Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Writing Food, Writing Life


There's an essay on The Millions about food writing.

From the story...

Writing in itself is a sort of cooking, a combining of ingredients: sometimes the finished product turns all corners of our tastes, filling us with joy, other times, we’re not so lucky. And many writers, Plath included, cooked or baked as a reprieve from the arduous hours of writing, returning to their desks refreshed. Kate Moses, when struggling to finish her novel Wintering about Plath, followed her lead and took to spending time in the kitchen working out her ending. If one reads for pleasure, it’s no surprise that these authors end up on the reading list. M.F.K. Fisher said it best: “It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it … and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied … and it is all one.”

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