Entries Tagged 'Food Studies' ↓

The best thing about writing a blog is the relationships that you form with online friends. Anyone could work that out. The second best thing about blogging is being able to say things like this:

I have just read Gina Mallet’s book Last Chance to Eat, a book that claims cookery is dying, being killed by industrialised food production and nutritionist fear-mongering. It is a bad book.

Many food writers have had a privileged upbringing (like me, to a point). Some can write about it in a way that’s not only interesting, but graceful - say, MFK Fisher. Part of what makes her writing graceful and interesting is the clarity of her analytical intelligence. Gina Mallet does not share this virtue. She is just up herself.

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I’ve always loved finding little things that it seemed I wasn’t supposed to, particularly photographs. I’m not alone there, although I don’t know if anyone else obsessively reads other people’s shopping lists found in the bottom of their supermarket trolley.

My camping reading this time was Marion Halligan’s Eat My Words, an entertaining although somewhat relentless memoir of loving food and cooking which I bought in a local second hand shop. And looky what I found inside -

Do you know this man? I wonder whether the place it shows is in Goulburn (about an hour north of here) - it doesn’t look local, but of course it could have come from anywhere.

It’s not just photos and shopping lists I love. I’ve never been one to really value books as objects, but I know many do and that they probably don’t share my love of marginalia.

It’s hard not to fall in love with the physical presence of Gay Bilson’s Plenty, though. And wow, can that woman convey emotional intensity and deep intelligence. I bet she’s a Cancer. I find it bizarre that one of the judges who awarded the book The Age Book of the Year prize in 2005 (see link on title) said:

A generous, hospitable book that offered reading as a slow pleasure, Plenty connected food and the intellect without emotion or nostalgia, says [historian and judge Clare] Wright.

“It is a memoir, yet it is not self-referential,” she says. “It is about the intimate workings of her mind, not about her emotions. It was a very brave book in a lot of ways and I quite admired the way she was able to keep herself to herself.”

I wonder why it was so important that the book not be emotional? Perhaps Wright is one of those historians who thinks that the intellect should trump emotion but knows that in real life and real kitchens it’s usually the other way around, or that in a certain kind of person the two are so entwined that it’s pointless to try and tease them apart (and I bet Wright’s a Virgo).

I borrowed the book from the library, but of course will have to buy it now. I’m considering stealing the aptly decorated post it note I found inside the library’s copy for myself. It’s stuck over a section describing Bilson’s 1993 Symposium of Australian Gastronomy dinner, which has become famous for a never-served dish of blood sausage made from the hostess’ blood.

To make sense of the note, you need to either read the text in the image, or know that Bilson and her chef Janni Kyritsis made a forty metre long tripe tablecloth for the dinner - Halligan said on the First Tuesday Book Club that it was the most beautiful tablecloth she’d ever seen - and that Bilson’s daughter Sido emerged in bandages from a mound of fruit at the end of the dinner bearing menus for the diners:

Happily I managed to make it to this work-in-progress talk by Visiting Fellow Associate Professor Donna Lee Brien at ANU yesterday, sleeping toddler in tow. She gave a survey of her work, looking at some of the big names in Australian food writing since the 1960s and examining how they have been agitating for culinary - and social - change.

I used to work at the CCR, now part of the Research School of Humanities where Professor Brien is visiting (and I’ll be back on Mondays next week, as part of a project investigating the war rugs of Afghanistan). One of the great strengths of the CCR is the variety of the work the scholars there are doing. They come from many different fields and share a commitment to interdisciplinary and collaborative work. They’re also committed to innovative forms of research presentation. I don’t think anyone’s done an interpretive dance yet as part of their PhD, but I am happy to be corrected on that. So the audience of about thirty or so was lively and interested. And very heavily female dominated, as it happens.

The whole area of “Food Studies” is pretty new to academia, as the somewhat graceless introduction Professor Brien was given made clear. But she’s such an engaging speaker, and it’s such an interesting field that the she’d converted the graceless one within an hour. Also she had brought really quite superior chocolate crackles.

Her work is to an extent mapping out the territory - there’s been little academic attention to the field in an Australian context, and it seemed from this gathering that every nearly conversation can spark a new possible line of enquiry.

Two points she raised in her talk particularly resonated with me. The first was in relation to criticisms that cookery and food writers reinforce the domestic enslavement of women. As a mother who’s been at home for an eighteen month stretch twice in the last six years, and often sometimes struggled with it, I responded to the idea, traced to Margaret Fulton, that cookery could provide an island of creativity in a day otherwise structured to the demands of others. (There’s an excellent post on the view that there’s something necessarily oppressive about a woman cooking for her family from chef Barbara Fisher of Tigers & Strawberries.) The whole idea of female amateurism/male professionalism was raised, including mention of the ABC’s “The Cook and The Chef”. It shits me a bit, because Maggie Beer has been a restaurateur and in charge of a professional kitchen for a bloody long time. Anyway, I’ve had my spray about that elsewhere.

