Home from the Greenbrier Food Writer’s Symposium

September 20, 2010 · 24 comments

It’s been a little while since my last post, but I have a good reason for slacking off: I was a panelist at the Greenbrier Food Writer’s Symposium, along with Dorothy Kalins, Christopher Hirsheimer, Joe Yonan, Justin Renard, Carole Bidnick, James Peterson, Holly Hughes, David Joachim, Laurie Buckle, Kirsty Melville, Rux Martin, Rick Rodgers, and Molly Wizenberg. I brought my laptop with me, but when a second-night, post-dinner schmooze-fest went beyond 2:30 am, all hope was lost.

The 2010 Symposium (its 20th anniversary) was my third; I attended as a scholarship winner back in 2003 and as a panelist in 2008, and this year’s event proved to be wildly different from years past. On the one hand, the 2003 Symposium ended just as we went to war (literally the last night) so everyone was a little bit cranky; on the other hand, the 2008 Symposium, which featured speakers including Dorie Greenspan, Russ Parsons, Jeffrey Steingarten, Tori Ritchie, and Diane Morgan and was quite serious during the day, turned into something of a frat party for food journalists by sundown. This year’s gathering was serious—very serious—and while we all enjoyed each other’s company immensely, we were all (and I mean all) talking about two things: the fact of change as a constant, and the place of digitalia in the world of the food writer.

I’ve often been accused of being a Luddite, and really, it doesn’t much bother me; in fact, I find it very flattering. My first experience in the world of publishing took place when I was three; I stood in my grandfather’s press room at The Forward in lower Manhattan, he put a piece of warm, lead type in the palm of my hand, and that was that. Over the years, I’ve witnessed some fairly major changes: the demise of the typesetter and the slugger (look it up; hard to explain) being two. But I never believed that, even with the birth of the eBook, books would “go away.” I didn’t believe it at the digital medium’s inception, and I don’t believe it now. And that’s saying something, considering I just spent the last week in the company of forty or so bloggers and writers and restaurateurs wielding a nice little gadget called the iPad. You know these folks when you see them because they’re generally followed down the hallway by a crowd of people who look like this:

Sure–the talk was largely about the state of the industry (slow, snoozy, taking a nap, reactionary were a few descriptions, and I believe they’re accurate), but the flipside was about the power of possibility. In other words, how, exactly, will the digital world impact my cookbook, or your memoir. And instead of being sullen and morose about the whole thing, my colleagues were getting very, very excited, in a Seth Godin-esque, Purple Cow kind of way.

Take, for instance, the possibility of using the iPad to digitally reproduce a practical guide to cooking–say, Jacques Pepin‘s La Technique, or James Peterson‘s master-class-in-book-form, Cooking. Say you buy the book as a download, and say you hit upon a recipe that calls, within the ingredients list, for a boned duck. (We’re being totally hypothetical here, so don’t go looking for it in those two books please.) Wouldn’t it be amazing to be able to click on that ingredient, have a screen pop open, and see a short video of the author showing you—yeah, you—how to bone a duck? And then, of course, you could replay it over and over again, and bookmark it. Better still, wouldn’t it be amazing if you so fell in love with the book after downloading it and working with it for a while, that you had to have it forever and ever as a part of your library, so you then bought the book itself in order to have the content available to you in two different mediums—each accomplishing two different functions? (The book as a forever reference, and the download for hands-on, practical experience?) Nobody loses here: the author sells his work.  And if the digital format (for which a royalty is paid; don’t get me started, that’s another subject) manages to simultaneously support the sale of the hardcover (for which a larger royalty is paid), this potentially is a very good thing.

Taken to another level, what about all of those incredible cookbooks that we all love but that have been out of print, or have just fallen out of popularity or trend? If the way into a young food geek’s heart and mind is through his iPad, and he’s never heard of Richard Olney—then for god’s sake: get Simple French Food up onto iBooks, cross-reference it everywhere with Paul Bertolli and Alice Waters and Elizabeth David, and have this kid READ READ READ! I can guarantee you: five minutes of reading Simple French Food in a digital format, and said young food geek will want the actual book in his library too. Because that’s the way food people are. We love and need our books in a tactile way, and food professionals especially are drawn to them because our subject matter—what we live and breathe and work with every day of our professional lives—is so by its very nature elemental. But we also love clarity and immediacy of information, and of course, its practical application.

I had a conversation with a dear friend yesterday about what this all means for the world of books; as I told her, there is nothing in the world that gives me more comfort than being in the presence of books—nothing soothes my soul more, except for Susan. I walk into a library or a bookstore, and my blood pressure drops and all I want to do is read. I will never cozy up with a digital device (although I am in love with the iPad I now own), and I will never associate bedtime with getting under the covers and firing up the old tablet.

