'I Make Little Choice at Table'

Food seems to have replaced religion and art as a source of consolation and purpose in the lives of many people. I know some who photograph most of their meals and share the pictures. I’m reminded of Tom Waits in his spoken introduction to “Eggs and Sausage”: “I was always, uh, kinda one who’d like to consider myself kind of a pioneer of the palate, a restauranteur, if you will.” 

There’s a trace of snobbery in this pose, of course, as the photographed meals often look elaborate, expensive and unidentifiable, the sort of thing you would never prepare for yourself. It wouldn’t occur to me to photograph my peanut butter sandwich or tonight’s red beans and rice. I’m far from ascetic but I’ve never wished to fetishize food. It doesn’t somehow represent me. Like everyone I have likes and dislikes but that’s not important. Foodie is an ugly word and concept, uncomfortably close to gourmand and glutton.

 

In his final days, my brother and I talked a lot about Montaigne. In hospice he stopped talking about the same time he stopped eating. I’m reading the Frenchman's essay “Of Experience” again and like his approach to food: “I make little choice at table, and attack the first and nearest thing, and I change reluctantly from one flavor to another. I dislike a crowd of dishes and courses as much as any other crowd. I am easily satisfied with few dishes.”

 

I knew an anthropologist who said casually, in conversation, that people have more hangups and crackpot ideas about food than they do about any other subject, including sex. They also tend to be more dogmatic. Take the recent vogue for protein. Such are the concerns of the citizens of a wealthy nation who know precisely where the next meal is coming from. Montaigne continues in “Of Experience”:

 

“There are some who act like patient sufferers if they do without beef and ham amid partridges. They have a good time; that is the daintiness of the dainty; it is the taste of a soft existence that is cloyed with the ordinary and accustomed things, by which luxury beguiles the tedium of wealth [Seneca]. Not to make good cheer with what another savors, to take particular care of what you eat and drink, is the essence of this vice.”

 

[The Montaigne passage is from the translation of The Complete Essays of Montaigne by Donald Frame (Stanford University Press, 1957).]