The second point I connected with was Professor Brien’s consideration of how we incorporate what we read in food media into what we do - how we cook and eat - which becomes part of what we are, in both the literal and metaphorical senses. Part of the context is the massive commercial success of publications about food and cooking - a spend in Australia of around $60 million per year.

It was an interesting counterpoint to some of the questions from the audience which seemed based on the conviction that People didn’t cook and what’s more People Who Consumed Food Media didn’t really make the food in the magazines or books. Apparently that is the only thing that cookery writing is for, beyond what you might call the performative function of displaying taste. (I did mention it was an academic audience ;) One woman went so far as to say her many travels in the US had led her to the conclusion that “Nobody there cooks.”

That’s just wrong, and I was surprised how very cranky these statements from the audience made me. I have as little respect for Donna Hay as anyone, and OK, it may be bourgie to have a bunch of fancy cookbooks on prominent display in your house*, but how does someone else determine whether you’re entitled to display them or not? Is there a magic ratio? Need the pages be sufficiently splattered? How precisely need the recipe be followed? Piss off!

Like many - another outspoken female comes to mind here - I will read a number of things around an ingredient or recipe and fashion a version to suit my tastes and what’s in the fridge. Tonight I made a roasted vegetable frittata, using the roasted cauliflower I’ve been nuts for since this post at Gastronomy Domine and this one for faux mashed potatoes at Diet, Dessert and Dogs. Although I just think of it as a warm dip and have the goddam potatoes if I feel like them.

I read food memoirs and criticism in bed - in fact I’m working my way through what you might consider the English language “canon” of food memoir and the parallel one of behind-the-scenes restaurant life. (Suggestions for good reads gratefully received, btw.) I’m also now in the habit of taking a neglected cookbook from the shelf every time we go on holiday; last time we had a week at the beach it was with Rosemary Brissenden’s South East Asian Food to read. I didn’t cook from it while we were away, just read it. On the little road trip we made before that one, I’d taken Fuchsia Dunlop’s Sichuan Cookery (Land of Plenty in the US edition), which I read cover to cover three times before I cooked a thing from it.

Professor Brien is eager to talk to people who write about food, and I’ve said I’ll pass on the details of interested food bloggers (rather than put her email address up). Leave a note in comments or email to crazybraveATgmail.com if you’re keen.

* guilty! But the living areas are one room really, so where would it be truly tasteful to put them?

My friend Jonesie tipped me off on an interesting looking free lunchtime talk at ANU next Tuesday, 5 August:

Enabling New Ways of Thinking about the World?: The Australian Food Writer as Activist

Food writing makes up a significant proportion of the books, articles, weblogs and other texts written, published, sold and read each year in Australia. While the food writing in cookbooks, magazines and other publications is often thought of as providing useful, but banal, practical skill-based information, recent scholarship has begun to suggest that food writing is a more creative, and interesting, form of cultural production.

As part of a biographically-based study of Australian food writers, this work-in-progress seminar focuses on the roles the contemporary food writer plays in an environment where food is the subject of considerable scholarly, policy and personal interest and anxiety. In such a context, a number of contemporary food writers engage with issues around food production and consumption. These issues include sustainable and ethical agriculture, biodiversity and genetic modification, food miles and fair trade, food safety and security, and obesity, diabetes and other health issues. In this activity, the Australian food writer is, moreover, not only a media commentator on these important contemporary concerns, but is, at times, a forward-thinking activist, advocating and campaigning for change.

Donna Lee Brien is the Associate Professor of Creative Industries, and Head, School of Arts and Creative Enterprise, Central Queensland University. She is the author of John Power 1881-1943 and co-author of the popular self-help books Girl’s Guide to Real Estate: How to Enjoy Investing in Property and Girl’s Guide to Work and Life: How to Create the Life you Want. Donna is widely published in the academic areas of writing pedagogy and praxis, and collaborative practice in the arts. She is the founding co-editor of dotlit: The Online Journal of Creative Writing and Assistant Editor of Imago: New Writing and Imago: Online. Donna is currently an Associate Editor of New Writing: the International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing (UK), and is on the Board of Readers for Writing Macao. She is the President of the Australian Association of Writing Programs and in 2006 was has awarded a Carrick Institute Citation for Outstanding Contribution to Student Learning.

If I can find someone to sit on the one year old I’ll be there. Full details and contact info here.