7) The Art of Eating

The Art of Eating is a collection of five of the most well-known works by M.F.K. Fisher, Lady of All Things. Her writing about food is specific and uncomplicated - like the individual bits of a slice of mandarin orange, whole and slick and satisfying. In An Alphabet for Gourmets she offers entries like 'Dining Alone' for 'A' and 'G' is for 'Gluttony.' It is a surprising, whimsical and delicious book. Even serious and pressing topics like hunger during war and loneliness are treated with compassion, frankness, humor and humanity in How to Cook a Wolf (the wolf, of course, is hunger). Written during World War II, Fisher offers solutions to questions of how Americans can nourish themselves and, maybe, prevent their taste buds from dying off. As white America has never really had working taste buds, there is something inherently tragic and courageous in her attempts.

Food writing is a genre that is under-explored by most readers. There are some famous names like Anthony Bourdain and Ruth Reichl, so it's not a wholly ignored section. That said, not many people know of M.F.K. Fisher though they remember watching Julia Child on PBS - and yet these women were friends, they shared concerns about food and cooking and culture with each other and the world. Dig under the top layer of ingredients in any cook book or book about food and you will find life, steamy and simmering. The books in this collection are like a dam in a busy river - both because the book is a door stop, and because Fisher's prose requires a slowing of the mind, of the pulse, of the body. We are required to think with our gullets, to feel the effects of food beyond something like satisfaction. Eating something as simple as a slice of dried mandarin orange becomes an act of creating a story and becoming part of it. This is a worthy addition to any library.

This book is three inches thick.

The first book by M.F.K. Fisher that I ever read was about the time she spent in Provence before and after the Second World War, before and after her first marriage, before and after having children. Her descriptions of the places and people were respectful and lacking in that golden romantic glow of so many others who decamp to the South of France in attempts to find their souls. She did not seem even to notice a particularity to the light. She learned there to eat. She learned to be alone. She learned to be suspicious and eventually she teaches us how to consider change.

I'm angry that I was not introduced to her at a younger age. Angry that food writing is a thing shunted off to the bare spaces between fancy unused cookbooks or clumsily left somewhere in history section of your personal library. When I was a child at home, food mattered - we learned to taste it, to try new of it, to enjoy it and to seek out nourishment that fed our hearts and our souls and our bodies. That stayed with me. The outside world allows for "I won't like it and don't want to try"and while there is a completely normal component to that, it's not my go-to position on new food or new atmosphere. There is privilege in being comfortable and unhurried in any restaurant situation, and it is one of the few privileges for which I am grateful. I was raised to care about the food that people made; it is of them and they are sharing it with you. 

It was even more powerful to learn to care about the food that I make for myself. This book, along with If I Can Cook/You Know God Can and Super Natural Every Day opened up my kitchen and my personal food stories to me in ways that would never have happened without them. These are stories that I did not know how to tell. I had to hear them first, and then learn to recognize the experience.