Monday Miscellany #8

Special COVID Edition

I’ve caught the COVID, tested positive on Saturday morning. Thankfully, it’s turned out to be more of an unpleasant weekend thing than a life-threatening event, and this morning I am much recovered, having spent most of Saturday and Sunday in bed. Unfortunately, it’s put me behind on my various labors, including grading papers, haphazard gardening, and writing things that need to be written. Here then, are a few items to keep you interested until I come back with something better.

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A Completo in Santiago. A hotdog smothered in mayonnaise, sauerkraut and avocado. One of Chile’s national dishes.

Thanks to the kindness of Tyler Cowen and a link from his blog Marginal Revolution, I picked up several dozen new subscribers over the weekend. They were drawn here by last Thursday’s piece, A Curanto in Ancud, about eating seafood and pork from a hole in the ground in Chiloé, an island muy romantico in southern Chile. This was the fifth thing I’ve published about Chilean food on my substack in the last couple of months. Here are links to the previous four articles, in case you missed them.

A Bowl of Patasca in the Vega Central

Mote con Huesillos on Cerro San Cristobal

Pan Amasado and the Chilean Carb Fest

Merkén: The Mupache Spice

Originally, a few years ago, my goal was to write a book about Chilean food culture entitled, “A Completo in Santiago”. Each of the various chapters started with me eating something in a characteristic location, hence, “A Curanto in Ancud”, or “Mote con Heusillos on Cerro San Cristobal,” and using that experience to launch into a discussion of Chilean history and culture.

Chile has a fascinating and little known history, and a unique culture that developed in near isolation. As I said in my piece on merkén,

It’s best to think of colonial Chile, prior to the 19th century, as being on the far side of a distant mountainous moon, isolated and cut off from the rest of the world by the Andes, the Pacific Ocean, and the Atacama Desert.

That’s why Chile isn’t like the rest of Latin America, why it’s so different from anywhere else in world, and why I’ll eventually write that book, even if it’ll be hard to find a publisher willing to have a go at something as obscure as Chilean food culture.

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Next…this beautifully written piece about Richard Olney by Nancy Harmon Jenkins is one of the best things I’ve read in the last month. It’s so good.

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Tuscany. Just because. Photo by Petr Kratochvil

Speaking of beautiful food writing, my reaction to reading Nancy Harmon Jenkins’s reminiscence about Richard Olney was the same as when I read something by Ruth Reichl, to wit: “why is this so good, when so much current food writing is so bad?”

It’s not just that most current food writing is bad, it’s that everyone producing it seems to be angry, depressed or discontented all the time. Good food is supposed to be fun, but no one is having any fun in food media right now, something they’re all eager to tell you at great length. Professional food writers are now the most emotionally fragile people on the face of the earth, at least that’s how it looks from the outside.

The worst part is that everything is now written in this ponderously clunky style, half freshman sociology paper, half Shining Path pronunciamento, and the ill-considered shoehorning of politics into everything is at epidemic levels.

Dude, you’re writing about pimento cheese. You don’t need to include that paragraph giving us your third-hand misunderstanding of Marcuse’s theories, just tell us how it tastes.

American puritanism has reappeared in American food writing. Like the Skid Row rescue mission, you’ll eventually get to eat your beans and bread, but only after you’ve listened to the sermon.

Give us a break.

I write about food because I like to eat, I like history and I like to inform people. My readers are guests in my house. I want your visit to be fun, and I want my writing to entertain, not annoy. I wish professional food writers would extend that same courtesy to me.

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Sorry for the brevity. I’ll be back on Thursday with something more substantial. Thanks for reading!