Life
itself is the proper binge—Julia Child
What do our characters eat? When I read, I see very little mention of
meals. Perhaps that’s because writers are taught to avoid table talk scenes as
being boring. Donald Maas expresses it in a section of his book called, “Low
Tension: The Problem with Tea,” insisting that authors should “cut scenes set
in kitchens…or that involve drinking tea or coffee.” Certain food descriptions
in literature, though, have become as famous as the books themselves. Few
people have read Proust’s In Search of
Lost Time, but most know of the reference to madeleines: “No sooner had the
warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through
me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me.
An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with
no suggestion of its origin (long memory omitted)...The sight of the little
madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it. And all from my
cup of tea.”
In Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, he describes a snack imbibed on a cold Paris day
that made me travel there after I read it (I was nineteen): “As I ate the
oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that
the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent
texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down
with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be
happy and to make plans.”
There are also fine moments of
cooking in literature, such as when Pippi Longstocking makes pancakes for her
friends. She “got out three eggs and tossed them high in the air. One of the
eggs landed on her head and cracked open, making the yolk run into her eyes.
But the other two she easily caught with a saucepan…’I’ve always heard that egg
yolks are good for your hair,’ said Pippi…’Just wait and see, my hair is going
to start growing like mad.’”
Going back through my books, I found
plenty of meals, although not a single cup of tea. More prominently though, I
discovered a motif of hunger. Liberty Aimes’ mother consumes “thirty-two pieces
of fried French toast, seven pounds of fried clams, sixteen fried hot dogs, two
fried chickens, twenty fried hamburgers, six platters of French fries, three
platters of fried noodles, a pie (not fried), six ice cream sundaes…” every
day, but Libby is half starved. She takes a few bits while cooking. Adam in Aftershock is traveling across the
country without money. He is so hungry that he tries to eat a pizza frozen. Walking on Air begins with a rare diner
meal, since it is the depression and June and her family are often hungry. She
even scores a piece of pie from a kindly waitress: “If I could I would live on
pie. It’s as if all of the excess of feeling in these towns-the forlorn brides,
the drunks, the lonely old ladies and hungry children-have landed soul-flown in
the crust, the weeping apples, the peaches liked babies curved in their ma’s
bellies.”
Some of my favorite characters are
hungry. Think Dickens and they’ll line up, most notably Pip and Oliver Twist.
Then there’s Stanley Yelnats and Zero in Holes
being so famished and thirsty that they eat raw onions, which saves their
life since it keeps the lethal yellow-spotted lizards away.
As always, there’s some past trauma
lurking. My mom was a terrible cook. She baked steak and put large chunks of
yellow onion in tuna fish. She boiled vegetables until they were soggy and
gray. She even burnt canned soup, then scraped the stuck bit at the bottom into
the bowl. I remember a meal she made where the only edible item were frozen
peas in cream sauce, one package for six people. One day, my hippy brother
moved back home from his naked commune in Santa Barbara, and took over the
cooking. He made black bean burritos with grated carrots, caramelized onions,
sour cream and avocado; fruit salad aptly called “ambrosia”; gazpacho; and
carob brownies. He brewed coffee instead of making instant.
Food
is a packed symbol: an apple, a cup of coffee, meat loaf, a bottle of wine. Physical
hunger is a metaphor for other kinds of hunger (soul hunger, heart hunger). Our
characters are driven by desire, or they may not have a story. What is your character dying for want of? Sometimes, it’s a good meal.
