More on urban farming

My new Bookforum column is live today, and featured on the Bookforum home page as the Daily Review, so you can access it here or here. Whee! It’s about three urban farming memoirs–one by a former drag queen, one by a Brooklyn journalist, and one set in inner-city Oakland, CA. If that combination (or at least some part thereof) doesn’t whet your appetite, I don’t know what will….

Friday Food Writers: Raymond Chandler

I know. Raymond Chandler? The closest I usually come to connecting him with food is the term “hard-boiled,” and in his context it never has to do with eggs.

However, I am in the throes of a Chandler obsession thanks to a very good Christmas gift. When I’m not working or trying to convince The Cheese-Hater to taste some cheese, I’ve got my head buried in a Chandler novel and I’m transported to another planet. A planet where people say things like: “He was looking at me and neither his eyes nor the gun moved. He was as calm as an adobe wall in the moonlight.”

So once again, what does this have to do with food? Well, even detective Philip Marlowe has to eat (or not). He also happens to have a) opinions about Americans and eating that aren’t at all out of line with this blog’s and b) an impressive arsenal of food-related similes and metaphors at his disposal. In The Long Goodbye (rush out and buy or borrow it—seriously) I couldn’t help smiling at this passage, which appears about a page after Marlowe says he has no appetite for lunch and instead gets “the office bottle out of the deep drawer.” But then he makes a critical phone call and gets restless.

We hung up. I went down to the drugstore and ate a chicken salad sandwich and drank some coffee. The coffee was over-strained and the sandwich was as full of rich flavor as a piece torn off an old shirt. Americans will eat anything if it is toasted and held together with a couple of toothpicks and has lettuce sticking out of the sides, preferably a little wilted.

And here, just because I really can’t resist Marlowe (though as a self-respecting dame, I should really know better) is a little bonus item:

The jangle of the telephone dragged me up out of a black well of sleep. I rolled over on the bed, fumbled for slippers and realized that I hadn’t been asleep for more than a couple of hours. I felt like a half-digested meal eaten in a greasy spoon joint.

Just one more description I’ll go to my grave wishing I’d written myself.

Friday Food Writers: A.J. Liebling

I’m back in Berlin, but in keeping with my week’s travels, I thought it was the perfect time to induct the legendary A.J. Liebling into my Friday food writers pantheon. Born in New York in 1904, Liebling was a journalist who eventually ended up writing for The New Yorker. He loved Paris, where he went for the first time at the age of three, and he adored food. The collection this is from, Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris, was given to me by David Shea, the chef and co-owner of applewood, who told me it’s his favorite book. In particular, I love how this passage captures the pleasure of sending extra food out to people you care for when you’re in the restaurant kitchen and they’re in the dining room. I had a few chances to do this at applewood and I always got a huge thrill out of it.

The primary requisite for writing well about food is a good appetite. Without this, it is impossible to accumulate, within the allotted span, enough experience of eating to have anything worth setting down. Each day brings only two opportunities for field work, and they are not to be wasted minimizing the intake of cholesterol. They are indispensable, like a prizefighter’s hours on the road…A good appetite gives an eater room to turn around in. For example, a nonprofessional eater I know went to the Restaurant Pierre, in the Place Gaillon, a couple of years ago, his mind set on a sensibly light meal: a dozen, or possibly eighteen oysters, and a think chunk of steak topped with beef marrow…But as he arrived, he heard Monsieur Pierre say to his headwaiter, “Here comes Monsieur L. Those two portions of cassoulet that are left–put them aside for him.”…M. Pierre is the most amiable of restaurateurs, who prides himself on knowing in advance what his friends will like. A client of limited appetite would be obliged either to forgo his steak or to hurt M. Pierre’s feelings. Monsieur L., however, was in no difficulty. He ate the two cassoulets, as was his normal practice; if he had consumed only one, his host would have feared that it wasn’t up to standard. He then enjoyed his steak. The oysters offered no problem, since they present no bulk.

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Fishy chips?

The other night when I was putting The Cheese-Hater to bed, I read him a book called Room on the Broom that contains a scene in which a dragon threatens to eat a witch and bellows (meaning I bellow, because if I try to just read it in a normal tone of voice The Cheese-Hater makes me go back for a do-over):

“I am a dragon, as mean as can be,
And I’m planning to have WITCH
AND CHIPS for my tea!”

Once we had gotten past this tense moment in the narrative (the witch, in case you’re worried, prevails–but if he’d managed to eat her, would she count as local food?), The Cheese-Hater turned to me with utmost seriousness:

“Mama?” he said. “Yes?” I answered, bracing for a question about fire-breathing dragons and whether or not they eat little boys. “I like chips.”

That’s my boy!

As it happened, I already had chips on the brain because earlier in the day I’d read an item about how Frito-Lay is planning to introduce a fully compostable bag for Sun Chips by Earth Day 2010. As they put it, “You eat the chips. The earth eats the bag. And we all live in a cleaner world.”

Of course, compostable bags don’t make Sun Chips any less mass-produced or Frito-Lay any less of a gigantic corporation. Still, given the reality that we all find ourselves in gas stations and airports and other places needing a snack with nothing available except such items–does this decision make you more likely to go for the Sun Chips as opposed to something else?

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Friday Food Writers: Julian Barnes (with a dash of Joseph Conrad)

Julian Barnes is the author of numerous novels (Flaubert’s Parrot is the best known), but my favorite book of his is The Pedant in the Kitchen a very sympathetic and very funny book of essays about his trials and tribulations as a home cook and his—he feels—nerdy, profoundly human reliance on recipes (“Non-pedants frequently misunderstand pedants and are inclined to adopt a tone of superiority. ‘Oh, I don’t follow recipes,’ they will say, as if cooking from a text were like making love with a sex-manual open at your elbow. Or: ‘I read recipes, but only to get ideas.’ Well, fine, but let me ask you this: would you use a lawyer who said ‘Oh, I glance at a few statutes, but only to get ideas’?”). Here, he mentions a quote from novelist Joseph Conrad which appears earlier in the essay (turns out Mrs. Heart of Darkness wrote a cookbook!), “Good cooking is a moral agent.”

That’s what it’s about. You choose a loaf. You are reckless with the butter. You reduce the kitchen to chaos. You try not to waste scraps. You feed your friends and family. You sit around a table engaged in the irreducible social act of sharing food with others. For all the cavils and caveats, Conrad was right. It is a moral act. It is an affair of sanity. Let him have the last word. “The intimate influence of conscientious cookery,” he wrote, “promotes serenity of mind, the graciousness of thought, and that indulgent view of our neighbour’s failings which is the only genuine form of reverence. Those are its titles to our reverence.”

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