But publishers’ futures—and mine, as an author—are not built on the fact that I still have a rolodex on my desk and my Uncle Marvin’s 1934 Remington Noiseless Model Seven sitting on my low bookshelf about a foot away from my Mac; publishers are (or at least should be) business people, hell bent on the power of possibility, and on giving their audiences access to the written word in whatever form their audiences want it. And that’s what this year’s Symposium was all about.

When Food Means More Than Words

September 8, 2010 · 25 comments

There are some times, as a writer, when words escape me. Usually, there’s some sort of emotional conflagration involved and no matter how I try to sit down and write, I can’t do it. Because, as I’m often reminded, all I’m doing is writing about food, and that can feel a little bit flimsy at times.

This happened to me, rather severely, in early September of 2002. I was living in Harwinton, Connecticut, in a town of 3,500 that had only gotten its first stoplight a few years before. One lovely summer’s morning weeks before, Susan and I were out in the garden, up to our knees in compost; we came back in to the house to get some water, and the phone rang. It was my stepbrother; he said the four words that no one, ever, ever wants to hear: “There’s been an accident.”

We left the door unlocked so that Susan’s mother could come and get the dog, and raced down to Long Island. Simple story: Car accident. My father and his longtime companion, who I consider my stepmother. He never regained consciousness.

Over the years, I’ve written about this a lot; anyone who knows me, and knew him — really knew him (as opposed to just believing they knew him) — knows that we had a peculiar relationship: he was my best friend. He introduced me to food. He introduced me to humor. He introduced me to Perelman and Thurber and Allan Sherman and Le Pavillion.  He introduced me to the understanding that life has far less to do with money (although it admittedly never hurts), and far more to do with experience, sensitivity, joy, and kindness.

And his greatest happiness came, he once told me, when I finished my first whole plate of Holsteiner Schnitzel at Luchow’s. I was eleven.

Food, he said, was experience; it was life. It was a Proustian conduit, a time machine, and it had the ability to jettison you back to other places and experiences—to the safety of your grandmother’s kitchen, or the raw, cold gravity of a stranger’s dining room when you’ve been left there as a child, to eat weird, unrecognizable food, fed to you by people you don’t know. Food, he said, was equal opportunity.

Between the time that he died and early September of 2002, I had a lot of work to do; there was a mountain of insurance papers and attorneys to deal with, and grief, I was told, had to be postponed to another time that was perhaps a little less inconvenient for everyone. I tried to be dutiful, and ultimately I was. But it eventually caught up with me.

“Maybe you should write,” Susan said to me. I tried, but I couldn’t.

Rosh Hashana—the Jewish New Year—fell on September 7th 2002, and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, fell on the 16th. Although we were never religious in my home, we did celebrate the holidays together, and this would be the first year I would spend without my father, and the first during which I would light a memorial candle in his memory. Smack in the middle of the week was the first anniversary of 9/11, and I lost my appetite. I started to feel a little bit uncertain about my own feet and like my balance was off, as I did once when I got off a cruise ship. So I read everything I could get my hands on: C.S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed; Leon Wieseltier’s Kaddish. I read Madeleine L’Engle and Harold Kushner and Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and Thic Nhat Hanh and everyone in between. And nothing helped bridge the gap between life and death and mourning and living and remembering. And nothing, anywhere, talked about cooking and eating as a form of psychic nourishment.

And then, one morning, I went out for the newspaper, and there, in the dining section, was a short piece by Amanda Hesser, called “A Meal with Loved Ones Closes the Circle of Life.”

Feeding yourself is a way of healing, of embracing your existence, of remembering the lost, and of pushing forward.

Amanda went on to quote Kathleen Purvis, food editor of the Charlotte Observer, on the meaning of round food in the Jewish faith.

A round food is symbolic because a circle is closed, and it signifies that you have no words to speak your grief.

In that piece, Amanda went to her stove. She didn’t try anything new, as she said. She made a comforting dish meant to be shared in peace.

That September, I had no words to speak my grief, but after reading that article, my appetite came back, little by little, and I’ve never forgotten it.

Yesterday, while cleaning out my office in preparation for a move to a larger space across the hall, I found Amanda’s piece, buried at the bottom of a drawer; stained, a little bit dog-eared, it managed to show up in my life again right before the start of the Jewish New Year, which is tonight at sundown. It’ll just be me and Susan and our animals. In the coming days, I’ll be lighting a memorial candle for my father, and spending a day in quiet meditation. The one symbolic food we’ll eat will be challah.

Always plain. And always round.

← Previous Entries

Next Entries →

indiebound

 

©2009, ©2010, Poor Man's Feast. All rights reserved. To reprint any content herein, including recipes and photography, please contact rights@poormansfeast.com