Bilson review Feb 08

The ABC of banana phalluses

Gay Bilson

We came prepared, though both of us denied it. In a way we had been swotting for years and years. I am familiar with Marion Halligan’s writing about food and her essays on food in literature. ABC TV had flown us to Sydney to take part in a special edition of First Tuesday Book Club on writing about food. There were two other guests: a personable young man (a vegan) from Triple J Radio, who brought with him children’s books with playground rhymes, including much custard and vomiting; and the comedian Mikey Robbins, who was armed with a book by Alice Thomas Ellis. I used to read Ellis in The Spectator ages ago. She wrote rather good novels and a column called ‘Home Life’, often funny and often about the kitchen. Was Robbins reading her, or eager to quote her? He was besuited, the young man carelessly dressed, as if to say, ‘Telly, so what?’ We women of a certain age were more carefully groomed than usual. That’s the thing with television: you clean the garden from under your nails, polish your clogs, and in all probability your brain goes to mush.

In the holding pen, the producer and production assistants kept on bringing books, mostly tired cookbooks from the 1970s. Heavens, I hadn’t given 1970s food a thought. We had been sent a list of possible topics, so long it would be impossible for four people to address them all in half an hour. But reading the list set off little connective explosions. It was sensibly divided into fiction and non-fiction. The former was unexceptionable: memory, sex, plot, inspiration, food in children’s literature, detective fiction – all promising reference points. Under non-fiction there were many good subdivisions: food history, memoir, travel, cookbooks, taboos and fears, health issues and agriculture, ethical concerns.

I haven’t purchased a cookbook for years. When I weeded my collection of books not so long ago, I kept many of them, never used in the kitchen, because they are useful for research. They are mostly catalogued by country, but sometimes a particular food category calls for its own shelf: bread or tea, for instance, and an interesting little section which includes Persian recipes and books such as Sir John Chardin’s Travels in Persia 1673–1677.

Then there are the reference books, from histories to The Oxford Companion to Food (1999) and The Oxford Book of Food Plants (1969). There are Waverley Root’s analyses of French and Italian cuisines, both published in the 1970s, through to that new phenomenon, Cod: A Biography (1997) and Citrus: A History (2007), or the earlier Beautiful Swimmers (1994). Particular travel books treat food well (Peter Robb, a marvellous recorder of a complex, fascinating culinary culture in Midnight in Sicily [1999], the revered Norman Lewis, and Norman Douglas). There is Culture and Cuisine: A Journey through the History of Food (1982), by Jean-Paul Revel, who defined cuisine brilliantly as a ‘perfecting of nutrition’; Sidney Mintz’s Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom (1996); books on the politics of food, on food and the body; books on Chinese culinary culture, including perhaps my favourite of all, Chinese Gastronomy, by Hsiang Ju Lin and Tsuifeng Lin (the original 1969 Nelson hardback), a beautifully designed publication and a text of rare intelligence and economy.

Among the anthologies, Don Anderson’s subversive Banquets of the Mind (2000) stands out because the editor removes dining’s overcoat and finds the conversation beneath. I have some favourite poetry and fiction: surely, given time, I would be able to allude to some of it. A certain Damon Runyon story, for instance, or Isak Dinesen’s Two Ladies of Verlag ([1952], later filmed as Babette’s Feast), or that terrible story told by Primo Levi about the starving men in Auschwitz who begin to talk about the food they loved in the past and become so caught up in their memories that they forget to eat the slop in front of them. It would be imperative to include J.M. Coetzee’s The Life and Times of Michael K (1983). Then I would mention Alan Davidson’s quirky, erudite essays in A Kipper with My Tea (1990). For good measure I would throw in the Grimm Brothers, Giovanni Verga, John Berger and Eric Rolls.

The problem with television’s relationship to reading is that there isn’t one. The audience expects moving pictures (recently, on Channel 9, the last, troubling episode of The Sopranos, which closes with such a long take of a blank, black screen that you grow uneasy, was marred by the noisy closing credits). A talking head is a version of a moving picture, but one that seriously talks about writing doesn’t make the grade, unless the programme is classified Arts, which is not the fate of the First Tuesday Book Club. Fine, serious writing about food is abundant, but this is not common knowledge, and it has recently been snaffled by the academy. Reading (including reading about food) and television are antithetical; they cancel each other out.

I have warily watched a few First Tuesday Book Clubs. The moderator, Jennifer Byrne, is charming and well read but seems compelled to make sport and bouncy fun of books. The first episode included so many references to the-movie-from-the-book it was as if there was general embarrassment about reading for reading’s sake. There has been hardly a discussion about literary style, the words themselves, the possibility of the lovely mechanics within sentences, the architecture of novels – about, well, writing. Recently, David Malouf, because he is incapable of anything less, spoke marvellously about Moby-Dick in the minute allowed. A ridiculous two-minute mock epic of this huge nineteenth-century novel filled the small screen.

‘Writing With Food’ fared about as well as Patrick White did in an early, notorious First Tuesday Book Club. It began well, though. Halligan nominated Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea (1978) as fiction that used food to delineate character. I managed a garbled précis of Italo Calvino’s complex short story ‘Under the Jaguar Sun’. Mikey Robbins nominated Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961), and the young vegan mentioned custard and vomit. We skidded through some detective fiction, cookbooks and history. Then Jennifer Byrne made much of a photograph accompanying a 1970s recipe for an edible candle made from a banana, a glacé cherry and custard. Use your imagination.

Food is both much more and much less than its conspicuous consumption. Halligan and I agreed that the best food writing is by no means simply about food. Sensing that time was running out, I reached for the only book I had brought with me for comfort, John Stewart Collis’s The Worm Forgives the Plough (1973). It is about the dignity of agricultural labour, the sum of Collis’ observations and ruminations after working on the land during World War II: