The Food Writing Trap
Joining the third places discourse, what's missing from modern food writing? Is it the end of the Californian wine golden era? An album and wine pairing, and more!
Hello readers!
Welcome back to another newsletter.
On a personal note, I’ve had my head down in work renovating some new homes we purchased. It’s been so nice to work with my hands and I’m really starting to find a groove. This year has been pretty different than most, as we’ve been stationary due to all the renovations, but San Sebastian 2024 is booked for late August through early November and I just can’t WAIT to see all of my friends! We also booked January to March in CDMX, so if you live there, please say hi! I have a few friends there, but looking to link up with more like-minded folks!
For a little bit of good news this week, this ad in the personals section of The London Review of Books melted my heart a little. If you’re ever in need of a chuckle, the back of The London Review of Books is full of intriguing, hilarious, beautiful, and weird personal ads. You can read some fun examples here.
One ad in the latest edition though, totally warmed my heart. It’s also a nice reminder to be grateful and present for what we have.
Okay so without further ado let’s get into this week’s newsletter.
The Food Writing Trap
Third Places
Was California’s Wine Revolution Just a Mirage?
An album and a wine pairing!
The Food Writing Trap:
I read two interesting newsletters about food writing and personal narratives in recipes. One was by Will Reidie in The Recovering Line Cook- who you might remember I wrote about in my newsletter ‘Where’s all the cookbook criticism?’, and one by Alicia Kennedy- who you might remember from most of my newsletters haha.
They both wrote about food writing as something more than instruction and what online recipe development/content creation loses when they lean away from what many online recipe hunters find “annoying”- personal narrative and poetry.
The instruction in contemporary cookbooks is often lacking, a little less descriptive, and has a heavy reliance on photography.
Reidie writes:
“And as for the step-by-step pictures, I suppose they get in the way of what I love and long for in recipe writing. The unique, personal, lived impressions that a writer poetically employs to evoke their experience of cooking a dish.”
He then goes on to include some of his favourite lines from recipes:
“The water should never boil. A few bubbles should hiccough to the surface in a desultory kind of way.”
or
“Fry the garlic in oil until it begins to waft delicious smells at you.”
“The cliché suggests a picture is worth a thousand words. But there is no richer, more multi-sensory image than the one a handful of elegant, considered, and choice words can paint in our mind’s eye.”
Kennedy similarly writes “There is a different kind of recipe writing that privileges intimacy over authority.” Nigel Slater, author of numerous cookbooks, is an example of this, calling himself “a writer who cooks.”
A book I spoke about two newsletters ago ‘Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen’ also explores the intersection of recipes and poetry and the importance of embodying recipe writing. In the chapter Rebecca May Johnson chronicles the evolution of a pasta sauce she makes, noting how it changes according to her mood, who she’s cooking for, time, memory, ingredients, etc. and the meaning this takes on.
Kennedy tells us “I think if we take recipe writing seriously as writing, if we approach cooking as both the stuff of everyday and a space of serious inquiry, there is less room for theft. There will be too much life, too much specificity, too much mess and joy and sorrow and anxiety. If the singular palate is privileged, if recipes are simply starting points of inspiration, if constellations of influence are written, how can a recipe be stolen? It is the product of a certain experience, a certain body.”
Definitely some food for thought.
Bring back the third place!
You might have heard the term ‘third place’ thrown around a lot recently. A “third place” termed by sociologist Ray Oldenburg (1999) describes a place separate to home (1st place) and work (2nd place). They are crucial spaces for connection, examples include parks, piazzas, libraries, bars, main streets, and community centers. Often described as the “community’s living room” they’re central in any 90s sitcom, most European cities, and really just life before phones...
Unfortunately, the way we design our cities, especially in Western societies, deprioritizes, removes, or privatizes the third place.
Globally, we are facing a loneliness epidemic, a widespread social, health, and economic crisis, exacerbated by the pandemic. Esther Perel tells us that this “modern loneliness masks itself as hyper-connectivity. And so, people have easily 1000 virtual friends, but no one they can ask to feed their cat.” The disappearance of third places plays a part in this.
Recently, scholars at the University of Pennsylvania and UCLA calculated the optimal number of “free-time hours in a working day was 9.5” for positive mental, physical, and social well-being, which feels so wild and unimaginable. But even with any free time we have now- exhaustion from the demands of capitalism often results in us filling the void with our phones and social media, which exploit the very emotional distress it, itself, has created.
In Jia Tolentino’s New Yorker piece ‘What it takes to put your phone way’ computer-science professor Cal Newport says “In (Virginia) Woolf’s time, women were denied this liberation by a patriarchal society. In our time, this oppression is increasingly self-inflicted by our preference for the distraction of the digital screen.”
Even if we do want to seek connection or find a space outside of our first and second place (of which the boundaries are already blurred with working-from-home setups) they are often privatized making our presence dependent on us purchasing things, or merged with our second place (think coworking spaces which have an underlying anxiety of feeling like you’re ‘on the clock’).
