Over the years, I've done my best to write seriously about food, assuming my readers are an educated audience who would get (and smile or learnedly chuckle at) allusions to the Bible, Shakespeare, Dickens, or Damon Runyon, readers who would understand cryptic puns and whose jaws would not slacken when asked whether they knew "the land where the lemon trees bloom?"Well now, that would explain why you're flopping about so desperately in the modern world of food writing. Look: while we foodies appreciate art as much as the next fellow, we don't want to have to check an encyclopedia to understand how an egg was cooked. Food is a common experience to all life forms. A food writer - like any good journalist - should speak to the common person, not to the elite crowd of snub-nosed alumni of Ivy League Schools. Levy points this out well to himself:
No editor today, for example, would be content with the way I dealt with durian, the cherished oriental fruit that looks like a giant hand grenade, which I wrote about for the Observer in 1984: "Some find the smell excremental, some find it reminiscent of sick." I'd now be booed off the fellas' food-writing team for excessive gentility. Today the correct vocabulary is shit and puke.30 years ago, that was the correct vocabulary too.
Writing needs to be honest. It is what writers are supposed to be; exquisite at lying and bluntly honest with the same tongue. Levy's desire for esoteric chat about cuisine and a polite vocabulary is Victorian at best. Only the few left in that aged circle actually care for that kind of discourse.
As Grub Street puts it:
If this is what we’re missing, bring on the barbarians. Food writing is too important to leave to gentlemen.Amen, dear comrades, and farewell to the past.
1 comment:
People should read this.
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