Sing for Your Supper

The food wars are raging. Is cooking art or craft? Who owns a recipe? Is convenience in the kitchen a dirty word? What is natural? Should I take up intermittent fasting? Is it moral to eat meat? Which is worse, fat or sugar? And, in a nod to one of the more insane millennial food trends, is it okay to Venmo my dinner guests the next day and bill them for their share of my time and expenses?

Food has become political. It’s a basis for argument and tribal identity; it is, to be blunt, no longer any damn fun—at least that’s where we are headed. Yet, there is hope. John Updike said this about food: “It never bites back; it is already dead. It never tells us we are lousy lovers or asks us for an interview. It simply begs, Take me; it cries out, I’m yours.” The Jamaican writer Marlon James pens, “Love isn’t saying ‘I love you’ but calling to say, ‘Did you eat?’”

These quotes appear in Dwight Garner’s autobiography, “The Upstairs Delicatessen,” a rollicking, funny yet thoughtful take on how the author has lived a life of reading (he is a book reviewer for The New York Times) and eating, the two activities merging into one delightful pastime. He expands rather than narrows his view of food to extend its pleasures way beyond tribal or ethical boundaries. He quotes Terry Eagleton, author of “Literary Theory”: “Food is endlessly interpretable, as gift, threat, poison, recompense, barter, seduction, solidarity, suffocation.” In other words, it is there for us every day in every aspect of existence. It is not special occasion; it is every occasion.

Garner has perhaps taken this to an extreme. He views the time of the day between the last cup of coffee and his first evening cocktail as some sort of gulag, a wasteland that has to be endured. And he agrees wholeheartedly with novelist Keith Waterhouse’s feelings about lunch: “Lunch is a celebration, like Easter after the winter. It is a conspiracy. It is a holiday. It is euphoria made tangible, serendipity given form. Lunch at its lunchiest is the nearest it is possible to get to sheer bliss while remaining vertical.”

There is more than a hint of Bertie Wooster in Garner, Wodehouse’s fictional character who lived life full of enthusiasm for the most banal and absurd details of existence, such as parrying the marital suggestions of his Aunt Agatha, trying to fit a fully stuffed moose through the front door of the Drones Club or failing to outwit his manservant, Jeeves, who was, of course, his mental and cultural superior.

So I ask again, where is our sense of humor, our irony, our amusement and pleasure around food? Is food, like most other cultural touchpoints, off the table? Are we, in a time of war, embarrassed by the shallowness of culinary wit, the quotidian cycle of eating, the sheer ordinariness of “putting on the feed bag,” as Bertie refers to mealtime?

Gael Greene recounts an evening with Craig Claiborne where he acted out, on his knees, the lyrics to the song “Maria” from “West Side Story” and then promptly fell down a spiral staircase and ended up in the emergency room. Today, this would be cause for cultural mortification—a drunken pratfall ending in disaster. Instead, let Craig Claiborne be our North Star and nuts to the consequences.

Food, as Waterhouse wrote, should be euphoria, not habit. Have a cocktail hour every evening. (Garner starts martinis at exactly 7 p.m. every night.) Rearrange your priorities. Put your palate and your belly first. Treat yourself daily to the thrill of drinking and eating, the transformational sociability of sitting around a table.

Most of all, please don’t transform eating into an academic discipline. Food is best placed in the mouth, not the ear. Get a buzz on, enjoy the intermittent binge, get on your knees and sing along with the music.

At the end of the day, I guarantee that you will cry over that forsworn slice of pie or that crazy evening where you could have filled your senses and lost them at the same time. The clock is ticking.