What do you think?
Rate this book
A Slice of Life
Represented here are some of the world's best known writers, many of whom like Nigella Lawson, Julia Child, Marcella Hazan, and Anthony Bourdain are well known for their alimentary musings, while others, like Charles Simic, Roland Barthes, Umberto Eco, Wole Soyinka and Susan Sontag are better known for their writings in other genres; all speak eloquently on the nature of food, language, and the adaptability of social customs. Bonnie Marranca has cooked up a tempting meal of writings that reflect on how the consumption of food or the lack of it takes on larger social significance. A Slice of Life is a banquet that readers will savor through its many courses. A mixture of cerebral and emotional nourishment A Slice of Life is filled with superbly conceived and compellingly crafted essays. My favorite essay of the bunch I cannot decide. It would be akin to choosing between roast duck and chocolate-chip cheesecake as my favorite food. St. Louis Post-Dispatch
400 pages, Hardcover
First published October 1, 2003
8 people are currently reading
39 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
April 14, 2020
The biggest issue I had with this book is that I had a hard time figuring out the meaning of the categories. For example, there's a section on "Body and Soul" that sometimes addresses religious themes (writing about monks and not wasting food, Buddhist approaches to food that focus on nourishment and loving-kindness for food and all things, plus pausing a little before you eat to remind yourself to detach slightly from the physical world) and other times addresses activism (Wole Soyinka's hunger strike), plus one that is about "soul" food. It's not that I see these things as antithetical, just that they seem like different categories.
The section on "Want" likewise has some religious/spiritual overtones (Jewish people ruminating on food during time in a concentration camp, the gastrosophy of nineteenth-century U.S. thinkers, Hindu food prohibitions for widows)--what makes an article go in one and not the other? Both sections seem to imply that there is a connection between religion and the absence of food, or at least the contemplation of its absence.
Then there are the "we need to be better consumers" from Michael Pollan's focus on organic food and the oxymoron of industrial organic, to Alice Waters's sometimes sanctimonious history of her restaurant Chez Panisse cultivating close relationships with growers and producers, to Wendell Berry's last words on being a cognizant consumer as a way to be free from advertisers' influence and heal the planet all in one (All of these are in different sections, although I guess reading them back-to-back-to-back might have blunted their message. But still: why does one go in one section and the other in another?). And those three would have been nicely paired with Rachel Laudan's piece that claims that people for much of history have NOT eaten locally or fresh when they could afford to do otherwise, and that processed foods have actually given nutrition to MANY more people in the last century than foodies bent on "local, organic" would have us believe as they criticize processed and industrialized food supplies.
"Place Settings" starts the book, that makes sense--put the utensils first, with Roland Barthes's ruminations on chopsticks (which have the elegant qualities of not violating/stabbing the food it getting it to your mouth AND of involving choice of morsels rather than shoveling things in with fork or spoon) and Alice Walker's mom's blue bowl. But then there's Emily Prager's experience with Swedish food (which she makes sounds AMAZING: light, flavorful, crafted) which she tries to replicate in Ikea in New Jersey, plus Umberto Eco's ridiculous, out-of-touch rant on how hard it is to eat on an airplane, and Nigella Lawson cooking for "one." All over the place settings. Ha.
Taste Memory seems to focus on the past and conjuring up food from the past--like looking for pie or someone finally realizing that meat is from creatures. And some of it is individual and some of it more cultural, collective memory realm: Israeli cuisine, restaurants in Russia.
There's a theme of seduction of food: M.F.K. Fisher describing how a woman would go about seducing a man with food (Place Settings) and Isabel Allende discussing cooking in the nude (Theatres of Food). And both of them are kind of irritating in their coy yet know-it-all ways. Again: what is with this organization?
