Against Gluttony

In the conclusion to my first book I have a line where I say: I am sick to death of food. I wrote and erased that line about ten times before leaving it in; as the copy edits are just now under way, I suppose that I may still take it out.

The truth stands, though: I am so tired of food. Tired of food as event (the expensive restaurant), tired of food as performance (cf: wine people), tired of foodie-ism (class pretension disguised as self-expression and "taste" or "preference"), tired of pretensions to earthiness (the whole DIY movement as the most recent narcissistic expression of commodity citizenship).

That feeling washed over me the other day at Whole Foods. I thought: look at how greedy we are. And I felt so ashamed to be participating in that greed. I looked back at my early foodie self, you know, over twenty years ago when I began to write and think about food and, well, the connection between that girl's class aspirations and her food tastes seemed raw and painful to me.

Don't get me wrong: I still do food studies and my next project is arguably a food studies project. I still like restaurants; sometimes I like wine (though I prefer beer); I still love to feed people delicious (truthful?) food; I still have strong opinions on and preferences for certain foods, and I like to can. Some might say I'm about as pretentious as you can get; I certainly would. But I guess what I'm saying is that I wish people would stop talking about food and just eat it.*

Lately I've been thinking about how to recuperate simplicity in food, how to make meals for my family that have an element of what I would call, maybe, elementalism. One ingredient at a time, doing a perfectly adequate job at being edible. I don't mean this in the California sense of ingredient-centered romanticism, that is, in some fantasy of food pastoralism. I can't wax precious about late summer tomatoes - though I do like them. I myself am not in love with farming or gardening, or growing anything with my hands - though I appreciate the people who do, and do it well.

The other night, for instance, I made us a meal of brown rice and scrambled eggs. Some sliced raw cucumbers on the side. A little hot sauce on top.

Shut. Up. A perfectly fine dinner. More than that: my son eating it and me watching him. Perhaps I have become more interested in how people are eating, in the intimacy of the everyday, than in what they are eating. This may be the theme that extends from the first book to the second.

Perhaps what I'm saying is that just fine is good enough.

* - I get the nauseating irony.