Kathy Biehl - Eat, Drink & Be Wary: Cautionary Tales

Cautionary tales

by Kathy Biehl

9th House

Eat, Drink & Be Wary: Cautionary Tales

Kathy Biehl 2021.

All Rights Reserved.

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever, including Internet usage, without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

FIRST EDITION

First Printing, 2021

ISBN 978-1-7364321-2-9

Book design by Noah Diamond

Cover concept by Matthew Foster

Author photo by Suzanne Savoy

9th House

P.O. Box 184

Oak Ridge, NJ 07438

9thHouse.Biz

Printed in the United States of America

If you love to eat and have a sense of humor Kathy will have you chuckling at her stories and craving some Doritos. She proves that writing about food doesnt have to be so darn serious. I wish it could all be this fun.

Sue Reddel

Food Travelist

Three cheers (salt, butter, and sugar) for Kathy Biehls wittily, wonderfully worded collection of mouth watering essays. Reading Eat, Drink & Be Wary was like going on a tasting tour - with a menu that encompasses not just food but the deeply felt culture that surrounds it. Culinary primitives like me will also be glad to know that the smorgasbord frequently skirts the exclusive grottoes of gourmetism and makes a beeline towards delicious, delicious junk. Devour this book!

Trav S.D.

author, No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous and the blog Travalanche

I love little books like this. Theyre like going to a coffee house for an hour with a good friend and just spilling the beans. And this one is focused on the major appetite we can talk about in mixed company. A fun, cathartic book we all need to have at hand to cleanse our metaphorical reading palates.

John-Michael Albert

author of 8 volumes of poetry (most recent: Questions You Were Too Polite to Ask, Marble Kite Press, 2018) and 8th Poet Laureate of Portsmouth, NH (2011-2013)

Food and drink do a lot more than address physical need. They play a central role in our emotional and social existence. They serve as currency for hospitality, love, and affection, as a security blanket and plug for psychic wounds, and as a touchstone for times that have slipped into memory. They provide an excuse for people to sit together and share a meal, a round or two, and, often, the experience of connection.

Cognoscenti have long laid claim to this turf. They got a lot of company and competition in the late 20th century, when food and drink escalated into the stuff of entertainment, foodie and cocktail cultures, multiple TV networks, and intellectual superiority.

I wandered through this terrain as it morphed, downed a lot of meals and drinks both appalling and delighting, typed up observations for all manner of publications, and usually got paid to do it. I didnt set out to spend decades writing about bars, restaurants, food, and the behaviors they occasion. (My freelance writing focused on offbeat travel and what used to go by human interest.) The topics threw themselves across my path, in the initial years, in a real-world lead-in to an old joke.

A girl walks into a bar and

It did begin with a bar, or rather, lots of them. A former boyfriend passed on a gig he was leaving, writing short, snappy listings of Houston bars for Texas Monthly. Actually walking into a bar played a role, too. I was only a few yards into a pub late one evening when a reporter Id gone out with flagged me over to say that his paper was losing its restaurant reviewer and I had the right style for the job. No, thanks, I said. The resolve lasted until he phoned my office the next day with the Houston Business Journals editor-in-chief on the line. (One moral of these stories: Dont burn bridges.)

In the 30 years since that call, I have reviewed restaurants for newspapers, magazines, directories, and guides, reported food news for national publications, and written about wine for magazines. My career coincided with Houstons culinary scene rising to national prominence; my base of operations expanded to New York City and, eventually, the entire country. A cultural anthropologist by nature, I picked up great and sometimes incredible stories that fell outside the scope of assignments (and their mainstream frame of reference). Those found venting in my long-running, self-published zine and its companion blogs.

This book consists primarily of magazine and zine articles. When I began compiling the collection, the vignettes and focus and frame of reference struck me as artifacts from a distant era. (Iced coffee an anomaly?!?) As I write this introduction during a pandemic, a thick glass wall is now between me and the world I prowled and captured. It was one in which people gathered at tables and counters, raised glasses, shared food, and engaged in dramas and laughter and magic.

I invite you to join me, from the socially safe distance of reading, press your face against the glass, and peer into a time that was.

Kathy Biehl

September 2020

Cozy Lake, NJ

Proust had his madeleines. For me, its Doritos and Dr Pepper.

Food isnt just about nutrition. Argue all you want that the reason you eat is to fuel your body; if youre reading this, food actually has quite another, larger meaning for you. (Unless, of course, youre my friend who serves himself cornflakes for dinner the revelation of which neatly cut off the possibility of his ever becoming more than my friend.)

If food were merely the equivalent of gasoline, why do we talk and think and care so much about it? For vast segments of this society, food offers refuge from a cruel, uncaring or, perhaps, merely boring world. Food is a diversion, a hobby, an obsession, a form of entertainment swelling to faddish proportions. Just look at the rise of celebrity chefs, avalanche of high-profile cookbooks, and proliferation of television cooking shows (why, in some parts of the country,1 theres even a cable channel dedicated to nothing else).

Too, food has a profound connection to the subconscious, particularly the nooks and crannies having to do with Mom and nurturing. What, where, when, why, and how we eat are questions fraught with emotional significance and baggage. Through our choices, we reconnect with something more than whatevers going on at the moment. Some of us seek to recapture sensations we enjoyed at the family table or elsewhere in the past, which is part of the driving force behind holiday traditions and rituals. Others of us are looking instead to compensate for a childhood of lousy meals.

I think about this subject a lot, and Im finding that food also guards a weird intersection point between the subconscious and our bodies. I stumbled upon the correlation during a bout of therapy a few years back. My therapist suggested I try talking to my inner child by writing down questions and seeing what answers bubbled up. I dutifully wrote, What do you want? and was startled to watch my hand scrawl out demands that my conscious mind would not have generated. Second on the list was an Almond Joy.