WHAT I WOULD HAVE SAID IF I COULD HAVE
things I wanted to write about but didn't... aka I wrote a little bit about them here bc I couldn't resist :) whoops
Hi! Miss you!
First, I want to say thank you for still being here as I have been Missing In Action. I swear I have been away for a good reason that will one day be revealed. But right now, I have gone into a special kind of hermitage wherein I am only working on one thing. So that you are giving me the time & space to do that feels very lucky to me.
In the meantime, the world has been happening and BOY has it! I’ve thought a lot this month, and last, about what I would be writing about if I simply had it in me. Culture moves like summer: quickly, where each day could have been yesterday.
I came up with a list of moments I’ve noticed. Maybe I’ll get to them eventually — in the meantime, they’re for you.
-I would write about Love Island USA and UK. Not sure what. I’ve just watched both and now the Islanders show up in my dreams.
-I would write about Pete Wells ending his time as the NYT restaurant critic. I’m mostly interested in this piece, where he himself articulates the move away from his long-term post. Most specifically, I am interested in the way he speaks about the job’s discomforts. Physically, the taxing nature of overeating. Psychically, it seems, the loneliness of doing something everyone thinks you should only be happy doing. That you are, indeed, lucky to do.
Restaurant people, from my own experience, were not loving this. I think we, collectively, tend not to respond well when someone powerful expresses any sort of loneliness borne of their position of power. The loneliness itself also always seems true to me, too. Power isolates. When immersed in pleasure and treats (being a restaurant critic), perhaps even more surreal-y so.
Holistically, the end of Wells-era feels indicative of a big shift that we’re going to see in food and food writing. Less definitive and omnipotent review culture from specific people, and more collective evaluation (think of The Infatuation or Eater). And certainly, hopefully, more voices and backgrounds that vary and explore and represent a larger food context than just the 100 places at which someone like Pete Wells would like to eat.
Either way, I think work like Wells’ will be archival and only resonate more deeply as representative of a moment ‘before’ a lot of food culture changed. I have said this before, but it bears repeating: the inherent problem in food criticism is that so many critics have not ever done restaurant work.
All to say, let’s get a line cook in the NYTimes baby!!
-I would write about how good it feels to read recent works like Emma Specter’s More, Please and Emmeline Cline’s Dead Weight — both centered around questions of food, bodies, and disordered eating. How grateful I am that they are expanding the ‘disordered eating’ genre of literature…
-AND THEN I would write about how desperate I am to find a better moniker for that genre of work, because the questions they’re sitting with are expansive and ruminative and philosophical — tremendously researched — with deep questions around economics, existentialism, gender, race, class, and body politics. All through a lens of disordered eating, which still shocks me how little we dare — collectively — to look through.
-THEN I would write about how fun Charli’s Brat is, of course, but mostly how weirdly soothing it has become this summer. At a party the other night, 360 came on. Something in me awoke. I wasn’t even like “This is my song!!” I was like “Oh! It’s the song I hear once a day, at least”. Snapping me back to the present, or this season, or something. That song grounds to the home base of this summer.
-I would write about Janet Planet and its softness and sweetness. The relief in the feeling of strange girlhood, like a parent holding your hand through a crowd.
-In a similar vein, I would write about Harriet the Spy and tomato sandwiches. Harriet’s favorite food is a tomato/mayo/white bread sandwich. A perfect August food, and I love her vibe: “I can’t help it if I know what I like. And I know that I like: tomato.”
Thank you for reading! If you go to the beach, make sure to dunk xoxo