His name was Steve, or “Uncle Steve,” although he wasn’t anyone’s uncle that we knew of. He wasn’t enrolled at Berkeley and was indeed what we’d now call “unhoused,” with a substance-abuse disorder ill-suited to mission-critical jobs. But at the student-run cooperative residence Barrington Hall, “hotbed of UC radicalism,” per the LA Times, where hired party bands ran to Black Flag and the Dead Kennedys and the punch bowl was spiked with LSD, each contributed according to his ability and Steve’s ability made him Bong Monitor — a role he performed ably, tirelessly, and — crucially for our purposes — quotably.
Sitting at his post in the dining hall, the wizened 40-something dorm resident dispensed bits of wisdom along with hits of the house green. One stays with me, as a metonym for that whole era. I’ll render it here as I heard it:
It’s a good idea
To have a little food
Every once in a while.
While I officially lived in Barrington’s nearby sister coop, I spent enough time inside those graffiti-covered walls and their contiguous chemical flux to recognize a crucial survival tip when I heard one. The odd thing is how wise Steve’s counsel strikes me now.
It’s a clarifying statement against a constant stream of chatter. A summary of all my feelings on a subject others just won’t stop discussing. A little food, every once in a while. Now can we please move on?
Put me down as a conscientious objector to the food discourse.
I’m not trying to start a war. Although I imagine we’re somewhat past Peak Food, food-related content has been so abundant, so celebrated, and consumed by so many smart people for so long that trash-talking food culture is clearly a sucker move. Plus, I’ve spent a career writing about rock, hip-hop, and youth culture; I know the lazy contempt literary gatekeepers show writing about ill-pedigreed subjects they don’t get.
What I’m trying to do here is a searching and gustatory inventory, which I’ll probably regret in fifteen minutes. I’m trying to figure out what part of the brain I’m missing that makes a person perk up and lean forward when someone starts describing what they had for lunch. Hours ago. In a totally different place.
How many others are like me? What other members of the educated professional class sit dumbfounded at the narrated feast, wondering when to ooh, when to ahh, with a buzzing hallucinatory panic that this particular tale of potato preparation may well last forever?
Martin Amis spoke of people with an analogous problem. “Watch the humorless closely,” he wrote, in The War Against Cliché, noting “the cocked and furtive way they monitor all conversation, their flashes of panic as irony or exaggeration eludes them, the relief with which they submit to the meaningless babble of unanimous laughter,” he wrote. “The humorless can program themselves to relish situations of human farce or slapstick — and that's about it.”
Now we recognize this behavior in the world’s richest man (“Let this sink in”), Florida’s governor (of the Tourette’s laugh and agonized smile), and, I fear, myself thirty seconds into a friend’s exegesis of a tomato-and-mozzarella-salad, when I realize that what I took for a stray non-sequitur was actually the first tile of a mosaic they’ll be assembling for the next several minutes.
I’ve been told that I have an amused, expectant expression in such moments, like someone hearing the first part of a knock-knock joke. Only the punchline never comes, the joke gets harder to follow.
We’ve evolved to the point where most of us know that last night’s engrossing dream won’t reward a non-participant who hears it rendered as a pointless series of set pieces. So why does the lunch narrative retain such currency?
Am I just a stingy listener? Does some moral failing or niche sociopathy prevent me from treasuring every detail about the well-blanched endive leaf disintegrating in my dear friend’s stomach? At least that part of the alimentary canal holds potential for some drama or misadventure; otherwise, these stories all end the exact same way.
We’re among you, we mute, puzzled auditors of the food discourse. We eat food, pretty much daily, but we’re as likely to give you a detailed account of the menu as we are to share lab results from our recent physical. (Bad example: I’m way too likely to share lab results.)
Who are we? What do we have in common?
Conan O’Brien spoke for us when he complained about exhausting conversations with his wife and friends about where to dine out. “It doesn’t matter,” he sighed to a guest on his podcast. “I’m just going to put it into a hole in my head.”
Just last week, I was thrilled by Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek’s disclosure on his excellent substack: “I don’t care about [eating] — it’s an unpleasant duty to be done as quickly and painlessly as possible.” Actually, you need a second helping of him here:
My dream of the ultimate food is: take totally different elements like chocolate cake, fresh fruit, pork chop with creamy sauce, etc., mix them into a monotonous paste, and then cut the paste into small pieces that you eat till you are full. In such a way, you can eat a universal meal that defies all categorization.
Find that on epicurious.com.
