What Word Goes With Gravy?

“Our senses are never inaccurate, just our interpretations.”

--Stephanie Danler

Recently, I was interviewed for an article in a local magazine. The article, yet to be published (fingers crossed), will be about bloggers in Birmingham. I will be the only food blogger. The writer of this yet-to-be-published article pointed out that my blog is different because it disdains a one-to-one correlation with food. It is “of food” rather than “about food.” This may explain my occasional writer’s block. Writing about anything is hard; writing about food is even harder. 

How does one describe the taste of a ripe, juicy peach eaten at a backyard, family cook-out on a warm June evening? How does it differ from that of a peach eaten in a tart in a Parisian bistro? How does one compare the taste of your first birthday cake with that of your child’s? Does a hotdog at an amusement park with your high school sweetheart taste differently than the one eaten on a cold January night in New York with your fiancée? 

Food, like real estate, is about time and place. But how do we transliterate emotional acreage into what Hemingway called the “truest sentence”? Adumbration is the best we can hope for because we never remember how that birthday cake actually tasted in the same way we remembered what it was like to eat it.

The efficiency of our senses to experience in real time exceeds the ability of our brains to record the experience for posterity. In a restaurant on a Friday evening after a hellish week at the office, a hot and sizzling steak becomes, in a fraction of a second, an emotion that any attempt at prose cheapens the experience. There’s a reason we taste before we speak; a reason we speak before we write. 

Writing about how something taste is pointless, which is one reason I don’t write a lot of restaurant reviews or even read too many of them. I tend to take stock in how my friend’s face lights up when she describes the new sushi restaurant she found. In other words, I find it more valuable to write about how food makes us feel rather than how it tastes or, more importantly, how we think it should taste. So if that makes my writing more “of food” than “about food,” then I stand guilty as charged.