Best Food Writing?

“Suddenly everything we were and everything we did and the way we used to do it was brought to an abrupt and unfathomable halt. Within a matter of days (and just hours in many cases), we were feeding frontline doctors and nurses; and stocking mutual aid refrigerators; and selling coffee through little windows in our front doors and pizzas through holes we cut in our backyard fences; and collecting GoFundMe money and unemployment benefits that we secretly Venmoed to our undocumented workers; and lobbying Congress; and suing the insurance giants; and teaching people at home how to bake, cook, and taste wine on Instagram Live; and putting coolers of bottled water and hand sanitizer and granola bars out for Black Lives Matter demonstrators and opening our bathrooms for pee breaks along the rally route.” (Gabrielle Hamilton in the Introduction to The Best American Food Writing: 2021)

Flashback! Many of the articles in The Best American Food Writing: 2021 gave me a sickening feeling of reliving the worst months of the pandemic in 2020, when most of the works were written. I'm not blaming Gabrielle Hamilton, who selected the articles, nor anyone else. It was a terrible time for food! The choices do emphasize the experiences of restaurant owners and people who dine in restaurants, over lives of ordinary people, but that’s just the nature of this annual anthology.

From the Foreword by editor Sylvia Killingsworth, describing the events of 2020:

"In addition to the traumatic loss of life, many also experienced loss of livelihood and income. Some of the worst virus outbreaks in the country happened in meatpacking plants. Thousands of small food businesses shuttered, and food insecurity skyrocketed. The half-life of a restaurant is already short, but to see so many shut down so fast was gutting: a mass extinction event."

The stories of closed up restaurants trying to serve over-the-top meals in uncomfortable outdoor plastic bubbles or otherwise spiraling downwards were very depressing (though they preserved East and West coast restaurant snobbery quite effectively). A couple of articles that pre-dated the pandemic just preserved the snobbery: for example, "The meal cost $400 and came with rules." (From "The Fed-up Chef," p. 48). You can guess the snobbery from the title of this one: "You’ll Probably Never Get into This Restaurant" by Beth Landman, about private restaurants where very rich people pay tens of thousands of dollars for exclusive club-like dining privileges among their fellow rich people, obtaining "a layer of exclusivity" for their money. (p. 180-181). But enough of the bad part.

The selections that I most enjoyed were the ones that dealt with experiences and events prior to 2020. For example, an article by Britt H. Young about food and agriculture -- especially about chickens and eggs -- in Ethiopia, which taught me quite a lot. And I enjoyed Bill Buford's account of his family's experiences when they moved to Lyon, France. He wrote:

"Our apartment was opposite a mural called La Fresque des Lyonnais, two millennia of the city’s famous citizens painted onto a six-story windowless wall. The same building housed Bob’s boulangerie, where, friends told us, you could find the best bread in the city." (Bill Buford, "Good Bread," p. 24). 

Most of the article was about Bob's boulangerie, a chaotic place where Bob, a French baker from a family of bakers and millers, created unbelievable loaves of traditional French bread for the locals who were highly appreciative. Buford was looking for an apprenticeship at one of the famous Lyonnais restaurants, but no one would talk to him, so he went to work for Bob and learned how to bake real bread. A few times in the distant past, I spent a week or so in that same area, and poked around the interesting neighborhoods of the city of Lyon, so I especially enjoyed Buford's writing. I was intrigued by the bakery but also by the mural that he mentioned. I looked it up, and here are some photos from the local tourist promotion bureau.

The building covered with images of famous people from Lyon.
From a distance, the paintings look like real people on real balconies.

The Lumière brothers, inventors of the first motion-picture camera,
and other devices,  appear on one of the "balconies."

Author and aviator Antoine de St-Exupéry is shown with his most famous creation: The Little Prince.

Familiar and Unfamiliar Sources

As I read through the selections in this collection, I was a bit surprised at how many of the articles were already familiar, because I have read several of the sources on a regular basis. From Eater, a website that I read frequently, there were four articles; also from the traditional print sources, the New York Times (4) and the New Yorker (3), which I read online.  The compilation included one article from each of the following publications/websites that are familiar to me: Atlas Obscura, Slate, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Grub Street. And one each from Resy, Orion, n + 1, Longreads, Hazlitt,  Gossamer, GEN, Elemental, and  Afar -- sources that I've never heard of, but feel I should seek out.

On the whole, I liked this book very much, despite the abrasive nature of some of the more self-satisfied writers and the snobbishness of some of their subjects. If I were making the selection, I might make some different choices: particularly, I’d leave out the articles that extoll overpriced overhyped restaurant cooking and preposterous affectations like the “sommelier” for bottled water. Nevertheless, I appreciate what’s here.

Blog post © 2022 mae sander.