San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Terror of the family dinner table
Q&A with advice columnist on the intersection of familial tension and food today
On a recent episode of Extra Spicy — the new Chronicle podcast I cohost with Justin Phillips in which we talk to fascinating folks about restaurant life, cookbooks and bizarro happenings of the food world — I spoke with Daniel M. Lavery. Also known to many as Dear Prudence, Lavery is a writer and advice columnist who publishes very funny and provocative essays on the rhetoric of veggie burgers, breasts and “Columbo” in his newsletter, Shatner Chatner. I highly recommend reading his May 15 newsletter, titled “PossiblyExplicable Things People Sometimes Say About Cooking Beans.”
Lavery and I spoke about the healing power of beans and the persistence of the dinner table as the place where family tensions come to a head. He countered with a very interesting argument that food writing is, at its core, about terror.
The interview has been edited for length and clarity. Q: Is food a frequent kind of flier in your advice column? It seems so.
A: I think it definitely is the classic staple of advice columns for a reason. And then I think there has probably been an uptick since a lot of the stayathome, shelterinplace orders went out back in March because many, many, many more people are cooking from home way more often than they were a couple of months ago. Q: What makes it so easy for that to be the site of all this conflict and all this angst and all this pain and also a lot of good things? What are some commonalities that you see in questions and concerns about that?
A: Well, I think in an advice column — just sort of given the historical audience — those sort of questions tend to be around the interest in the problems that come with being middleclass women.
That’s not to say that they were the only people who read or write into those columns, not by a long shot, but for a lot of at least the 20th century movement, that’s kind of where it’s been at. And that’s where most of the anxieties and problems are located.
That’s why advice columns will get tons and tons of questions like, “My husband and I can’t agree about unloading the dishwasher or hiring a house cleaner,” and not a ton of questions from other perspectives. So with all that said, I think the dinner table is kind of a classic site of conflict for that sort of relationship because it’s often where the ideas of egalitarianism for that type of couple start to break down, if they do break down. Q: Yeah, that is sort of where the truth kind of comes out, right?
A: Yeah, and I think especially because it’s something that you have to do at least a couple of times a day. And yet, usually if you’re doing it at home, you’re not getting paid for it, so there’s that kind of push and pull between. It has to happen constantly. And also, oftentimes, there’s this sense of: “I don’t wanna hear too much about it. I don’t want to think too much about what goes into this.” Q: Wow. That seems like such a great microcosm of my entire life right now. A: Yeah.
Q: Well ... just writing about food and having a very significant portion of people not care about the process or kind of the labor of it. So I really relate to the questions you get about when making food ends up being kind of a drudgery — not through the fault of the person doing it, but just the reception of it.
A: And I’m just thinking of ways that it extends outwards — there was so much talk this week about a number of states that are attempting to reopen inrestaurant dining and the ways in which waitstaff are being put in these impossible situations. And again — like on a bigger scale — this idea of like: “I don’t want to think too much about the risks the person bringing the food to the table might be running.” Q: It’s also like the idea of knowing how the sausage gets made, which is one of my favorite idioms, probably, because it’s simultaneously gross but also really fascinating to me personally. We hear about the undocumented workers who are infected with COVID19 who work in our slaughterhouses. And just all of the stuff that happens behind the scenes so that we can eat something that is tasty to us.
And having to reconcile those two worlds — at least that are artificially separated — is kind of like fulltime work. You have to do it constantly because people are so eager to ignore it. Which is why I think the dinner table is the site of … It’s like where you get your thousand paper cuts, I think, in a bad relationship. A: Yeah. Yeah. Oh, man. Q: But I also wanted to talk about your food writing, because in addition to being an advice columnist, I think that you are a fantastic parttime food writer. I love everything
that you say about food. And you’re not like a traditional one — you don’t write about recipes necessarily or restaurant reviews, but other things.
A: I think part of that is because when I do food writing, it’s almost always on my newsletter, so I never have to pitch it. So it’s always just like, “What do I feel like writing about food right now?” Which is like a couple of times a year. I mostly just want to write about certain emotional states or fixations that I can launch myself into around food. I have an almost manic sort of riff on how I feel when I think about a bean.
Q: How do you feel when you think about a bean, Danny?
A: I feel like a very simple farmer in the south of France who says, “I have my one hat and my very simple life and I eat my one bean and it’s so good for me. And, you in the big glimmering cities with your many things and your sweetmeats, you have nobody. But I am a simple man of the soil. Please just leave my company.”
I think the states that we get ourselves into around food are fascinating.
Q: I think food is one site
where it’s so easy to get banal and fall into tropes because it’s so relatable. There’s not too many deep things you can say about beans, I think.
