Biologists talk of pre-adapted systems: things used for purposes other than the ones they evolved for. The middle-ear bones in mammals, for example, have their origins in the reptilian jaw. A more obvious example is the mouth. Our tongues and teeth evolved as a way to take foods into the body. At some later point, the existing structure was co-opted for a new task, the expulsion of words out into the world.
The old injunction “Don’t talk with your mouth full” is based on the presumption that, however multifunctional a mouth may be, it should only perform one job at a time. Humans have found a way around this limitation in the form of food writing. When we read one of the twenty-four thousand cookbooks published annually, we are indulging in the exquisite pleasure of combining the two functions: food and language mixed together.
“Why,” asks Sandra Gilbert in “The Culinary Imagination,” a new history of “eating words” in a cultural context, “do we so massively—and often so hungrily—meditate on food, its history, its preparation, its stories, its vices and virtues?” An obvious response is: Why wouldn’t we? Along with sex and death, food is one of the three great universals, and it can be discussed in a far wider range of registers than those other two. When breaking the ice with someone you’ve just met, you might hesitate to bring up sex (creepy!) or death (morbid!). Food, on the other hand, provides an instant topic of conversation that anyone can join, inoffensive without being boring.
And yet there is something puzzling about our obsession with imaginary food, as Gilbert’s book fascinatingly explores. Despite their shared origins in the mouth, the act of speech and the act of eating do not have much in common. As Gilbert notes, “it’s virtually impossible for language to describe the ‘physiology of taste’ in the pure moment of biting, chewing and swallowing.” The meal itself cannot be recaptured in words. Restaurant critics all struggle with the difficulty of writing about eating without resorting to the word “delicious” and its synonyms. Or, as Anthony Bourdain—quoted in one of Gilbert’s many epigraphs—puts it: “Writing incessantly about food is like writing porn. How many adjectives can there be before you repeat yourself?”
The pleasures of imagined food are something very different from those of the real thing. To read M. F. K. Fisher on eating her first oyster at a girls’-school Christmas dance is not at all the same as eating an oyster yourself: plump, briny, and (I can’t stop myself!) delicious. In theory, food writing is an aid or a prelude to actual meals: you read a recipe and then you cook. In practice—in a “paradox” that Michael Pollan, among others, has identified—our current gastronomic fantasies, particularly on TV, have coincided with a decline in home cooking.
This is not such a paradox, however, if we see that imaginary food—whether onscreen or on the page—is feeding separate hungers. Growing up in Soviet Russia, Anya von Bremzen, the author of “Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking,” found that “dreaming about food … was just as rewarding as eating.’ ” Gilbert quotes the well-worn line from “The Song of Songs”: “Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples: for I am sick of love.” Gilbert notes that “it isn’t just flagons and apples that stay and comfort us; it’s the knowledge that there are_ _flagons and apples.” Unlike an apple, which, however satisfying, is gone in minutes, the knowledge that there are apples is something you can return to any number of times, whether in moments of hunger, sadness, or when you are eating potato chips. Maybe people want to watch chefs on TV while eating microwave chow in order to remind themselves that there are still cooks in this godforsaken world.
Recipes, according to Gilbert, are always, in some sense, instructions for “recuperation, transformation, preservation.” All food writing is a way to pin down “a few of the fleeting things of this world.” William Carlos Williams’s plums, the ones that he stole from the icebox in “This Is Just to Say,” were gone before the poem started, and yet they lodge in the imaginations of readers as the loveliest plums ever, “so sweet / and so cold.”
In a chapter on food in children’s fiction, Gilbert suggests that food fantasies originate in children’s dreams of never-ending bounty. “Lollipop trees and gingerbread houses. Bottles of cherry-tarts mingled with custard, roast turkey, toffee and other goodies. Spoonfuls of sugar.” For most of history, while communities lived in constant fear of the next famine, the culinary imagination was dominated by Rabelaisian excess. In children’s books, we are all still ravenous. We share the hunger of Laura Ingalls Wilder for maple sugar and candy canes. In real life, sugar is now almost as freely available as the gingerbread on the cottage in “Hansel and Gretel,” yet in our bedtime stories it remains a precious commodity. The sweets in the Harry Potter series, whose release coincided with an inexorable rise in childhood obesity, are no less lavish and no less lusted over than those in “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.”
The nonfiction food writing now aimed at adults contains somewhat different fantasies. Gilbert writes of the “postmodern pastorals,” which, rather than inviting us to indulge in rivers of chocolate, create a fantasy of simple self-sufficiency wherein one never eats anything one hasn’t grown or at least cooked oneself, in an imagined recreation of the lifestyle of great-grandmothers. Now the dream is not of plenty but of scarcity: the make-believe idea that we are still governed by the constraints of the seasons. These utopias allow us to pretend that peaches in summer or squash in the fall still have the same force they once did. What is forgotten, Gilbert suggests, is the uncomfortable fact that many peasant great-grandmothers ate “a monotonous and often dangerous diet.”
One of the strange things about imaginary food is that it allows us to take pleasure in reading about things that we would never want to eat in real life. In Hemingway’s story “Big Two-Hearted River,” the protagonist, who is on a fishing trip, pours a can of pork and beans and a can of spaghetti into a frying pan, warms it up, and devours it with tomato ketchup. We can share his satisfaction even if we would never recreate the dish. Part of the appeal of reading about food is that it affords us a chance to borrow someone else’s mouth, which takes us away from the sometimes wearying demands of our own appetites, to a place where even canned food can form part of a grand narrative. Hemingway said, in “Gastronomic Adventures,” that he had “discovered that there is romance in food when romance has disappeared from everywhere else.”
The unending richness of our culinary imaginations shows that food, like the mouth, is an example of preadaptation. In the nineteen-seventies, the psychologist Paul Rozin argued that food started as a form of basic animal nourishment but later came to encompass culture and beauty, religious rituals and symbols, memoirs and cookery shows. Every animal has to eat. But it takes an animal as strange and creative as a human being to use food not only for eating but for “Iron Chef.”
