For Writers, Food Is the Subject du Jour

At some point in America’s recent past, cuisine became food for thought as well as for bodies. Knowledgeable and literate food writing has become a staple of American journalism, a fact that may be formally ratified May 1, when this year’s National Magazine Awards are handed out in New York.

The two favorites for the criticism prize are food writers--Jonathan Gold, a former Times contributor who reviews New York restaurants for Gourmet, and Alan Richman, a onetime sportswriter who travels the world for GQ. No restaurant critic or food writer ever has won a general journalistic prize for criticism. And if Gold or Richman wins, it will mark the end of an era in which American cooking was transformed from a domestic necessity to an expressive art, and eating from an indulgence to an act of aesthetic appreciation.

How did this happen?

Food historian Barbara Haber, curator of books at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies and author of the forthcoming “From Hardtack to Home Fries: An Uncommon History of American Cooks and Meals,” thinks two factors have been at work: The eclipse of American puritanism and the legitimization of the sensual. “It is no accident,” she says, “that even today, people equate food and sex. I live in New England, where traditionally food was quite bad and you didn’t complain because it was somehow rude to be concerned with the senses. If you wanted to be edified, you went to Symphony Hall or the Museum of Fine Arts, not to the table. Eating and sexuality were forbidden topics. That’s behind us now.”

Haber also notes what she sees as the significance of Gold’s and Richman’s gender, though she also adds that both are “real writers with real writers’ voices.” The movement of so many male journalists into food writing, she says, has had real consequences. “It is an unavoidable fact,” Haber says, “that food writing traditionally was considered womanish, and any occupation that has been feminized usually has low status.”

Haber believes that the maturation of women’s history projects in American universities has played an essential role in creating an intellectual foundation for the boom in food writing. Investigating food, she says, “is now a major trend in social history. Food is a window on our material culture. Wars have been fought over foodstuffs. I’ve seen a complete turnaround in attitudes toward my own work because so many of my colleagues now recognize that studying food is an economical way to do deeply interesting history.”

The Clinton File

It is possible that no one in human history has been cajoled, condemned, praised, advised, analyzed or just plain muttered over by as many paid pundits as former president Bill Clinton.

Now the folks who pay others to opine--and profit thereby--would like nothing better than to turn the two-term chief executive into a columnist on his own.

Two weeks ago, for example, Clinton met with Michael O’Donnell, publisher of the San Francisco-based online magazine Salon.com. On a number of occasions since he left the White House, Salon has worked with Clinton’s staff to recycle his speeches into op-ed pieces with what both sides felt was some success. In the course of their most recent conversation, according to Clinton’s spokeswoman, Julia Payne, O’Donnell raised the possibility of formalizing the arrangement by engaging the former chief executive to write a regular column for the struggling cyber-mag.

Sources familiar with the conversation now say that Salon shortly will present Clinton with a formal proposal.

“The president,” said his Washington-based lawyer, Robert Barnett, “has received dozens of offers to do one-off articles, series of articles and syndicated columns, domestic and international. Right now I have a folder of proposals three inches thick in my desk drawer. He has not accepted any of them and has no current intention to do so.

“Since leaving office,” Barnett said, Clinton “has received hundreds and hundreds of offers. There have been media opportunities, corporate opportunities, endorsement opportunities and teaching offers. He is very grateful for them, but right now his focus is on his charitable work, completing his memoirs and on his speeches.”

That’s understandable, since Clinton commands up to $200,000 per speech, a rate that is producing a multimillion-dollar yearly income, while the $10-million advance Knopf paid for his book is the largest nonfiction book deal in U.S. publishing history. Moreover, according to Barnett, foreign interest in acquiring rights to his forthcoming memoirs is extremely strong, particularly in the lucrative British, German and Asian markets. Neither O’Donnell nor Salon editor David Talbot was available for comment. But to provide an ex-president with an audience, it seems, it takes a global village--of the real rather than the virtual sort.

On the Burner

Yxta Maya Murray is professor of criminal law at Loyola Law School and the author of two novels, “Locas” and “What It Takes to Get to Vegas,” which is set in East Los Angeles’ boxing gyms.

“At the moment I’m copy editing the manuscript of my new novel, ‘The Conquest,’ which is about a rare-book restorer who works at the Getty Museum and is restoring a book about an Aztec juggler, a woman, who is taken by Cortez from Tenochtitlan in Mexico to the Vatican. It’s based on an actual historical incident. Cortez brings her to the Vatican as an entertaining present for the pope. She, however, has an alternative mission in mind while in Europe, which is to assassinate Charles V, the Holy Roman emperor, in retaliation for Europe’s crimes against Mexico.

“The question for the woman restorer at the Getty is: Who actually wrote the book on which she is working? Experts believe it was an insane Spanish priest who wrote a series of novels in the 16th century--he’s a completely fictional character--but the restorer suspects that the juggler wrote it as an autobiography. So it’s a literary/historical detective story, and I think it’s the first novel set at the Getty. “