Perfecting the art of eating - one bite at a time

Part Nineteen: “Serve It Forth.” Preach on sister.

One of the last books I bought from the Shaman Drum bookstore when it was still open was a copy of M.F.K. Fisher’s Serve It Forth. I had come across Fisher not through my passion for food, books or history, but rather through my love for the comedy duo Frangela. The team, Angela V. Shelton (born and raised in Detroit and went to college at our very own U of M) and her best friend Frances Callier (from Chicago) are hilarious, intelligent and self-proclaimed Rubenesque women (ho, holla if you hear me) whose audio would be the only thing I would listen to if I were marooned on a desert island.

I listen to their podcasts (as they both now live in L.A. and the time difference can be a killer) whenever they are available, and when they are not on the air I find myself starved for Frangela. They just speak my language. While most of their work is political satire, poking fun at inane crime or (my personal favorite) their “idiot of the week” segment, somewhere woven in the discussion of one of the episodes, Angela mentioned How to Cook a Wolf by M.F.K. Fisher. Naturally, because I would love for these two ladies to adopt me as their younger, also Rubenesque sister, I was rapt with attention. Who was this M.F.K. Fisher? I could ascertain that she was writing about cooking on a lean budget, but not much more, and I was very intrigued. So naturally my next step was to go online and put all of her books on my Amazon wish list.

Generally impatient when there is something out there with pages full of information, a front and back cover and a table of contents that I want and don’t have yet, I decided I would hunt her books down at my local bookstore. As anyone who ever went into Shaman Drum when it was around could tell you, it was a magical place packed end to end and rafter to rafter with books on what seemed to be every possible subject of interest. Amongst these many, I found and selected Serve It Forth, as it was M.F.K. Fisher’s first book in her Art of Eating series, and I figured I would start at the beginning.

There is something so delicious about her acerbic wit and descriptive power that adds to the already satiating act of reading. Somehow she crafts her work so that it mimics the satisfaction of eating as you experience each turn of phrase; a bite in themselves, each one. The book is laid out as a series of short, expertly crafted essays, which makes it a very quick read. Just as it is when you savor a morsel of truly great food and find yourself content with a small portion, so too are M.F.K. Fisher’s words. As I read through the pages, her philosophy on food and eating cut through a lot of the crap that we find ourselves inundated with in our industrial food system. She also cut through a lot of the crap I have been letting myself get away with.

In the interest of specificity, here are some quotes that spoke directly to me during my reading of the first essay in the book, When a Man Is Small:

“We sink too easily into stupid and overfed sensuality, our bodies thickening even more quickly than our minds.”

“Whichever school [of eating] a man may adhere to…he continues to eat through the middle years of life with increasing interest. He grows more conscious of his body as it becomes less tolerant. No longer can he dine heavily at untoward hours, filling his stomach with the adolescent excitations of hot sauces and stodgy pastries - no longer, that is, with impunity.”



“Most of us, unhappily, shudder and ache and rumble as secretly as possible, seeming to feel disgrace in what is but one of the common phenomena of age: the general slowing of all physical processes. For years we hide or ignore our bodily protests and hasten our own dyspeptic doom by trying to eat and drink as we did when we were twenty. When we are past fifty, especially if we have kept up this pathetic pose of youth-at-table, we begin to grow fat.”

And the zinger:

“But men [she refers to the collective everyone as men it seems] are thoughtless and they are habit-followers. They have eaten meat and starches for years: they see no reason for stopping when they are old, even when they think enough to realize that every function of their bodies is carried on more slowly and with more effort than ever before.

They go on whipping up their blood with “well-done” roasts, which travel haltingly through the system to the final colonic decay that makes one of the great foes of senescence - constipation.



They are floated to their coffins on a river of “stimulating” infusions of beef extract and iron, usually fed to them surreptitiously by well-meaning daughters.”

With everything that has been coming to light through the work of people like Michael Pollan and the creators of Food, Inc., and the trends that we can see in our own lives and experiences, I find Fisher’s frankness on food timely and as refreshing as any book being penned now by contemporary authorship. The words that she wrote to capture her opinions and feelings on the subject of food in the late 1930’s and on through the late 1940’s, are as germane and salient today as ever. We see the correlation with our own eyes and through our own lives, and in some of our cases (ahem, yours truly) in our own waistlines, between the ingestion of "...the adolescent excitations of hot sauces and stodgy pastries..." and our current national trends of epidemic levels of Type 2 Diabetes in adults, childhood obesity (and adult obesity) and general bad health and lack of awareness at what we willingly stuff into our bodies.

As I close the book, I see the slender young woman on the cover and I think: Here is a woman who has transformed our entire biological requirement to eat into a thing of such beauty with her words that we then go into the world after having read them burdened with the knowledge that we must do the "art of eating" justice; and isn't that a wonderful thing?

The La Rochefoucauld quote Fisher employs in Serve It Forth encapsulates this philosophy: "To eat is a necessity, but to eat intelligently is an art."

As for my art project, it seems to be in an ongoing state of evolution. It has grown out of its macaroni-glued-on-paper/Mario PaintTM-like infancy, on through the velvet unicorn painting/poster of lightning and wolves high school stage into what is now I think is starting to resemble a respectable, if not elementary, self-portrait of the artist as herself (the self she wants to be).

I’ve cut out almost all of the refined sugars, all of the intermittent snacking, most of the meat (I am trying to be a good vegetarian :) and most heavily processed foods. When I’ve gone out to eat, I have done my best to make the best choices available, and I’ve tried to pick the eating establishments that let me do this when I have some control over the choice.

Also, I went to the doctor on Monday, and he actually listened to me (new doctor), which was very helpful. He has me on a homeopathic remedy called Calc Carb 30, and it does appear to be doing something positive. Also, they are testing my thyroid, sugar, etc. to make sure none of those factors is the culprit.

In other news, next Friday is my next hafla…tune in on Wednesday for my unpreparedness fears, wardrobe malfunction woes and assuredness of bad hair for the performance!