‘ A long, luscious chapter in American food history came crashing to a close this week.” gushed the San Francisco Chronicle. A throaty voice on NPR oozed more hyperbole. They were mourning a mag whose Oct issue looks like all the other covers of the food mags on the stand: sell, sell, sell… Inside, the usual pablum. Read celebs’ daily menu! the best restos in the US. cook along with a chef. It’s amazing how little variation there is among the food mags which have the same breathless gush of all women’s mags.
It’s amazing that people still buy them. These days you can get recipes easily from the web and fool around with them yourself rather than having to put up with someone else’s spin. I threw out my Food Lovers Companion after discovering the the web is far more comprehensive and uptodate.
The food writers I enjoy reading remain the same as they were when I started writing: Elizabeth David, MFK Fisher, Joseph Wechsberg and JJ Liebling. They were amateurs in food, they weren’t under contract to gush, to use adwords like “luscious” or on a payroll, they weren’t driven by commercialism and I don’t think any of their books made the bestseller lists . They wrote honestly about food in the context of where they ate it. MFK Fisher’s early years in Dijon and Wechsberg’s last lunch with Fernand Point underline the way food is woven into relationships, influenced by circumstance, enhanced by emotion. In the seventies and eighties, Gourmet sent amateurs to write about eating abroad, in a serious way: reading was a trip but don’t try the recipes which had a rep for stovetop failure. After Ruth Reichl took over in 1999, the mag gradually assumed the ADD persona of all today’s mags, cluttered with copywriter’s jazzy adjectives, taking a cue from Reichl’s own equation of delicious food as “sinful” – a trope used by Gael Greene, I believe, to galvanize her reviews. Recently Reichl ate a knish in Toronto and declared it to be “decadent.”"
MFK Fisher simply said a piece of bread was “good.” That’s organic writing.
