Sorting through a pile that looked a bit like this, I found a new daily supplement! No, I don;t mean vitamins and minerals. In August 2006, Gourmet Magazine had a supplement when it arrived-- a special "reading supplement." A smallish pamphlet, it had short stories and essays, a photo essay and even a story written over what look like reproductions of watercolors. Monique Truong, author of The Book of Salt, writes about americanization through the lens of food. Pat Conroy visits Paris. Maira Kalman offers "Sunny-side Up" -- a lovely colorful set of pictures with a tale presented in typography imitating handwriting. Familiar names like Calvin Trillin and Jane Smiley, Jane and Michael Stern (here's their website), write about author tours and food, food, food. (Elsewhere, by the way, Smiley has written on "the unteachable ignorance of the red states" Check it out!)
My favorite, though, was an essay entitled "Some Pig" by David Rakoff where Rakoff writes of the relationship of food and Judaism. For those not Jewish (and I am not), perhaps the essay is about how we deal with rules. But it is also about the particularities of pork and shrimp and kashrut and growing up and taking God seriously and struggling with life and meaning. Rakoff writes of friends who simply cannot eat pork -- and of Rabbis who write that "Eating treyf signals a cessation of disgust for the Gentile world" (p. 41) Rakoff tells jokes and he makes serious, scholarly points. Judaism as religion, as culture, as politics, as the lived experience of Rakoff (who describes himself as "me, the -Jewish-homosexual writer: the ultimate degenerate" in describing his inclusion in an event in Germany -- where he sees the "extirpated culture" of Judaism as "fetishized." (see p. 41.) ) The subtitle tells it all: What is it about Jews and Pork? One Man Saves his Bacon by Invoking Sigmund Freud, Emma Goldman, and Irving Berlin." Even more so, these quotations that provoke thought:
The Judaism I feel connected to is more cultural than religious. But both are predicated on a spirit of dissent, of voluble, welcome disagreement, and an institutionalized and fiercely protected duty to question authority. (p. 40)
When I eat a piece of bacon, aside from its preposterous, heart-stopping deliciousness, I taste all of that: all those years and all those migrations that brought me to that museum in Munich, to this privileged place in space and time. I taste Max Beckmann lithographs, Freud case histories, Emma Goldman exhortations, the tunes of Irving Berlin and his Tin Pan Alley chums. Just behind the bacon's bracing jolt of salt and its comforting embrace of fat and smoke, even more than its shattering crispness and tenacious, leathery pull, I taste the World. (p. 41)
