Eat Live Love Die: Selected Essays
Betty Fussell is an inspiring badass. She's not just the award–winning author of numerous books ranging from biography and memoir to cookbooks and food history; not just a winner of the James Beard Foundation's Journalism Award who was inducted into their "Who's Who of American Food and Beverage" in 2009; and not just an extraordinary person whose fifty years' worth of essays on food, travel, and the arts have appeared in scholarly journals, popular magazines and newspapers as varied as The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Los Angeles Times, Saveur, and Vogue.



This is a woman who at eighty–two years old (and despite being half–blind) went deer hunting for the very first time in the Montana foothills with her son, Sam (as described in her 2010 essay for the New York Times Magazine.) She got her deer.



This is a woman who declared in a 2005 essay for Vogue that she had to teach herself Latin and German from scratch (on top of teaching herself how to cook) as a young twenty–one year old bride, because "housewifery wasn't enough."



Indeed, for Fussell one subject is never enough. Counterpoint is thrilled to be publishing this selected anthology of her diverse essays.
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Eat Live Love Die: Selected Essays
Betty Fussell is an inspiring badass. She's not just the award–winning author of numerous books ranging from biography and memoir to cookbooks and food history; not just a winner of the James Beard Foundation's Journalism Award who was inducted into their "Who's Who of American Food and Beverage" in 2009; and not just an extraordinary person whose fifty years' worth of essays on food, travel, and the arts have appeared in scholarly journals, popular magazines and newspapers as varied as The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Los Angeles Times, Saveur, and Vogue.



This is a woman who at eighty–two years old (and despite being half–blind) went deer hunting for the very first time in the Montana foothills with her son, Sam (as described in her 2010 essay for the New York Times Magazine.) She got her deer.



This is a woman who declared in a 2005 essay for Vogue that she had to teach herself Latin and German from scratch (on top of teaching herself how to cook) as a young twenty–one year old bride, because "housewifery wasn't enough."



Indeed, for Fussell one subject is never enough. Counterpoint is thrilled to be publishing this selected anthology of her diverse essays.
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Eat Live Love Die: Selected Essays

Eat Live Love Die: Selected Essays

by Betty Fussell
Eat Live Love Die: Selected Essays

Eat Live Love Die: Selected Essays

by Betty Fussell

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Overview

Betty Fussell is an inspiring badass. She's not just the award–winning author of numerous books ranging from biography and memoir to cookbooks and food history; not just a winner of the James Beard Foundation's Journalism Award who was inducted into their "Who's Who of American Food and Beverage" in 2009; and not just an extraordinary person whose fifty years' worth of essays on food, travel, and the arts have appeared in scholarly journals, popular magazines and newspapers as varied as The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Los Angeles Times, Saveur, and Vogue.



This is a woman who at eighty–two years old (and despite being half–blind) went deer hunting for the very first time in the Montana foothills with her son, Sam (as described in her 2010 essay for the New York Times Magazine.) She got her deer.



This is a woman who declared in a 2005 essay for Vogue that she had to teach herself Latin and German from scratch (on top of teaching herself how to cook) as a young twenty–one year old bride, because "housewifery wasn't enough."



Indeed, for Fussell one subject is never enough. Counterpoint is thrilled to be publishing this selected anthology of her diverse essays.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781619028616
Publisher: Catapult
Publication date: 10/17/2016
Sold by: Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format: eBook
Pages: 304
File size: 1 MB

About the Author

Born in Southern California in 1927, Betty Fussell grew up in Riverside, took her BA at Pomona College, married her college sweetheart Paul Fussell, took an MA at Radcliffe College while he finished his PhD at Harvard University. After teaching English at Connecticut College and Douglass College, she finished her PhD at Rutgers University and taught there before moving to New York City, where she taught literature and film at the New School for Social Research and writing at Columbia University. In the 1980s she left teaching to write full time.

Her most recent, and eleventh, book is Raising Steaks: The Life & Times of American Beef (2008). In this she takes up the historical epic she began in The Story of Corn (1992), which won the IACP's Jane Grigson Award for Scholarship. In between she wrote a food memoir, My Kitchen Wars (1999), which was performed in Hollywood and New York as a one–woman show by actress Dorothy Lyman. In 2007 she won a James Beard Foundation Award for Journalism for "American Prime" in Saveur's Steak Issue of July. She was recently celebrated, along with other winners of the Silver Spoon Award, by Food Arts Magazine, for which she has long been a contributing authority.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

FOOD IS ...

