Food for Thought

Giller-nominated novelist Timothy Taylor explains why he can’t stop writing about food, chefs and restaurants.

It’s the question I get asked most often about my writing: Why cooks, why kitchens, why food at all? 

I can see why people would ask. My first novel, Stanley Park, was set in commercial kitchens. I ended up writing two non-fictional books about food after that — one about the comical discontent of connoisseurship, the other about the comical overreactions of food critics. In my magazine work, meanwhile, I published hundreds of articles over a couple decades and I never managed to get very far away from food and restaurants and the people who worked and dined in them. And no complaints on my part. Writing careers are difficult to sustain. I was lucky to be one novel into my career and getting sent all over the place — Dubai and Dublin, Beijing, Tokyo, Shanghai, Seoul — mostly to eat.

Even when I was trying to write about other things in fiction, I’d inevitably touch back to food. When I wrote characters, I couldn’t help showing how they ate. When I depicted places, I’d find myself looking at the way local people gathered for meals. Even in the substance of the stories themselves, food was hard to escape. To illustrate: A woman has a mid-life crisis and I imagine her doing what? Well, she heads to Ireland to buy a cheese creamery. Because obviously.

Which returns us to that first question. Why?

I think of my mother here first. She gave me my earliest indelible memories, after all. And the first one of those is her making bread. I’m sitting there next to her on the counter, little chubby legs dangling. She’s working that dough, punching it down, rolling it, tossing out flour onto a grooved wooden surface. It’s physical work and she seems enormously powerful to me, pulling out that Mixmaster and slapping it up on the counter, cranking the bowl into place. But here’s the thing I remember most clearly. She’d get a strand of hair in her eye while working and blow it away with an upward breath. And the hair would always fall back down. So then, she’d use the back of her wrist to stroke it clear, awkward because her fingers were caked in sticky dough. She glances at me doing this, wiggling her fingers, then laughing. Now we’re both laughing and ever so briefly I understand everything there is to know. 

So, I cooked myself. How could I not? I cooked towards memories like that one, following the strangely hybrid family cuisine that she showed me and which I then carried away to grad school on recipe cards — ceviche; arroz con pollo; beef stroganoff, two kinds: Spanish-North European. This is what happens when a German Holocaust refugee meets a Canadian nomad in Ecuador and starts a family. It adds up strangely, but it does add up. 

But as I cooked, more and more after my mother died, I also naturally looked up to admire those who I could see doing it professionally well. I think writers maybe do this more readily than others. We look to a concrete trade that we admire more than the abstract one into which we’ve become ourselves absorbed. I’ve known writers who focus on athletes, musicians, visual artists. Cops and criminals are, of course, a pretty common writerly obsession. But cooks were mine, my professional alter ego as it were. I cooked to access memories, producing ceviche de langostinos on some occasions and beef tongue in mustard sauce on others. My mother and father were muddled in there, surely. But so too now were a new set of people to admire — Jacques Pépin, Julia Child, Jose Garces. I thought about the gap between the pro and the amateur, the difference in mindset, in stamina and toughness, guts and speed.

With this new novel, I think something new has crept in, something growing out of a later life sense I’ve acquired with regards to the power of people acting in groups — teams, peer clusters, crowds.

I’m interested in crowds. I’m interested by the way ideas catch and spread in crowds, the way they gain power through networks to magnificent and catastrophic effect.

Commercial kitchens are, to me, an interesting illustration of these principles. I think of the Michelin-starred plate, that one we can all imagine, coming into the dining room with a reverential hush born of the consensus opinion that Michelin represents. Then I think of the environment in which plates of this kind are still sometimes produced — the pit of the inferno, roughly speaking, surrounded by flames, by razor-sharp blades, by ego, ambition, anxiety, even violence. What is it about the crowd that makes it the vehicle for something as beautiful as that plate and as terrifying as some of the kitchens where those plates are produced?

In his book The Delusions of Crowds: Why People Go Mad in Groups, William Bernstein writes: “The violence of the crowd ends only if it boils over into a containable cataclysm.” Food transforms us with the containable cataclysm of that sacred plate. Cooks live nearest to the creation event in question, near what is most beautiful and terrible about the whole business.

If I had a wish in writing this new book — one that I’m describing here as the product of my mother, my heroes, and some truth about the profound power of crowds to both deify and destroy — it would be that the book were somehow a contained cataclysm in itself, a deluge, a downpour, a change agent. So, I launched it in September, but I did so differently than I’ve done before. I did it as a fundraiser for the BC Hospitality Foundation, which helps out restaurant workers in times of crisis, surely some of those arising precisely because of the dynamics of cataclysm that I’m describing here.

All art is cataclysm. The novel, too. On a good day, it arrives from the pit of its own inferno, delivered with a whisper as if to the white tablecloth of a fine-dining room. This is all that the writer can write for, that whisper. But we share that much with cooks. Bon appétit.