food essays

spring evening at the Prato

I have had a solid training week so far.  Yesterday morning I went for 1:40, running for an hour on the canal before stopping off at the track for four miles at 5:51, 5:45, 5:43, and 5:43 and then running the two miles home.  Today, I ran eight 800s at the track with two minutes rest in between.  The workout didn't go as planned, but I finished it and felt great.  I wanted to do all eight in under 2:40.  The first three clocked in at 2:40 flat but the remaining 800s started to drag ass like a poor man's Lars von Trier film.  Fine.  Yesterday tired me out.  And so much of running is pushing through races or workouts that aren't going as planned.  Or muddling through when your eating habits go to hell, as mine have lately.  I've tried to cut down on the gelato and pastries, but last night I was starving and ordered a pizza for delivery and tonight, after a stroll in the Prato, I had a small cup of gelato.  To eat here on a regular basis is to encounter more high-quality junk food than one could enslave one's palate with in the U.S.  But high quality though it is, it is junk food nonetheless, abstaining from which will exact nothing from one's store of future memories of Italy.

For some people food is incredibly mnemonic, for others, not so much, and whether or not food works on your memory has nothing to do with your sensitivity or your intelligence.  Proust, obviously, invented this connection between food and memory and probably determined thereby a whole Western way of traveling through the palate.  Food is absent from the travelogues of Henry James, however.  For some travelers opening up taste and smell adds to the sensorial arsenal with which they metaphorically conquer a place.  (Forgive the imperial metaphor, but I'd love to meet someone who didn't travel with mastery in mind; or maybe my own desire for mastery means I never have, and never will, travel.)  For other travelers, taste and smell shut down the other senses, and a place reduces like some savory sauce to the mere quality of its food.  A saving grace of Venice, you should know, is uniformly bad food, which forces you pay attention to the visual scene.

Grad students love to talk about food, and they have a strange fondness for cooking, and for talking about cooking as a respite from work. They also strangely enjoy emphasizing how they enjoy fatty meat dishes such as pork and bacon.  (This is truly weird, and I don't know where this love for trumpeting one's taste for lipids comes from.  But you decide which sounds better:  "I just love pancetta, and I save all the grease so I can make gravy" v. "I only eat fat free Snackwells -- Devil's Foodcake is the best!!)  There's a strange relationship to domesticity in all this that I can't figure out, but I think it has to do with academics' inherent personal conservatism.  See this essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education, which pretty much encapsulates this tendency to talk about loving to cook and using cooking to relax.  Notice how it's written in the breezy, somewhat cheery, stilted, precious, personal-and-yet-not-too-personal style of the university public communique, or of the grant application essay or teaching statement, one of the intellectual autobiographies that we academics write from time to time when we want an institution to give us money.

The other thing that interests me about this essay is how she refers to keeping her sanity, as if she were under the polar icecap on a submarine or D-Day plus 15 on Iwo Jima.  There's nothing to go insane about in graduate school, but when PhD students talk about insanity (a cliche in grad school) they're really talking about the phenomenon ofaltogether losing that salutary perspective in which these intellectual pursuits (for which myopia is actually a thrill) appear merely as a job.  Not useless or silly, but simply a part of a multifaceted life.

Hell with it, though--if this person can write that essay about cooking, maybe I'll do it with running, and go on and on about how after the library on rambles on country roads, past the horsefarms in the crepuscular light of late afternoon in the first days of November, I let brilliance effervesce and ideas stew, like the beef stroganouf I would cook later that evening after a rejuvenating shower.