Eating My Words

FOOD IS NOT a subject in the way that the great subjects of literature like War, Love, Death, Sex, Power, Betrayal, or Honor are subjects. Neither is food an object, in the way that a Car, a Washing Machine, a Computer, a House are objects — generic commodities that we desire and consume. Rather, food is an action, more primal than speech and more universal than language. And for humans, there's the rub. While everything in the created universe eats, not everything speaks. Wind and water eat stone, night eats day, black holes eat light — silently. We find words to address these actions, but long before we ever arrived on the scene or said a word about it, every link in the terrestrial food chain, as in the cosmic chain, was chomping away and changing one thing into another. It's one of those givens we like to avoid because we don't fancy our table companions or dining conditions. We don't like to be reminded that if dung were not caviar to the dung beetle, the earth would be covered in shit.

Nor do we like to be reminded that we are steak tartare to worms or, if we thwart their slow munch, a grillade to flames. We want to be exempt, special, excused. We don't want to be reminded that in the game preserve staked out for us, we are flesh and blood like our fellow animals, subject to the same feeding frenzies but with inferior teeth. In terms of brains, we may be first among mammals, but we are mammals nonetheless, and as such we cannibalize our mothers in order to live. Each of us, no matter how noble his sentiments at a later stage of development, drinks mother's blood from the time he is a tiny egg clinging hungrily to a uterine wall. Long before speech, the drama of communication begins in the womb and is merely amplified with baby's first intake of breath that ends in a howl, acknowledging in premonitory outrage that life-long separation of the feeder from the fed. From birth on, what comes out of the mouth and what goes in are inextricably mingled because there is only the one orifice for both feeding and speaking, not to mention kissing. Was that a mistake in engineering or a brilliant subversion of human pretense?

Elias Canetti asks whether it wouldn't have been better to have one orifice for food and another for words. "Or does this intimate mixing of all our utterances with the lips, teeth, tongue, throat, all those parts of the mouth that serve the business of eating — does this mixing tell us that language and eating forever belong together, that we can never be nobler and better than we are?" But what if we ask the question another way? Does this intimate mixing of language and eating suggest that both are forms of knowledge and communication, that ingesting what is outside us with lips, teeth, tongue, and throat is intimately related to excreting from within the cries, sighs, babbles, and prattles that are eventually transformed into words and sentences in the cauldrons of the human mind and imagination? Could we go further and suggest that the lineaments of the mouth lick into shape the very images that the mind of man conceives in his struggle to find sound bites and transform them? The crunch of teeth biting into an apple shapes the image of the father of mankind, who hungers and thirsts after righteousness with actual lips and throat. Does not this intimate mixing suggest that the human animal is forever a bewildering compound of body parts and spirit sensors, a belcher of hymns, an angel that farts, and that wise eaters and speakers will savor the mixture?

For is not the mouth our primary mediator in distinguishing what is without from what is within, as we suck first our own and then other people's fingers and toes? We learn to say "Mama" out of hunger, for both speaking and eating express similar actions of hungering, desiring, gathering, preserving, communing, laughing, fearing, loving, and dying in the long agon of separation and connection. Even a mouth eating in solitude — and silence — is engaged willy-nilly in discovering and communing with what is outside itself, which its hunger transforms by taking the outside literally in. We eat the world to know it and ourselves. If we fail to distinguish outside from in, we are stamped with a name and a story: Narcissus, hungering to eat himself, imaged in a pool, opened his mouth and drowned.

Eating, like speaking, reconnects through the imagination what reason has learned to disconnect through the senses. In this way, eating is a form of magic. When Shakespeare's Leontes discovers in The Winter's Tale that the statue of his Hermione is alive, he exclaims, "If this be magic, let it be an art lawful as eating." Eating, like speaking, mediates between opposite worlds, forging a bridge over the natal chasm between mind and body, images and substances, symbols and things that reason works hard to keep apart. Even as a noun, food suggests the action of ferrying meaning across species, across ontological continents, ensuring that despite the logic of appearances, you can turn a sow's ear into a silk purse through the "turn" of trope, or the "transfer" of metaphor, through speaking pictures, or images in action.

