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Eating As I Go by Doris Friedensohn
Eating As I Go: Scenes from America and Abroad
Doris Friedensohn
University Press of Kentucky. 2006
249pp. $25
ISBN 0813191645
The Couscous Has Something to Say
You are a child who chafes at the rituals and rules of your parents’ religion. When, as a teenager, the need to rebel becomes overwhelming, what do you do? If you are the ingenious Doris Friedensohn, you meet your friend at the local Chinese restaurant. There, you violate not only the rule against eating pork, but the one against eating at all on the holiest day of the Jewish calendar.
In “Yom Kippurs at Yum Luk” and all other vignettes in Eating As I Go: Scenes from America and Abroad, the food itself is never the point. What the food represents, transcends, manages to heal, or not, is the point. “Yum Luk beckoned like a way station for the outward bound,” Friedensohn writes. Outward bound she was, for the next 50 years, as graduate student, wife, feminist, and well-traveled American Studies scholar. This book, part memoir and part global studies, is what she brought back.
Food is for Friedensohn what the camera is for most tourists. It is the medium through which she captures her experiences, the chip on which her memories are stored. In recalling the look, texture, and taste of the handmade cheese in Coimbra, Portugal, she recalls the man who made the homely delicacy, the beat-up barns beyond the picture window of her rented flat, the beloved husband with whom, seated in front of that window, she shared the cheese as well as dense bread and local wine. When the author’s memory queues up the image of the sturgeon, black caviar, and chocolate truffles of a Park Avenue couple’s regular dinner parties, she is reminded that expensive food, served on exquisite china, cannot resolve all cravings, the dinner parties having been derailed by divorce court. The mental image of the plate of dal bhat in Nepal, which turned her fingers yellow and raised fears of a midnight trip to the outhouse, “a rickety flight of stairs down and thirty feet of foliage away from the house,” reminds Friedensohn of how she felt as she ate, seated on the dirt floor of a hut: homesick for her bathroom in Leonia, New Jersey.
The author acknowledges, without dwelling on it, the price she pays for the exhilaration and insight that foreign travel give. Near the end of an academic conference in Austria, where discussions with other foreign scholars turned tense, even painful at times, she is eager to go home because “paradoxically, the very things I look for in travel—the epiphanies, the enlarged purview, and the rush of adrenaline in the rituals of farewell—are taking their inevitable toll.” By way of epiphanies, hardship, and telling details, Friedensohn gives us powerful snapshots of places most of us have never visited, and equally enlightening insights on places many of us probably thought we knew well—a suburban dining room, an upscale supermarket, and the food court at the mall, which specializes in “kitsch ethnic.” She takes the reader to her neighborhood ethnic convenience store, where the coffee is a bargain and the “nonstop small dramas” are free.
Clearly, the author has a wide-ranging, sophisticated palette, but she is not merely a foodie. The quality of the food has little bearing on the quality of her experience when eating it. “When things go well, my hosts and I trade intimacies and deflate stereotypes. Other times, even though we eat chicken and drink beer together, we trip over differences in language, culture, and power.”
Such differences were on the table at a dinner party in Tunisia, where visiting professor Friedensohn and her artist husband had lively conversation with their host, Fahti, a Tunisian artist, and his other guests. They discussed the conflict between native craft traditions and European modernism, a hot topic still, a generation after Tunisia had gained its independence from France. Then the couscous is served, and Fahti recalls a poor childhood sustained by this staple of North Africa’s Arab kitchens, which was served daily to him and his siblings by an unsmiling, hardworking mother. His friends at the table have similar memories. The grains of couscous on the heaping platter before them hold lifetimes of colonialism and bitterness. “The heat intensifies around the low table where we are seated,” Friedensohn writes. “Beneath the calculated black humor, the Tunisians’ fury festers…Are we, who grew up well fed in a distant place, somehow responsible? What is our role in the release they seek?”
Food, that most basic of necessities, is rarely basic. The social, political, or economic ramifications of food are there, in every story, at home and abroad. One of the five sections in Eating As I Go is devoted to the Food Service Training Academy, run by the Community FoodBank of New Jersey. It provides the underemployed—many of them ex-cons and ex-addicts—with the skills and credentials to get a job in the food service industry. Can food be the toehold up from a life of bad luck or bad choices?
Maybe it was her career as a classroom professor that taught Friedensohn to be interesting and entertaining in order to get her message across. For all its information and important questions, Eating As I Go is, first, engrossing storytelling. In fact, several tales have the pull of a good mystery, including “Chapulines, Mole, and Four Pozoles,” which describes in detail the harvesting, cooking, and seasoning of a favorite snack among natives of Oaxaca, Mexico. Before this trip—this story—is over, will Friedensohn finally try the fried grasshoppers?
Whatever the meal, we can be grateful that this author, a “glutton for eating as experience,” has invited us to the table.
Theresa Forsman, a member of the Ethical Culture Society of Bergen County, raises money for the Community FoodBank of New Jersey.
Eating As I Go: Scenes from America and Abroad
Doris Friedensohn
University Press of Kentucky. 2006
249pp. $25
ISBN 0813191645
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