Who cares what I've eaten?

When I was a kid, my family was friends with another family in Oak Ridge, Tenn. My parents would go out with this couple for dinner and all four kids would get one babysitter. At the night's end, the other mom would come into the kids' room and, in a quiet, murmuring voice, she would proceed to recite to her children exactly what she had eaten that night.

I mean, the whole dang dinner, explicated endlessly. I would drift off to sleep listening to her saying things like, "green peas with those little onions, and soft, pillowy rolls with foil-wrapped butter...."

The takeaway, for me, was that listening to someone talk about what he or she has eaten is fundamentally boring. I grew up to be a food writer and I still thought this. Good food writing is not about listing what you ate. A restaurant review should be edifying, sure (should I go to this restaurant or should I save my money?), but it should also be entertaining. Fun to read. There should be painting a picture (the dishes, the ambiance, the service, etc.) as well as thoughtful synthesis, hilarity and hijinks, drawing of larger conclusions, jokes, verbal slights of hand.

I was saying all this at a staff meeting a couple weeks ago, when Eric Deggans basically told me I'm wrong. He told me about an entertainment blog that he likes. At the end of each entry, this woman lists what she has eaten for lunch. Just lists the stuff like this: pulled pork, beans, beets, corn.

I'm not willing to totally concede, but there is something perversely interesting about her daily chronicling of foodstuffs. A strange form of voyeurism.

Comments

[jimbo]

Laura,

Your little friend is wrong. No descriptive writing? There might as well be no metaphors, expletives, or tooth fairies.

Listen, seriously, you're righ--no one cares about what you eat every day. I'll wager Eric is young, too young to remember a certain area sports editor that started every one of his columns with what he ate for breakfast. Not only did it not amuse most of the people in Greater Tampa (except maybe Wauchula) but it was a bit of a laughingstock among his sportswriting brethren nationally.

To sum up, the sports editor came across as a self-indulgent hick.