Food is always image and icon as well as substance. Semioticians explained decades ago how food, cooking, and eating create a tripartite language of their own through which a culture expresses itself, and this language dances between the literal and the figurative in the way that we usually expect of speech but not always of food. Despite laboratory analyses, mother's milk is never simply the sum of its biochemical or molecular parts, no more than a bottle of milk is. Who's holding the breast or the bottle or the baby, and where? Are mother and baby sitting on the grass in suburban sunshine or are they flat on a canvas surrounded by drapery and haloed cherubs? Are they on a railway platform herded into a cattle car by soldiers in uniform? Food always condenses a happening, a plot, which unfolds like any enacted drama in the spotlit present, surrounded by shadows of the past.

The most ancient originating plots in the Western world, in fact, hinge on the relation of food to language. Before the Madonna there was Eve, and before Eve there was Nin-ti, the Sumerian mother goddess whose story, told in the world's first written language, Sumer, is a food story. After the water god Enki ate eight of Nin-ti's magic plants, the goddess cursed eight of his bodily organs with death, then relented and restored the god to life. Nin-ti's name was a pun, which meant both "rib" and "to make live." In the language of Sumer, Eve's name also meant "rib," but the language and the food got muddled in the translation from Sumer to Hebrew, so that in the Hebrew story the lady Eve was given life by the rib of man, whose death was caused by the woman's eating of a magic plant. Despite the gender and cultural reversal from mother goddess to father god, the paradox of the human animal remains intact: that which gives him life also kills him, and his tragedy is that he knows it.

Human life is so bound up with food — the sounds, textures, smells, tastes, emotions, ideas, and rituals of the one so meshed with the other — that to take a slice of life at any point is to cut into a full loaf, a pie, a roast, a terrine of meaning. Personal and cultural memories are so integral to eating and speaking that simply to name a food is to invoke the lifetime of a person — and a culture. We don't need Proust's madeleine. We have Twain's cornpone. Even when the nominal subject is a single food, such as coffee or oysters or beans, it is also about place and time and occasion and memory and need, just as it is about politics and economics and trade and war and religion and ceremony. While the first person singular is the instinctive voice in which to express our thoughts and feelings about food, the point of view will be as diverse as the position of the speaker: social critic, gardener, connoisseur, athlete, chef, housewife, farmer, dentist, historian, garbageman, politician, pastor, poet. All walks of life eat, in every corner of the world, whether in Nigeria, Bombay, Austria, Israel, Kyoto, or Iowa. Although attitude and tone of voice may play every key from rhapsodic to obscene, both the particularities of food and the universality of hunger keep the speaker, or writer, rooted in common ground.

Food, like language, forever unites the concrete with the universal, and a writer's attitude toward food will appear in how he manipulates the nervy relation between substance and symbol, jittery with dramatic tension, that dictates the behavior of us all. The materialist asserts the primacy of flesh: "Erst kommt das Fressen, damnn kommt die Moral," sings Brecht. The spiritualist denies or subjugates the flesh: "I need nothing. I feel nothing. I desire nothing," writes Wole Soyinka in prison on the eleventh day of his fast. The ritualist transforms substance and symbol alike into physical sensation: "The gamey taste and smell of ripened cheese is sexual, and provocative; the smell is maternal still, but now it is the smell of cyclical time," writes Paul Schmidt. The satirist mocks symbols of fabricating ridiculous substance: "The correct drink for fried bologna à la Nutley, Nouveau Jersey, is a 1927 Nehi Cola," writes Russell Baker.

Writings about food are necessarily as diverse as writings about any art of life and as illuminative of the things that matter because food is connected to everything. Homer, whether speaking of epic wars or journeys, never neglected food and drink. He specified in detail how to roast and salt the joint of meat and how to mix wine with water to invite the gods in. Greek gods ate and drank in the company of man long before Christians turned their God into cooked food to be eaten by men. That changed the nature of the feast, of course, although there is nothing new in gods who existed to be eaten. Think of Prometheus with his eternally gnawed, eternally renewed liver, wherein man's lips and tongue tasted forever the sour of cyclical time, the bitter of eternal hunger, the sweet of immortality, the salt of death.

