Food For Thought

"Food... opens other worlds. As the American appetite has become over the past half century more adventuresome, the enthusiasm for reading about the food of disparate cultures has grown - and so has the body of literature that opens doors to the tastes and habits of far-flung worlds. Cooking has always been a necessity; today it is also a pastime, an obsession, an entertainment a spectator sport. Food is what we think about when we worry [about] the future. What will we eat? asks Eric Schlosser in Fast Food Nation. What indeed? asks Michael Pollen in the Omnivore's Dilemma. The subject is infinitely elastic, and so it seems, is the appetite for reading about food in America today. Why? Perhaps because reading about food reminds us that we are human and alive and a tangle of contradictions, some of which can be caused by a meal and some of which can be resolved by remembering and imagining what it feels like to bite off a piece of the world, to pull it across the tongue, to swallow it. Perhaps we read about food to recall the meals we've already eaten and to picture the ones we'd like to tuck into at some later date. Or maybe we read about food to avoid eating, a nation of armchair gourmets protecting our waistlines and arteries, eating nothing but words. But at the deepest level I think we Americans read about food to remember what it feels like to be hungry and to deserve a meal, to imagine being windswept and exhausted, shivering and lonely; to fell, as the early explorers did, wracked by the appetite born of long odds and great hope. We read about food to feel the things that thoughts of food can fix. Which is just about everything. Every meal, after all, is a new beginning."

From American Food Writing: An Anthology with Classic Recipes, Molly O'Neill (ed.), The Library of America, 2007.