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Food Stories

by on Aug. 11, 2009, under Arts

chefs-hat

There’s lots of buzz about the new movie Julie and Julia . Since food is only partly about nutrition or fuel, I was thinking about how many stories there are about food.  It’s a subject that is fraught with meaning, memories may be evoked, significant moments celebrated, resentments can be created, food fights might reign.

M.F.K. Fisher wrote “family dinners are more often than not an ordeal of nervous indigestion, preceded by hidden resentment and ennui and accompanied by psychosomatic jitters.”  But Virginia Woolf wrote “One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”

I Goggled food stories to see what’s out there and came up with:

First stop was Karyn Zoldan’s blog To Market to Food Market, to see what was happening on the local scene.  I discovered that there are 4834 food blogs listed at the Foodie Blogroll website.  And I learned that Helen Graves at Food Stories appears to be a competitive blogger.

I had some food fun at Food Stories: Where do Crisps Come From. A pleasant woman’s voice tells you the aim of the game is to place the pictures in the right order to tell the story of crisps (potato chips) from beginning to end.  When you do it correctly she’ll praise you with a “well done”.  Very comforting.

At  Good. Food. Stories I read stories about eating, drinking, and most of all enjoying oneself immensely (and sometimes gluttonously) through food.  I found out the stories behind 10 famous food logos at  Neatorama.

I checked out the politics of food websites such as Cooking Up a Story.  Their goal is “to bring shared interest and enthusiasm for film stories and food together.”  They feature personal stories about people, food, and sustainable living “through documentary short stories, interviews, and cooking demonstrations providing information and inspiration about family farmers, agriculture and sustainability, food history, food culture, food science, and much, much more.”

bananasI was warned to avoid tropical fruits unless I live in the tropic at Eat Low Carbon Diet.  Eating a single banana means about 8 pounds of carbon emissions for a four ounce serving or .30% of my year’s allowance.

Of course I had to visit Food, Inc, the website for the surprise hit at The Loft that tells the disgusting story of where our corporate food comes from.

It’s become very popular to write and tell food stories from many points of view.  I had a storytelling event a few years ago called Eat Your Vegetables: The Food Show and I found out that lots of people love to tell and hear stories related to food.  Maybe it’s time to serve up a second course.

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  • karynzoldan

    Penny

    Great post.

    Have you ever had a food story theme at Odyssey? I remember once food writer and chef Barry Infuso told a story about learning to cook from his Italian grandmother. Food writer Edie Jarolim told a story about critiquing food while at a nudist camp.

    Food is in our face. People have so many different relationships with food.

    Decades ago when I was a civil servant slave in Los Angeles, I was at the drinking fountain and I overheard a woman talking about how her grandmother made tortillas. I chimed in to two strangers that my grandmother made challah. We compared notes and became best friends for many years following.

    Food is one of life’s great connector. Even in the grocery store, everyone is eyeballing each other’s shopping carts to see what other people are buying. Just the other day, someone asked me what I do with purple potatoes. 

  • Albert Lannon

    Loved the movie!  My favorite food story concerns my late former father-in-law, an immigrant Puerto Rican in New York working as a doorman.  Jose was very proud, and felt the equal of all.  Each day on his way to the subway to go to work, he passed a fancy Italian restaurant.  He would stop and look at the menu, and saw that he did not know what the most expensive dish was; he couldn’t make sense of the Italian name.  So he decided to save his money and, when he had enough, to go to that white-table-cloth eatery and order that most expensive dish.  That day finally came.  He put on his suit and tie, walked into the restaurant and ordered his dish from the tuxedo-clad waiter.  Imagine his surprise and chagrin when what was served was an entite lamb’s head, cooked.  Jose folded his cloth napkin back on the table, asked for his check, paid the surprised waiter, and left, never looking back.

    • Penelope

      Great story! It tells so much about your curious and proud father-in-law.

  • Carolyn Classen

    There have also been quite a few movies besides “Julie and Julia” about food and chefs.  For example the famous Mexican movie, “Like Water for Chocolate”  (I read the novel as well),  Danish film “Babette’s Feast”, and of course that German film “Mostly Martha.”   These were all interesting stories from around the world,  based around food and cooking.

    • Penelope

      You’re so right, Julie and Julia comes from a long history of food as a subject and symbol in films.

  • http://www.julieraycreative.com Julie Ray

    I love food stories! My grandfather and his parents were Lithuanian immigrants in a small Massachusetts town. My grandfather saw his school mates eating peanut butter sandwiches and asked his mother to make him one. She didn’t know what peanut butter was and instead made him a mustard sandwich!
     

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  • http://www.tucsoncowgirl.com Monica Surfaro Spigelman

    Childhood food memories: Visits from the horse-drawn vegetable-fruit cart that stopped at our corner in Brooklyn every week. Still visualize the apples and spinach and the scale that dangled from the back of the cart. Also I can see the sawdust on the floor of our local butcher, who would personally deliver chicken feet and other goodies my grandma and mom purchased each week. And then there was the milkman: when he arrived each morning at 5am with our bottles of milk, I knew from the clinking sounds of glass bottles that the day was here.  As Karyn says food is one of life’s greatest connectors.

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