go to the grocery store, that at the age of thirteen I lectured a friend on the demerits of hot dogs. And especially that most of the memories I had were centered around food, in some form or another.

The more I thought about it, the more I wondered why I couldn’t actually pursue my dream job. Food writing is a niche, certainly, but a growing one both high- and low-brow, as demonstrated by the infiltration of celebrity chefs into our daily lives. The growing niche is nice, because it means that someone out there wants to read what I want to write. So I started a blog, an experiment for a class on food writing I created with a friend of mine for a senior year independent study. My first entries were rough. Very factual. Very essayistic. And the professor leading our independent study noticed. I may not get her admonishment exactly right, but abridged it reads, “There’s no soul.”

Earlier that day I had made an absolutely perfect lunch, toasted baguette with butter and chili-infused sardines. It was so good and so perfect for the moment that I thought—maybe I could write about this—but dismissed the idea, because I wouldn’t have enough to “say” for a blog entry. On the short walk back to my dorm room after our meeting, I realized that writing about food is capturing the memory of sense, not detailing facts. So I wrote how I felt about that sardine toast: “It was exactly what I wanted without knowing that I'd wanted it. The softness of the sardines, their saltiness, that quick, subtle hit of chili and the richness of melted butter on crisped bread—sigh. It was delicious.”

Clearly nothing profound. But it was a breakthrough for me in my relationship to food writing. As I began to explore writing my visceral response to food, I saw that food connected people, and food writing interpreted the memory of that relationship. Food writing, however, is incomplete without the food reader. When I write about food, I want to share a part of myself with that anonymous reader, who I hope will be able to see what I see, feel what I feel, and taste what I taste. In a more abstract sense, then, food writing, like food, brings people together.

I love people who love food, because people who love food love living inclusively. They are open to new tastes and experiences, linger over dinner like conversations, and value the present as a flavor never to be recreated quite the same way. I choose to write about food because I want to remember each experience and share it with those I love most. The word companion, after all, means those who break bread together.

Check out Lyz’s food blog: http://eatmeanddrinkme.wordpress.com/