High Five 5 excerpts from Jonah Campbell’s Food & Trembling

This weekend, Jonah Campbell, author of Invisible Publishing’s Food & Trembling: An Entertainment, will be in town launching and reading from his book. A collection of essays, epistles, reflections, and general scrawlings on the subjects of eating, drinking, and gourmanderie in general, Food & Trembling approaches foodstuffs with equal measures white-tablecloth elegance, cutlery-pounding urgency, and scotch-spewing indulgent abandon. It’s a great read.

In fact, it’s such a great read that we asked Campbell—whose author’s note on Invisible’s website describes him as a “metalhead, misanthrope, [and] unrepentant good eater”—if we could publish a few excerpts. He gave us that whole “express consent of the author” thing you’ll find on the copyright pages of most books, and we culled some of our favourite sections from the uniformly excellent Food & Trembling. If you like these, there will be plenty more at Saturday night’s reading. And, you know, in the book.

1. Against brunch
I have yet to experience an omelette in a restaurant (inevitably nine- dollar-plus) that surpasses one I could make for myself in approximately ninety-nine seconds at home, and I don’t expect that when I do, it will be found at “brunch.” This has as much to do with the qualities inherent in the omelette itself as with the exigencies of running a brunch setup. The power and the glory of an omelette, in my estimation, reside in the ability to eat it mere moments after it has been slid from pan to plate, only so many moments as are required to for the residual heat to finish cooking the interior to silky but fragile perfection. If I am in the mood for something spongy, browned, and sweating, I will take it as a tortilla with maybe some olives, half drunk off a two-euro Spanish red, or alternately in a bathroom stall of an Ibizan nightclub, thank you very much.

2. From the chapter “The Chip Returns, Part Two”
Today I mistook for potato chips what turned out, upon more considered scrutiny, to be flower petals strewn upon the metro floor.

3. On the Reese’s Peanut Butter Bar
Similar in basic structure to a Caramilk—chocolate chambers filled with, you know, filling—but resembling nothing so much as the generic “Chocolate Bar” of comic books and clipart, there is something fundamentally aesthetically satisfying about the Reese’s Peanut Butter Bar. It looks classic. But not good. I mean, not awful, but really just not right. Not right in one’s head. You can’t really hold it against them, because such is the nature of the beast, and chocolate bar novelty marketing can be kind of cute in a sad way, because you’d think that they, if anyone, should have a well established sense of what about their product works and why. But no, those flavour scientists and stuffed-suit junior execs seem to miss the boat a good sixty percent of the time.

4. On why he doesn’t identify as a “foodie,” or even suffer the term
I hesitate to use the term “foodie” not only because I dislike it, but because for purposes of retrospection it certainly cannot describe my relationship to food before the cultural moment at which “foodie” became a salient term. I have written elsewhere about my discomfort with the term, and while I have no problem at all with people self-describing as such, I am put off by how the label rarifies something so universal and essential to life by reinscribing it as a lifestyle. I do not mean to claim that I am any less precious or annoying or of the present time by insisting that I am not a foodie, but simply someone who is very interested in food, but I do not feel that I profit much from so identifying. I am also aware that the term is of only slightly more recent vintage than myself (coined by Barr & Levy in their 1984 The Official Foodie Handbook), and like myself, had as its aim to circumvent some of the pretence and stuffiness of the gourmet, but hell, I am an obstinate bastard, so let’s leave it at that.

5. And finally, and most lengthily, a (hypothetical) conversation between Campbell and a coworker at a bookstore, on the merits of calling gluten soy balls “meatballs.” From the chapter “When in Doubt, Put Some Gravy on It”
An ongoing point of contention in the warehouse where I work is my tendency, as a once-vegan, to unproblematically refer to vegan bastardizations of specific dishes by their ‘original’ names, sans vegan prefix, by which my coworkers are invariably scandalized (their mock confusion begins to wear on me). An obvious example would be any time I talk about fake meat, eschewing out of laziness the qualifiers “mock,” “soy,” “gluten,” etc:

Me: Man, I made this delicious meatball sub the other night with sweet potato fries in it. You know, you wouldn’t think the sweet potato would work so much, what with the sweetness and the marinara sauce, but it was actually pretty epic.
Skeptical Coworker: Wait, I thought you didn’t eat meat?
Me: I don’t. Vegan meatballs.
Skeptical Coworker: That is not a meatball.
Me: Whatever, it is more or less a meatball. It serves the same basic function as a meatball, i.e. being meaty, being ball-shaped, being totally excessive when put in a sandwich, right?
Skeptical Coworker: Yeah, not a meatball.
Me: Yeah, anyway, please allow me to continue telling you about this epic sandwich already, this vegetarian meatball sandwich, or do you suddenly have something better to do, like your job?
Skeptical Coworker: Why not just call it a soy ball?
Me: Because it is not merely a soy ball, it is a combination of gluten and soy, and no one is going to eat a ‘gluten soy ball.’
Skeptical Coworker: Well no one should eat a gluten soy ball.
Me: Shit, have you seen fifty-two copies of Digital Fortress?