Foodie Bios

Recently, I've rekindled my love for foodie bios. What is a foodie bio exactly? It's a biography about someone whose life revolves around food. I first got into this genre when I read Peter Mayle's A Year in Provence for my French Humanities class while I was at Cal Poly. Lately, I devoured Julia Child's My Life in France right after we got back from our honeymoon. Now, I'm onto Bill Buford's Heat. The subtitle for Heat is: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany.

I just had to read it when I read the part about the "Dante-Quoting Butcher." Dante has been a big part of my collegiate life. I learned in my first hardcore literature class that Dante was obsessed with a woman named Beatrice and wrote her a series of love poems. She also reappears in the Divine Comedy. I had to read the entire Divine Comedy along with other medieval literature while having a full course load that quarter. Talk about intense. I'm so glad that I read it though. It's amazing. Then another quarter, I had a philosophy teacher that would say every morning (class started at 7:10am) when he called my name for role, "Dante would be very happy you're here." When we went to Italy last year, I saw his tomb in the Santa Croce church in Florence. That's my whole Dante shpeal.

Of course I previewed the book before I bought it, the preface begins with this quotation from George Orwell:

A human being is primarily a bag for putting food into; the other functions and faculties may be more godlike, but in point of time they come afterwards. A man dies and is buried, and all his words and actions are forgotten, but the food he has eaten lives after him in the sound or rotten bones of his children. I think it could be plausibly argued that changes of diet are more important than changes of dynasty or even of religion. The Great War, for instance, could never have happened if tinned food had not been invented. [...] Yet is curious how seldom the all-importance of food is recognized. You see statues everywhere to politicians, poets, bishops, but none to cooks or bacon-curers or market gardeners.


I love the 30+ pages I've read so far. I know it's no Odyssey or Ivanhoe, but I think I put in my dues already. I can read some non-serious literature for awhile. :) But seriously, each of these foodie bios talk about people rediscovering themselves and following their true passions. For this reason, I love these books. Yes, it sounds somewhat corny and overly idealistic; however, it's something that is easy to connect with and aspire to.