The other theme that was not grouped together but seems also to be a theme in food writing: the insufferable twits who name-drop chefs and French dishes over and over to show how cosmopolitan they are--Joseph Wechberg showing his knowledge of cuisine and gypsy music in Budapest, Elizabeth David's interminable list of what dishes should go with what herbs...with no point to the whole thing, Jay Parini writing about how awesome it is to wile away the hours writing in a diner while teaching at Dartmouth (did I mention he teaches at Dartmouth? He does. Mention it. And teach there.), even Nigel Slater's list of everything he ate in a year and how awesome he is for eating what he wanted, taking the stairs mostly, and keeping track, all of which led to inevitable weight loss that anyone with an ounce of his discipline could do, too, if only they'd stop cramming their head holes with processed food. I liked Russell Baker's parody of this style of writing, in which his gourmet meal starts with pate de fruites de nuts de Georgia, peanut butter on a graham cracker, and ends with burning bologna until the smoke billows in the apartment.
OK, so the list goes on. Here are ones I liked or had a strong reaction to: Sallie Tisdale's meat, with blood, very visceral. I will probably try to teach Rachel Laudan's historical review of "local, organic" eating to my world history kids sometime. And Anthony Bourdain still feels fresh and interesting, with only a touch of that arrogance I generally despise above. Julia Child also avoids that arrogance, focusing on her successes and failures and the massive amount of help that went into producing her TV show. Jane Kramer's description of how she uses cooking to process her thoughts for writing: I love the metaphor (my best friend describes her own mental process for mulling/sifting/percolating ideas as a pot boiling on a back burner--and look how many words we have for "thinking" that relate to cooking or digesting), but I envied her life to such an extreme (traveling all over, writing for a living, being a good cook) that I sort of hated her.
So that's also what to read during a pandemic: food, travel, stories about want and deprivation.
The section on "Want" likewise has some religious/spiritual overtones (Jewish people ruminating on food during time in a concentration camp, the gastrosophy of nineteenth-century U.S. thinkers, Hindu food prohibitions for widows)--what makes an article go in one and not the other? Both sections seem to imply that there is a connection between religion and the absence of food, or at least the contemplation of its absence.
Then there are the "we need to be better consumers" from Michael Pollan's focus on organic food and the oxymoron of industrial organic, to Alice Waters's sometimes sanctimonious history of her restaurant Chez Panisse cultivating close relationships with growers and producers, to Wendell Berry's last words on being a cognizant consumer as a way to be free from advertisers' influence and heal the planet all in one (All of these are in different sections, although I guess reading them back-to-back-to-back might have blunted their message. But still: why does one go in one section and the other in another?). And those three would have been nicely paired with Rachel Laudan's piece that claims that people for much of history have NOT eaten locally or fresh when they could afford to do otherwise, and that processed foods have actually given nutrition to MANY more people in the last century than foodies bent on "local, organic" would have us believe as they criticize processed and industrialized food supplies.
"Place Settings" starts the book, that makes sense--put the utensils first, with Roland Barthes's ruminations on chopsticks (which have the elegant qualities of not violating/stabbing the food it getting it to your mouth AND of involving choice of morsels rather than shoveling things in with fork or spoon) and Alice Walker's mom's blue bowl. But then there's Emily Prager's experience with Swedish food (which she makes sounds AMAZING: light, flavorful, crafted) which she tries to replicate in Ikea in New Jersey, plus Umberto Eco's ridiculous, out-of-touch rant on how hard it is to eat on an airplane, and Nigella Lawson cooking for "one." All over the place settings. Ha.
Taste Memory seems to focus on the past and conjuring up food from the past--like looking for pie or someone finally realizing that meat is from creatures. And some of it is individual and some of it more cultural, collective memory realm: Israeli cuisine, restaurants in Russia.
There's a theme of seduction of food: M.F.K. Fisher describing how a woman would go about seducing a man with food (Place Settings) and Isabel Allende discussing cooking in the nude (Theatres of Food). And both of them are kind of irritating in their coy yet know-it-all ways. Again: what is with this organization?
