Dirt: Adventures in Lyon as a Chef in Training…
(Knopf, $29)
Bill Buford’s previous memoir was
“so persuasive an achievement” that he’s created himself a minor credibility problem, said Lisa Abend in The New York Times. But even though the former New Yorker fiction editor is no longer the novice he was when he threw himself into learning Italian cuisine for 2006’s Heat, this similarly structured book “may well be an even greater pleasure.” Here, his subject is French cuisine, and to understand its essence, he moves to Lyon—France’s gastronomical capital—and stays there five years while subjecting himself to boot camp–style training in a culinary school and Michelin-starred restaurant. “Along the way he tangles with the bêtes noires of every Anglophone in France—the language, the bureaucracy, the arrogance”—while annoying all around him by trying to prove that Italy is the true source of certain beloved French dishes.
Buford is a writer who “seeks out extreme experiences,” and in Lyon, “he finds plenty,” said Moira Hodgson in The Wall Street Journal. The rough-edged city made sure the Bufords felt unwelcome. But after the author finds temporary work with a baker, then hones some skills in a top culinary school, he is soon working 15-hour days and enduring brutal hazing at the hands of, among others, a 19-yearold supervisor. “Built into the culture of the kitchen,” the 66-year-old writes, “is a pathological intolerance of the novice and a perverse bully’s pleasure in watching a novice’s failed efforts.”
Buford has witnessed such conduct before, said Ryu Spaeth in The New Republic. His mentor in Heat was celebrity chef Mario Batali, whose career was sunk by the kind of sexist behavior and sexual harassment Buford chronicled. Dirt is “not a better book, but it might be the deeper one,” because it seeks and finds the element that binds the refined and the brutish in France’s culinary culture and others like it: a desire to preserve a way of eating that predates industrialized food production. In the end, he simply wants us to be more mindful of the food on our plates, and of its origins and hidden costs. In Buford’s world, “we are what we eat.”