Eat It Like You Mean It

From Eden Bainter — Blog by Eden Bainter

April 26, 2009

My bookshelf moans with each cookbook and food memoir I add to it. Not to mention fiction and politics. I have enough books on my “to read” list to constitute their own book. So I couldn’t really explain it – even to myself – when I honed in on an (expensive) new hardback copy of Fuchsia Dunlop’s book, “Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-sour memoir of eating in China.”

There were all sorts of alarm bells. Vivid sentences like:

“A whole puppy, roasted crisp, splayed out on a plate after having been attacked with a cleaver, so its skull is split in half, an eye and a nostril on each side, served with an elegant garnish of coriander, and flowers made from pink radish…”

For a life-long vegetarian like me, that amounts to the beginnings of a scary story on par with reading Stephan King after the electricity goes out. And I can safely say that the few times she didn’t happily munch her exotic meals – that it felt taboo to her and she questioned the ethics of it all, well…the blush and guilt that ensued on my end, reading it on the bus or in the park, was equal to hers, endangered turtle for turtle.

So why subject my strictly veggie self to such a wild, gory adventure?

I asked myself this nearly every page. Because – truly – I wanted to figure it out. And eventually, I did. Dunlop’s memoir, and indeed her food ethics, was vastly different from my own. She headed into China with a personal promise to eat whatever was put on a plate in front of her. But throughout the book, though stalwart to her mission, she finds herself hitting walls, questioning the limits of her resolve, negotiating her ethics and personal identity. For a while she even turns vegetarian (sadly, it didn’t last). But I respected her choices all the while. I kept reading because I saw the kind of eater I was in Dunlop. Not in what she consumed, but in how she negotiated the borders of eating in an unfamiliar (and sometimes disagreeable) culture. How she remained receptive to any and all opportunities that came her way.

So, Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper was a bit of a scary story. But ultimately, it was a story of embracing a world of change and ambiguities. And it’s also the reason that my bookshelf is about to crack any day from all those cookbooks and food memoirs: there’s nothing quite as satisfying as committing yourself to keep learning, keep questioning, and keep negotiating your culinary and cultural borders. That’s the joy of eating, cooking and living – and it just might require another shelf or two to get there.

Eat This Not That.

From Eden Bainter — Blog by Eden Bainter

April 26, 2009

Rather than blog, I’ve been...living. I’ve been out walking, hiking or at least reading on the porch-couch until it’s too dark to see. We even started a garden! Anyway, being outside has definitely made me feel more alive, so to hell with being behind on the blog posts. I’m sure Mary Oliver would approve, too.

When I saw these exotic looking fiddlehead ferns for sale at the farmer’s market, I thought “eee!”

My practical side said beware. The little coiled beasts reminded me quite a lot of my potted fern house plant, the one Belvedere chews on for fiber. A popular phrase “eat this not that” came to mind, so I went for it. I ate this (ferns from the market) not that (ferns from the bookshelf).

I improvised a crunchy stir fry of fiddleheads, shitakke mushrooms and a minced scallion, which reminded me a bit of eating the floor of an old-growth forest, but classier looking (and still surprisingly bawdy.) Summer fare? Bring it.