The other theme that was not grouped together but seems also to be a theme in food writing: the insufferable twits who name-drop chefs and French dishes over and over to show how cosmopolitan they are--Joseph Wechberg showing his knowledge of cuisine and gypsy music in Budapest, Elizabeth David's interminable list of what dishes should go with what herbs...with no point to the whole thing, Jay Parini writing about how awesome it is to wile away the hours writing in a diner while teaching at Dartmouth (did I mention he teaches at Dartmouth? He does. Mention it. And teach there.), even Nigel Slater's list of everything he ate in a year and how awesome he is for eating what he wanted, taking the stairs mostly, and keeping track, all of which led to inevitable weight loss that anyone with an ounce of his discipline could do, too, if only they'd stop cramming their head holes with processed food. I liked Russell Baker's parody of this style of writing, in which his gourmet meal starts with pate de fruites de nuts de Georgia, peanut butter on a graham cracker, and ends with burning bologna until the smoke billows in the apartment.
OK, so the list goes on. Here are ones I liked or had a strong reaction to: Sallie Tisdale's meat, with blood, very visceral. I will probably try to teach Rachel Laudan's historical review of "local, organic" eating to my world history kids sometime. And Anthony Bourdain still feels fresh and interesting, with only a touch of that arrogance I generally despise above. Julia Child also avoids that arrogance, focusing on her successes and failures and the massive amount of help that went into producing her TV show. Jane Kramer's description of how she uses cooking to process her thoughts for writing: I love the metaphor (my best friend describes her own mental process for mulling/sifting/percolating ideas as a pot boiling on a back burner--and look how many words we have for "thinking" that relate to cooking or digesting), but I envied her life to such an extreme (traveling all over, writing for a living, being a good cook) that I sort of hated her.
So that's also what to read during a pandemic: food, travel, stories about want and deprivation.
September 7, 2022
A Slice of Life: Contemporary Writers on Food is a collection of essays on food edited by Bonnie Marranca and published in 2003. It is a sumptuous smorgasbord of writings about food, literature, society, culture and how they are all inextricably linked to how we are today, how we arrived here and how we might negotiate an uncertain future. Maranca has assembled a stellar cast of contributors, a cross-section of luminaries from many genres. Included are legendary names such as MFK Fisher, Roland Barthes, Umberto Eco, Alice Waters, Claudia Roden, Michael Pollan, Julia Child, Isabel Allende, Susan Sontag, Anthony Bourdain, Laurie Colwin, Elizabeth David, Wendell Berry and many more.
It is a veritable feast of ideas that spark off each other and combine to give us a multilayered rendering of the role food plays in every aspect of life, how it changes over time and in relation to place, history, civilisation, fashion and the inevitable influences of politics, philosophy, art and science.
September 15, 2017
I love this anthology on food writing. Marranca has strung together a diverse band of writers, many with opposing perspectives on food. Some essays I've marked to read again and again; others, I couldn't get through fast enough or even skipped on the rare occasion. Certainly, there are the unsurprising essays set in the familiar "foodie" grooves of organic eating, local foods, home-cooking etc. But there are also delightful essays on food and its relations to race, linguistics, religion, and so on.
November 8, 2014
A great book. The preface and introduction are outstanding. Many chapters follow that feature the best known writers of and about food, but also outstanding writers who have used food in some form. The writers include Roland Barhtes, Alice Walker, Nigella Lawson and Michael Pollan. A diversity of food genres are including, incorporating restaurants, nostalgic pieces and features.
For those interested in both understanding and replicating the best of food writing, this book captures a fine selection.
For those interested in both understanding and replicating the best of food writing, this book captures a fine selection.
February 2, 2010
This was a very mixed read - I ended up dipping and skipping essays that didn't interest me. Some chapters are just what you'd expect from the authors - such as Michael Pollan and Julia Child, and seem almost lifted from their books. Others (Nigel Slater comes to mind) are very entertaining. Now I know - never order fish in a restaurant on a Monday, and even a Tuesday can be pushing it!
February 26, 2011
As with several books that combine literature and food, I enjoy the combination -- makes them that much better!
April 8, 2016
Some great essays on all different food subjects. And it has Laurie Colwin!
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews