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Tasting vs.

Writing about Taste


An excerpt from A Woman of Many Appetites by Ginny Mata Yet precisely how does one write about food? First of all, as with any kind of writing, it must be good writing. Thus says former Saveur magazine editor-in-chief, and author of the book Ferran: The Inside Story of elBulli and the Man Who Reinvented Food (2008): Its about carity of expression, style, voice, accuracy, knowledge of structure, and rhythm of language. The idea that food writing is a separate discipline is false. (Jacob 2) When one writes about food, one writes about a more common experience, drawing on something universal that speaks to everyone. (Jacob 5) And thus, in all writing that involves food, there is always a larger context, that part that goes beyond merely eating to live --- that is, the various social, anthropological, psychological, and philosophical gestures in the non-consuming aspects of food, and rituals of eating. (Halpern 1) These are the very same varied and various conjugations in our lives that Doreen Fernandez speaks of. The point is not the food itself, but the stories behind it. In essence: eating our daily slice of bread, but not for the intake of that slice alone. (Halpern 1) As Doreen Fernandez says: Tasting, eating, and savoring are very intimate adventures they are literally, and metaphorically, gut experiences. They occur within the person, involving memory, sensation and pleasure. (xi) Hence, the goal is not to describe perceptions per se, but rather to evoke the readers understanding of them, through memory:
Obviously, it was not the vocabulary that counted, or even the diction, the syntax, the sentence structure. It was getting the reader to see through the words to the experience. It was choosing the words that echoed, that reverberated umaalingawngaw. And then it was making the readers hear the silence between the echoes, and themselves load them with memory, sensation, and finally, meaning. (Fernandez xvii)

For Trillin, the most important part of the writing is making sure every word is the right word --- choosing the words that echoed, reverberated, umaalingawngaw. Adam Gopnik makes the act of shelling beans analogous to the act of writing itself:
A devotion to shell beans, I have noticed, divides even amateur cooks from noncooks more absolutely than any other food, and they are, into the bargain, a perfect model of writing. Like sentences, shell beans are a great deal more trouble to produce than anyone who isnt producing them knows. You have to shell the beans, slipping open the pods with your thumbnail and then tugging the beautiful little prismatic buttons from their mooringsa process that, like writing, always takes much longer than you think it will. And then even the best shell beans, cleaned and simmered, are like sentences in that nobody actually appreciates them as much as they deserve to be appreciated. (emphasis mine) (2)

How else can this be accomplished, except by writing with, and about, the senses? After all, food is, first and foremost, a physical, tangible object that we perceive through the senses.

The problem then becomes, how do we write about the senses? The writer often runs into a wall when trying to identify and describe odors and tastes. For instance: how does one describe what an apple tastes like? Its easy enough to talk about the crunch it makes, its ruby skin, and how its texture changes once it is cut open, from firm flesh to mealy mush. But doesnt an apple simply smell like itself? Thus says Diane Ackerman, in a Natural History of the Senses: Smells coat us, swirl around us, enter our bodies, emanate from us. We live in a constant wash of them. Still, when we try to describe a smell, words fail us like the fabrication that they are. (80) Hence, the cognitive distance from what I taste when I bite into an apple, to what I eventually end up writing about the sensation, is colossal. The only way to bridge that gap is to not write about the perception per se, but to evoke the readers understanding of it through memory. In the act of remembering, many things are lost in translation the words themselves cannot seem to fully describe the experience. Also, in time, this same memory, shifts, and changes, seeming to be in a perpetual state of flux. This is because, as chef and neurologist Miguel Sanchez Romera says in La Cocina de los Sentidos:
Remembering is first of all a dynamic process, and not only a trunk of memories or a library of experiences lived once that can be later evoked according to circumstances. It is something as lively and nimble as our own self, since individuals create memoires in connection to many personal necessities. (220)

In other words, memory is not fixed once and for all, ready to be accessed when needed, but rather a creative and dynamic faculty which allows us to relive the past each time in many different ways. (Parasecoli 104) The effect of food on memory is very powerful, which is why many writers use it as images, metaphors, and analogies, in their work. The most famous example of this is Marcel Prousts omnipresent and unavoidable madeleine. (Paraseocoli 107)
She sent for one of those squat, plump little cakes called "petites madeleines," which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted valve of a scallop shell. And soon, mechanically, dispirited after a dreary day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. 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. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory - this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me it was me. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I sensed that it was connected with the taste of the tea and the cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours, could, no, indeed, be of the same nature. Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it? (48)

Upon tasting the madeleine, Proust is inexorably taken out-of-himself (ekstasis). In this state of bliss, he is compelled to search for the origin of that emotion in the cake itself, only to realize that the secret is hidden in his soul. In this way, he affirms that remembering is not merely searching, but also creating. (Paraseocoli 107) For writers who want to capture these fluid, shifting memories, Doreen Fernandez suggests the they try to employ any, or all, of the following techniques when writing about food: (1) by simply using the words, or names of the food themselves, which reverberate by themselves (xvii), (2) by enumerating the ingredients that will tell the reader what the dish takes like (xii), and (3) by using poetic imagery and metaphor. (xii) Yet, writing about our taste memories is not enough. The story is of paramount importance: the core narrative must have substantial weight for any kind of writing to ring true. Sources Ackerman, Diane. A Natural History of the Senses. London: Vintage Books, 1991. Fernandez, Doreen. Tikim: Essays on Philippine Food and Culture. Pasig City: Anvil, 1994. Gopkin, Adam. Cooked Books. The New Yorker Magazine. 9 April 2007. Halpern, Daniel. Not for Bread Alone: Writers on Food, Wine, and the Art of Eating. ed. Daniel Harpern. New York: Harper Perennial, 1993. Paraseocoli, Fabio. Hungry Eneagrams: Food and Non-Representational Memory. Food and Philosophy: Eat, Drink, and Be Merry. ed. Fritz Allhoff and Dave Monroe. MA & Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007. p. 102 113. Proust, Marcel. Remembrance of Things Past, Vol. 1: Swanns Way. trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff & Terence Kilmartin. New York: Vintage Books. Romera, Miguel Sanchez. Lo Cocina de Los Sentidos. Barcelona: Planeta, 2001.

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