Our lost culinary innocence (National Post, October 20, 2004)

A bout of stomach flu took me out of commission last week, and for 36 hours I could think of nothing but the impossibility of ever eating another thing. In fact, I wondered how I had been allowing anything so vile as food to pass my lips for more than half a century.

But I've recovered. And food is once again on my mind, as it is on everyone else's. New, enticing cookbooks crowd the shelves. Celebrity chefs duke it out on TV. The Internet swarms with foodie sites. Diet gurus proliferate. No first-world eater can escape the ubiquity of food consciousness and the questions arising from it: what to eat, where, when, how much, in what combinations -- and even, for anorexics, how not to.

According to no less an authority than The New York Times Magazine, this obsession has become an affliction -- in the United States at least. In last Sunday's issue, Michael Pollan concludes that Americans have become "the world's most anxious eaters." He describes experiments in which people from different nations were asked what springs to mind upon hearing the words "chocolate cake." In France: "celebration." In the United States: "guilt."

How much simpler and better things once were.

In pre-modern times, before scientists got hold of the stuff, people didn't experience self-consciousness around food. Victorians didn't theorize or agonize over food "issues"; they simply enjoyed it. I envy the Edenic innocence that allowed the pleasures of the table to be nakedly embraced -- before our culinary fall from grace, when the leaden fig leaves of knowledge about calories, trans fats and free radicals imposed self-consciousness and shame on the spontaneous expression of gustatory ardour.

One must look back to literature to recall our previous innocence. Good writers have always used food to reveal character and culture. Typically, it is the small details that are the most telling and, for me, the most evocative. A character has but to slip a dish of olives on the table and it opens up maghrebian vistas. Or, reading about anything on "thickly sliced bread," I at once long for a sandwich.

In fact, sandwiches of any type in literature always please me, whether the dainty crustless cucumber triangles of high teas, a falafel wrap or a pub lunch of a cheddar cheese block on "thickly sliced bread" with a pickle. All meats and fowl sound good so long as they are "roasted," anything taken "from a sideboard" holds allure.

Yet even classic literature isn't safe from today's neuroses. When the subject of food is joined to postmodern cultural studies, when the extreme self-consciousness of the foodie is freighted with the deconstructive extremism of academia, you get something like the Food and Literature Symposium held in Australia a few years back, which offered such scholarly downers as "Whale Meat Again? The meal in the Icelandic Saga" and "From Rabelais to Ronald McDonald: an examination of food in the carnivalesque."

One can only imagine what such ivory-tower types would make of my all time-favourite passage in the food-lit vein, from the novel Loving and Giving by anglo-Irish writer Molly Keane. It describes a maiden aunt at a family meal, taken before going on to a ball:

"When she explored the depths of the snipe pudding for a bird she fancied, Aunt Tossie's pleasure rose to its height ... Complete and unbroken, the wild corpse kept its tiny crouch on her plate while Mrs Geary's finest and most secret sauce was spooned round it. Aunt Tossie put the long-handled gravy spoon back in the napkin-swathed pudding bowl and waited in happy expectation for the sea kale. It would be the earliest, thongs milk-white and small as a baby's fingers were even now draining on toast. Snipe don't sing, they only drum their wings, she remembered, as she cut through the threadlike neck, and holding the bird's head by its absurdly long beak, crunched through the white skull and sucked out the strange delicious brains within it. She wiped her lips on a vast white napkin and emptied her glass of wine. She had no hesitation in her pleasure."

I love the writing, if not the meal -- imagine the possible prion disease lurking in snipe brains! And I regret that because I know too much, no one will ever say of me -- food-wise at least, "She had no hesitation in her pleasure."

© National Post 2004