Fast or feast

‘Tell me what you eat and I shall tell you what you are.’ The best known adage in food literature, penned by the French politician and gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, divides all of us generally: the gourmands from the picky, the greedy from the careful, one nation from another, one culture from the next.

Laura Shapiro’s book about six famous women and their ‘food stories’ made me want to re-read a few biographies for those food moments. Shapiro claims that food in life stories is undervalued as a subject, considering how much time people spend eating. Their tastes, loves, hates, phobias, habits and cravings can tell us as much about people as the more ‘essential’ topics within their stories; their politics, vision, power and, not least, their sex life.

Past biographers and scholars saw food as a tough sell, says Shapiro:

These issues and more can be brought to bear on the making of dinner — but back then the great minds, not to mention most of their graduate students, were reluctant to descend to the frivolous realm of the kitchen.

For Shapiro, a food journalist who wants a person’s whole story, food is the entry point to her subjects’ lives.

At first look Shapiro has assembled a weird cast of characters. I would certainly not want all six round my table as fantasy guests, and they have not necessarily been chosen for an outcome that will make the reader hungry. But it’s a successful approach. What She Ate is truly original and fascinating; a new and clever form of food writing. Sensuality, sympathy, snobbery, humour and horror — all are here.

‘It turns out that our food stories don’t always honour what’s smartest and most dignified about us. More often they go straight to what’s neediest.’