Some have ineffectually sought to spark a foodie backlash for decades, one Guardian journalist writing in 2012, “food is the new drugs… a safer and more respectable hedonic tool, the key to a comfortingly domesticated high.” Before this and for slightly different reasons, as EIC of New York, Kurt Andersen included the word “foodie” on an internal list of banned words, along with “eatery,” which prompted a copy editor I liked to make the nearby “Foodie’s Eatery” his favorite lunch spot.)
A good decade before this, I spent months reporting on a more feral expression of this urge in a Spin feature called “The Gastronauts,” where I moved among raw foodists, juicearians, sproutarians, and assorted pre-millennial dietary extremists. The less wacky and exhibitionistic of them really did seem to bring the kind of spiritual consciousness to their eating practice that Michael Pollan would later champion in his 2006 book The Omnivore’s Dilemma. A book that generated an epigram almost identical to the one Uncle Steve offered with a bong hit: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”
But this exhaustive inquiry into the science, culture, and ethics of contemporary eating now strikes me as a rehearsal for the topic Pollan pursued in his subsequent book, 2018’s How To Change Your Mind, an historically-rich book, subtitled, “What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence,” in which Pollan, a science writer, delivers an under-sung literary performance as he verbally grapples with the same ineffable sensorial-cognitive explosion that literary giants like Aldous Huxley had 50 years earlier, and doing so repeatedly, with several brands of hallucinogen.
Cooking and eating. They’re both eternal and essential. They’re sensual, scientific and have, per the tiresome usage, “a narrative.” There may be analogues to Pollan’s psychonaut in food literature, some young Nabokov or Dorothy Parker might run a brilliant food newsletter on this very platform. But I bet it would be lost on me.
Here's where I have to cite Sigmund Freud, that towering visionary of Western thought, whose profound knowledge of art, drama, and literature illuminated so many dark corners of the human soul, and who simply didn’t like music. Any of it.
In his 1914 paper “The Moses of Michelangelo,” Freud famously wrote that “with music, I am almost incapable of obtaining any pleasure. Some rationalistic, or perhaps analytic, turn of mind in me rebels against being moved by a thing without knowing why I am thus affected and what it is that affects me.”
Some scholars argue Freud, obviously a masterful writer, was exaggerating his own deficiencies simply to provoke, entertain, or make a point. (Can you imagine?) They say that his ready knowledge of Mozart and Bizet operas belie his supposed acoustic atrophy. But I like to think that everyone is allowed one blind spot or dead zone, even if it’s bigger and more basic than not getting fantasy football.
Still, I like to think of Freud sitting there in his office, listening to some horizontal neurotic going on and on about the prelude to Parsifal. How the unison strings’ transcendent melody speaks, ex nihilo, like the voice of the Creator. How it fills him with such sadness and longing, sends him hurtling back not only into his own past, but to humanity’s, to the planet’s, to the origins of life itself.
While the doctor taps his pen against his notebook, waiting for him to stop speaking gibberish and get to the point.
After our last installment, on names, I was thrilled to see Harper’s excerpt an all-too-short passage from Lucy Sante’s upcoming book, I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition. I’ll quote the opening graf here, by way of bowing to a much better writer on changing names.
For months I was preoccupied with the matter of my name. I knew perfectly well that my name was Lucy. Over the decades I had occasionally toyed with alternate names. I liked Louise, Betty, Julie, Colette, Simone, Florence; I thought of just dropping my first name in favor of my middle name, Marie. But Lucy stuck. That had nothing to do with any other Lucys I had met, but went straight back to my appearance as Lucy in a picture-caption typo in a small suburban gazette when I was twelve. The name had taken root in my brain and defeated all comers.
Nice, huh?
Anyways, thanks for being with us.
Bon appétit!
Oh totally. I bet that head chef was aware of self-parodying oenophiles (sp?) when he landed on that solid assessment (although it does make me want to ask if it's also a good bathing wine, or engine lubricating wine, etc.) I should probably cop to the fact that my interest in cuisine and discussion of same took a radical downward correction when I stopped drinking.
It makes me think of wine talk. an old bandmate of mine was a bit of a wine snob and waited tables at a fine dining place in Cambridge, and told us that at staff wine tastings they would expand poetically on the wines and that the head chef was a working class British bloke who would say each round 'it's a good drinkin wine' and slap it back. My friend was amused at the chef, not by him, and was comparing the rest of us slobs to him, but whenever I hear florid wine notes I think admiringly of that chef I never met.