In imaging the unavoidable and appalling fact that life eats life, the Ancient Maya invented a language in which men and gods were made of the self-same food in an eternal interchange of substance. A literal ear of corn growing in the fields was also the finely shaped head of the sacrificed young corn god with his hair of green leaves. To eat corn was to eat one's mother, father, sister, brother, and ancestor gods. Substance and symbol were so intimately mixed in the mouth of man that life and death were as mingled as body and soul, as eating and speaking. Maya speech wrapped the cosmos in a language of verbal and visual food puns, so that eating and speaking were alike actions of punning. To eat a kernel of corn, the substance of life, was to swallow a drop of blood, a sign of death. The Maya sign, or glyph, for bread abstracted the cornhusk wrapper and the ball of corn dough of an actual tamale, so that both speaker and eater alike shared in the bread's layered meanings of "sacred offering," "sacrificial blood," "something precious," "day." Every kernel of corn condensed the plot of the Popul Vuh and its hero, the sacrificed god Hunahpu, whose decapitated head in the calabash tree, after he and his twin brother outwitted the Lords of Death, impregnated Blood Woman who gave birth to man from her body of corn.

And so then they put into words the creation,
  The shaping Of our first mother
  And father.
Only yellow corn
  And white corn were their bodies.
Only food were the legs
  And arms of man.
Those who were our first fathers
  Were the original men.
Only food at the outset
  With their bodies.

Nothing else can do for man's mind and imagination what food does because it is the one and only thing that accompanies every single man, Maya, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, on his journey from cradle to grave. If his first sound is a cry for milk, his last may be a whimper for sugared tea or a spoonful of Jell-O. Sans teeth, tongue, or throat, he still must open the veins of his body to the outside world to sustain life, whether or not he is conscious of that mechanized connection. His final image may not be of the loved face hovering over his bedside at all, but of a wished-for muffin or martini, as real and intense as the griever left behind.

Never underestimate the power of food to summon images and dictate lives in the here and hereafter. Why are the graves in almost every ancient culture stuffed with containers for food and drink to accompany the corpse on its journey between worlds? As in life, so in death, food remains our most faithful attendant on the ferry across the river Styx, giving comfort and sustenance to the frightened soul soon to swallow and be swallowed by a realm where outside and inside have no meaning and where that peculiar mixture of eating and speaking will vanish in the emptying out of appetite and the entering in of silence.

Introduction to A Slice of Life: Contemporary Writers on Food (Bonnie Barranca, editor), 2007

CHAPTER 2

CULTURES

"If You Lack Turtles, Try Buffalo Hump."

EUROPEANS LAUGH WHEN Americans claim regional diversity and provincial specialties in their cooking. They laugh the way National Lampoon laughed at "The Cooking of Provincial New Jersey": traditional Coke, Twinkies, Rice-a-Roni, Hostess cupcakes, frozen fishsticks — "21 cuisines, one great taste." Words like "regional" and "provincial" belong properly to Europe, China, and other civilizations that took root and blossomed over the centuries in the same plot of earth. American cooking cannot be regional in this sense, but it is vernacular, as vernacular, uprooted, and upstart as American jazz.

With American cooking, a word like "authentic" is as useless as "regional." A Big Mac, after all, is authentic American Road Food, for which Americans stationed in Borneo or Mozambique yearn as nostalgically as for a Chicago deep-dish pizza or a Philadelphia soft pretzel. When a Frenchman demands authenticity as the criterion for a native dish, I recite my favorite recipe from a Northwest Gitksan Indian for moose or caribou, which begins, "Get a good-sized piece of heavy tinfoil, big enough to wrap your roast in. Get a package of onion soup mix, any good brand." And if the Frenchman persists in his folly, I remind him that Edward S. Curtis, the great photographer of North American Indians at the turn of the century, always carried with him a box of long-haired wigs to guarantee the authenticity of his aborigines.

