Wood - Love and hunger: thoughts on the gift of food

LOVE
AND
HUNGER

LOVE
AND
HUNGER

CHARLOTTE
WOOD

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First published in 2012

Copyright Charlotte Wood 2012

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ISBN 978 1 74237 776 6

used by permission of the David Foster Wallace Literary Trust. Originally published in Gourmet magazine, 2004. Copyright 2005, David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster, Little Brown & Co.

Text design by Sandy Cull, gogoGingko
Set in 12.5/17 pt Granjon by Bookhouse, Sydney
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

It seems to me that our three basic needs,for food and security and love, are so mixedand mingled and entwined that we cannotstraightly think of one without the others. Soit happens that when I write of hunger, I amreally writing about love and the hungerfor it, and warmth and the love of it andthe hunger for it... and then the warmthand richness and fine reality of hungersatisfied... and it is all one.

MFK FISHER,

THE GASTRONOMICAL ME

For my friends

CONTENTS

PART I
ORIGINS

PART II
PRACTICALITIES

PART III
OBSERVATIONS

PART IV
CONSOLATIONS

I began really learning to cook in my mid-twenties, at about the same time as I began really learning to write. I have only recently wondered if there is a link between these two things, other than the circumstances in which I found myself: an idle university student in possession of time for dawdling, some vague creative urges and new friends who inspired me with their own creativity and skill with a pen or a frying pan.

I had, of course, been cooking for years, in the way one does to feed oneself on first leaving home. I cooked sturdy, cheap and cheerful meals that were nutritious enough, if not exactly adventurous. I had also been writing for years, as a journalist on our small-town local newspaper, and I suspect the properties of my writing echoed those of my cooking. My articlesabout artificial insemination of cattle, say, or the latest Lions Club fund-raising effort for a new piece of hospital equipmentwere competent, and no doubt accurate enough. But the desire to write creatively, to bring out into the light and give shape and purpose to the inchoate longings and imaginings of my young mind, was still too unformedor else too deeply buried to acknowledge. I remember once being asked if I had ever thought about writing a novel. The idea seemed utterly ludicrous. My questioner might as well have asked if I had yearnings to captain a ship to Antarctica, or to become a world-famous belly-dancer. It was not just that such an achievement was beyond me, but I couldnt imagine why anyone would want to expose herselfto danger, to knowingin such a way.

Skip a few decades to a recent dinner, when a dear friend who likes to be provocative suggested that people like me cook for others as a way of feeling superior to them. I admit I was a little rocked by this idea. Could he be right? Might there be even a kernel of truth in this? And if it wasnt true, why then do I cook, and why does the satisfaction it brings me feel so profound?

I hope my friend is wrong about my motivesor mostly wrongbut I do see his point, given the almost obscene contemporary obsession with what I think of as fashion cookery: the slavish reproduction of the latest television fad, the obedient queuing outside this cake shop or that restaurant, the cult-like allegiance to this brand of olive oil or that cookbook. All this worries me, because it seems born of a kind of competitive social anxiety rather than a confident love of food, and it makes cooking into a club of knowing insiders, excluding all others. The fetishisation of chefs and dishes and ingredients and equipment led one woman I know to declare in exasperation that she just didnt get this obsession with something as basic as food. I mean, she cried, its just