Satiation Guaranteed
When Becky sent me the Winter, 2010 Alimentum to review, I wasn’t particularly excited. All I knew about the journal was their subtitle, “The Literature of Food,” so I imagined an endless series of paeans to chocolate, perhaps a cookbook review or twelve, and an essay about how kopi luwak is made (by passing coffee beans through the digestive tract of the Asian Palm Civet, for those who have to know). It took me weeks to finally get around to opening and reading this issue, and now that I’d done so? I could say I’ve got egg on my face, maybe that I’m eating crow, but I won’t -- because reading or writing such trite food-related clichés is as unlike the experience of reading Alimentum, as eating beluga caviar at L’Astrance in Paris is to participating in a International Federation of Competitive Eating hot dog challenge at Coney Island.
The fiction is this issue of Alimentum includes nine stories, most of them running to the shorter lengths. “Sacrifice in Fukuoka,” by the late Paul Silverman, may center around an American eating horse while on a business trip to Japan, but it is a primarily a unique story of desire and negotiation between two people of different races, sexes, and classes.
Carol Parikh’s “Cakes for All Occasions” is a beautiful short-short about death, desire, and a bakery that rewards re-reading. Another short-short, “Comfort Food” by M.E. Parker, is also about the death of a relative, an abusive father, but doesn’t hold quite up as well upon examination. Parikh’s story weaves a connection between the food and the narrator’s emotional state of mind in a succession of mini-scenes, while Parker’s is a more simple juxtaposition: memories of abusive father/daughter moments alternate with a male-served meal of barbecue and beans and leaves the weaving as an exercise for the reader.
“The Big Juan” is a longer piece by Michelle Panik, that tells the story of how a teenage girl is displaced in her father’s affections by a troubled boy, three interesting and fully-depicted characters with disparate motivations in a relationship that changes all of their lives. It also happens to include food-eating contests and the characters’ restaurant reviews. Rebecca Louie’s “The Ascent,” a shorter piece, does a wonderful job describing the surface events of the narrator’s quest for meat at a vegetarian jungle retreat without much illumination of the reasons behind the quest (beyond the obvious), and suffers by comparison.
“Chestnut” by Katherine A. Gleason is a flash piece of a vaguely dysfunctional family’s Thanksgiving that didn’t stay with me very long after reading. And then there was “Apples” by Erik Hanson. “Apples” is about a dog, and apples, and hungry soldiers, and the evils of war, a terrible story with unpleasant characters an unhappy ending that you should read, and that will stay with you forever, because it is unsparing in the depiction of the large and small cruelties, and triumphs, that happen in wartime. “Beans,” by Larry Crist and “Starving” by Richard Schmitt are both serviceable shorts about parents struggling with their poorly behaving (“Beans”) or well-behaving (“Starving”) adolescents, but “Apples” was the best story of the issue for me.
There are 24 poets represented in Alimentum, many of them with two poems each (including, I have to say, more than one paean to chocolate), some of which were little more than recipes, although they did sound delicious. My favorites were “Bread” and “Burning the Bread Board” by Maura Stanton, the funny and seductive “Gluten-Free Poem” by Jax Peters Lowell, and “Oatmeal Everyday” by Alisa Gordaneer.
The non-fiction essays were as good as the fiction, and like the fiction, the best of them said much more about life than about their food-related subjects. The title subject of “Gjetost” by Peter Selgin may be a stinky cheese, but this is a coming-of-age memoir about sex, seduction, and love. “ Front Yard Fruit” by Ellen Estilai is about mulberries, and “Persian Perfection” by Becky Ruiz Jenab is about baking bread, but both are also about the obligations of family and community, and about living a life separated from your cultural heritage. “The Late, Late Kitchen” by Artis Bernard, on the other hand, is well-written, but is quite literally about making an omelet and breaking eggs. There is also an interview with Deborah Madison, a chef and food writer.