We need new words to describe the cooking and culture of a "new" world of émigrés and immigrants, in which the first émigrés arrived some 40,000 years ago. We need new syntax to capture the monstrous size, mobility, and speed that go with the American territory and the American table, where "all semblance of European structure," as Cyril Connolly once said, "vanishes." We need new forms to express a cooking culture that is continuously moving and changing, that is entirely hybrid, atomistic, versatile, improvised, and gloriously askew.

It's cooking based on authentically improvised substitutes. If you lack mincemeat, advised the ladies of the parish guild of Deerfield, Mass., in The Pocumtuc Housewife of 1805, use dried apples or dried pumpkin or grated carrot or boiled raisins or cracker crumbs: "A little ingenuity added to almost any material that comes to hand, will make a tasty pie." If you lack Christmas dinner, as Ginnie Mae Finger did in Texas in the 1860s, then climb on a horse with Mother and Father and go hunting for "Christmas dinner lunch" of buffalo, turkey, and deer. If you lack turtles for soup, try buffalo hump, advised Susan Magoffin, who traveled the Santa Fe trail in 1846 and found buffalo-hump soup "far superior to any soup served in the best hotels of Philadelphia or New York."

Hodge-Podge of Peoples and Food in Motion

No place on earth contains such a hodge-podge of peoples and food in motion in a landscape as radically diverse as ours. But if we don't have static culinary regions, still we can chart a culinary map by drawing a circle around our borders and cinching the middle with a belt. We can map at least seven borderlands — the Northeast, Middle Atlantic, Deep South, Delta South, Southwest, Northwest, and Great Lakes — that encircle the heartland of the Corn Belt.

We can even chart a topography of provender characteristic of each place: cod, clams, and lobsters in the Northeast, oyster and crabs in the Middle Atlantic, shrimp and rice in the Deep South, crawfish and cane in the Delta South, chili peppers and squash in the Southwest, salmon, apples, and artichokes in the Northwest, lake fish and dairy stuff in the Great Lakes, and in the Corn Belt, what else but corn?

Ethnic topography, however, complicates our map, since we find Sephardic Jews in Texas, Danes in California, Vietnamese in Arkansas, and Lithuanians in Michigan. These graftings of peoples and places produce curious results. It was a German in Braunfels, Texas, who first packaged chili powder. It was a pair of Armenians in Oregon who devised the confection called Aplets and Cotlets. It was Portuguese fishermen in California who refined our sourdough bread.

(Continues…)


Excerpted from "Eat, Live, Love, Die"
by .
Copyright © 2016 Betty Fussell.
Excerpted by permission of Counterpoint.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Table of Contents

Introduction by Alice Waters,
Preface,
FOOD IS ...,
Eating My Words,
CULTURES,
If You Lack Turtles, Try Buffalo Hump,
America the Bountiful,
True Grits,
When Corn Was King,
Corn Porn,
The Cowboy and the Machine,
Hamburgers,
All About Oysters,
Absolutely Smashing,
J-E-L-L-O,
4-F Food,
The Artful Cafeteria,
Class Action,
Romancing the Stove,
PEOPLE,
Elizabeth David 1914–1992,
The Prime of M.F.K. Fisher,
Great American Taste: Claiborne, Child, Beard,
James Beard, American Icon,
The Greening of Alice Waters,
Grand Dame of Virginia Cooking: Edna Lewis,
Breaking Bread with Africa: Marcus Samuelsson,
The Count of Cuisine: Jean-Georges Vongerichten,
PLACES,
The Beautiful Birds of Bresse,
Rich, Robust, and Rewarding Normandy,
Umbrian Truffles and Game,
Festival of the Flowering Almond,
Tracking Cortés in Mexico,
Bahia Black and White,
Turning 60 at the Top of the World,
The Surviving Galápagos,
China Solo,
FAMILY,
The Eyes Have It,
Thanatopsis '83,
My Daughter the Painter,
My Son the Bodybuilder,
Nostalgia: Salad Days,
Love and Mayonnaise,
Home Free: Of Keepsakes and God Pots,
On Murdering Eels and Laundering Swine,
Earning Her Food,
FOOD SAYS ...,
A Is for Apple,

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