A: I think, too, when a particular type of food becomes newly trendy, or written about in a way that it hasn’t previously, or written about in types of outlets that it wasn’t being written about a month or two months earlier: There becomes this kind of conversation about the conversation of, like, “I have to acknowledge the things other people are saying about beans now.”
Does that make sense? There’s the whole sort of like … anything that I read about beans will start with some sort of gesture towards the soaking debate.
Q: The big soaking debate!
A: Because you have to drum up some sort of intensity or topical peg, there’s like, “Stop worrying about soaking beans, you idiots! You’re wasting your life soaking the beans. Don’t be precious. Look, these are beans. When you put water on them, they turn from stones to pillow, like, just relax.”
And then there can also be the kind of like, “This is how people try to make cooking beans seem too difficult for the regular cook. It’s quick and easy. Don’t let anyone tell you different.” And then someone else is, “No, no, no, no, you’re slacking. I don’t! Don’t be fooled. The soaking is important.” I don’t know. There’s so much that’s wrapped up in that. And I love the conversation before the conversation.
And so I think, especially in food writing, there can be a fear that, “If it’s not topical or if I haven’t added something new, why would anyone read this?” I think they are also just really connected to the precariousness of trying to make a living as a food writer, which I don’t do. That’s not precariousness that I’m subject to. But, just in general, there’s this kind of sense of, “I’ve got to give ’em a hook. I gotta get ’em in the door!” Q: No, I mean, the hook is the symptom of this underlying thing. And we all just have to do it because that’s kind of what we’re stuck in. I think one of the lines in your bean essay is: “Beans will fix everything.” And to me, that brought to mind, like, all the coronavirus stories: “Beans are your coronavirus food.” Or, “Focaccia is your coronavirus food.” You know, like everyone had to hit the SEO in the title. And you can weave any sort of straw into gold with the right search terminology.
A:
Yeah, and I think also just like a very real sense of: “I am also freaked out. What’s the food that I can associate with both ... fussiness ... but that it’s also simple and can remind me of general ideas about hardiness, authenticity, earthiness, anything that feels grounding? So, that part of it makes a lot of sense to me.
And then I think just the next thing: “I think we might be asking and expecting too much of beans.” It’s hard. I think writing about food is sort of like a way of trying to deal with terror. And it’s hard to write about terror.
Q: Tell me more about this.
A: I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately, too. I guess what I’ll say is: When it comes to both workers’ rights and the future and climate change, everything about the systems that we have in our foodways is terrifying.
Everything about factory farming is terrifying. Anybody who tries to think about it for more than a minute, I think, often runs into just this absolute sense of terror, like, “Oh my God, we’ve created hell on Earth. And I don’t know how to think about that.” Like, there’s just these massive pig s— lagoons spreading across the country and these horrifying slaughterhouses where people are forced to work under the most inhumane conditions. And it’s also what’s making the Arctic turn a hundred degrees. And also, there’s this disease out there that no one seems invested in actually protecting us from. And also, bodies are strange and food spoils so quickly.
And it goes from wonderful and beautiful and appetizing to terrifying and dangerous very, very quickly. And then let’s also throw a little bit of like any sort of aspect of disordered eating on top of it. It’s genuinely, genuinely terrifying.
And so when you look to something like beans to address it, it’s sort of like: “OK, beans, what I need from you is to usher in a slightly pastoral but also slightly urbanized communist paradise future, where there’s ice at the poles and there’s maybe like 10 pigs die a day, but not like a million, you know, like a number I can wrap my head around. And they’re all killed by a farmer named Jeff, and he thinks about it very seriously.”
And there’s no pig s— lagoons. And we all eat at a big, long, low table and people make money for pulling up radishes. And things work. And that’s what I need from these beans today.
I don’t think beans can do all that. I don’t think they can hold all that intensity. I have no idea if that made any sense. Q: It makes a lot of sense, actually. Especially as a restaurant critic. Speaking as a person with acute anxiety and sadness about everything, it’s easy to think of food as a source of comfort. And there’s kind of a limit to that comfort. A lot of it is just pretend, at least for me personally, whenever I say that something is comforting, it’s kind of an affectation because nothing is truly comforting in this world.
A: Well it’s comforting in a way that kind of actually keeps the fear going because it’s like: “OK, well, I feel good now for half an hour.” But the pig s— lagoons in Georgia …
Q: They persist!
A: So, it’s like, “This made me feel better, but now I feel guilty about feeling better because I shouldn’t feel better. I should stay hungry and freaked out so that I can help change things.” But where would I start with changing things? That feels too big. But I can eat a bean. But now I feel good, and that’s wrong.
“I mostly just want to write about certain emotional states or fixations that I can launch myself into around food.”
Daniel M. Lavery