Third places provide chances to create meaningful community, connection, or even just to ‘linger’. They increase our chance of ‘unexpected encounters’ with people outside of our socioeconomic group/age/race/gender/sexuality- interactions which we know build tolerance and empathy in our communities.
This is especially important when we think about marginalised groups and what it means to create a safe space and community. When we talk about aspirations for our country and community- we can lose sight of the original Latin root of the word ‘aspiration’ spirare meaning ‘to breathe’. With breathe comes possibility, but increasingly for many people it feels like a struggle to find a place to breathe, be themselves, and be present.
There have been lots of great pieces about the importance of bringing back third places, and the joy of bars, cafes, and restaurants as third places. But in today’s economy- these spaces aren’t accessible to everyone, let alone a part of our daily routine.
Allie Conti wrote a nice piece in The Atlantic about how she discovered a ‘neighborhood third place’, an example of people creating the spaces they need rather than relying on the state.
“On a Sunday last year, I was walking through a suburban neighborhood in Pennsylvania, heading home from an early-afternoon meditation class. One of the nondescript stucco houses had a curious sticker on its mailbox reading mac’s club. I checked Google Maps to see if I was standing next to a cleverly disguised business—what might pretentiously be referred to in a city as a speakeasy—but nothing popped up, so I peeked inside the house. That’s where I spotted a pool table and a middle-aged guy sitting at the end of a long, mahogany bar, drinking a Bloody Mary by himself. Apparently I’d stumbled upon a social club meant for residents of the neighborhood. Though at first the bartender was incredulous that I’d just walked in, he soon rewarded my sense of adventure with a Guinness on the house. The Eagles weren’t playing in the NFL that day, and he was grateful for the additional company.”
Recently, a trend has been going around on social media about people doing a similar thing, turning their house into a ‘coffee shop’ on one day/morning of the week and making coffee for their friends. There isn’t a set time, just whoever can come or even strangers who pass are welcome! I think this is a really creative solution but it does make me sad for the days when bars and cafes were affordable third places. But more than that- for when we had a culture where you would show up somewhere just knowing that someone will probably be there/you will meet people.
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Was California’s Wine Revolution Just a Mirage?
I read this interesting piece in Punch Drink the other day about how the economics of making wine in the state have turned the promise of the “New California” into a cautionary tale.
California is home to one of the greatest concentrations of talented young winemakers in the world, and yet many of them will tell you that they are one step away from hanging it all up for good.
Patrick Cappiello, ex-NYC sommelier and current owner-winemaker of Monte Rio Cellars is quoted in the article saying “we are hurting”, the precarious nature of California wine and the state of the economy mean that it is no longer sustainable to make and sell wine.
“What’s missing from this discussion is the fact that the vigneron model is an economic model—one that prioritizes self-sufficient estates and concentrates their productivity into fine wine. This model is, by and large, one that small California winemakers cannot embrace. According to David Carciere of Cruland.com, a real estate firm specializing in California vineyards, the current average price of vineyard land in California is around $100,000 an acre, which is significantly more than the average cost of appellation land in France, at roughly $66,000 per acre, according to French land agency Safer’s 2022 Le Prix des Terres report; Italy and Spain can be had for significantly less.”
“Small California winemakers, without land, have very few backup revenue streams. “No bank is going to give [small winemakers] a loan,” says Bell of Margins. “They know we’re a bad investment.”
It’s not just that winemakers can’t afford vineyards, it’s the downstream effects that make the picture so grim.
The cost of living in California wine regions is exceptionally high. Likewise, the price of glass, corks, labels, bottling, and all other equipment/resources that go into producing wine are equally high- something made almost impossible during covid that the industry is yet to recover from.
“In such an environment, there’s tremendous pressure to sell out as quickly as possible, even if it requires lowering prices beyond a sustainable point. As recently as 2022, winemakers could depend on mailing lists, wine clubs and direct-to-consumer sales to keep them afloat, but that revenue stream has dried up for many, cutting their margins precipitously and forcing them to compete for spots on lists and shelves with overseas producers who have less overhead. Nearly everyone I spoke with said that to be truly comfortable, their wines would need to be priced $20 to $30 higher on the shelf, far more than distributors or consumers are prepared to pay. “We can never reflect what the price should actually be on these wines,” says Ashton-Lewis. “Our price points are really low considering how expensive making wine is here.”
A sad look at the state of the wine industry in California.
An album and a bottle pairing!
We haven’t done an album and wine pairing in a while, so I thought I would do one here! For some of you, a fun trip down memory lane, or for others an exciting discovery.
Love Lines by LP is an album rich with emotion, weaving tales of love, heartache, and human connection through LP's distinctive and powerful voice. Her nuanced songwriting and intricate melodies collide beautifully with Theodora Weiss's complex flavor profile of high-toned lemon, lemon balm, and underripe Bartlett pear.
LP's vibrant vocal style, paired with the fresh and sprightly nature of Theodora Weiss, creates an experience that is both refreshing and invigorating. Just as the wine is crafted with minimal intervention to preserve its natural character, LP's music feels raw and genuine, resonating with a similar authenticity.
I’ll end with a fun tweet I saw.
Carlie xx