The Man Who Ate The World by Jay Rayner
Posted by paragraphonline on March 2, 2010
If there were an activity I love more than reading, it would be eating. And if there is any activity that combines the both together so very well, it’ll be reading about food. Lucky for me, so many people have ventured into writing about food: from the preparation of it, to the stories behind it, from the cooking of it and right down to the eating of it.
Before I talk about Jay Rayner’s “ The Man Who Ate the World”, let me first state that food writing is an art, and it is an art that not many people do well. So what if you are JK Rowling? You can’t depend on an excellent word bank or good amount of imagination to write about food. It takes a skilled writer with plenty of guts to write about food in the most glorified detail without sounding like Nigella Lawson. You can’t be so explicit that your reader gets too hungry to go on reading, and you also can’t be too cursory that your writing becomes something you find in the lifestyle and cooking section of the newspaper.
Which is why I quite enjoyed Rayner’s book. I gravitated to the book when I saw it in a book sale because from the cover I figured it would make me laugh. It did, at the preface, when he warned me to read this in a café with no obstructing glassware and snacks within reach. As a food critic, you would think he might be pretty adept about all things food, but then he gets himself in strange places (Sushi in Moscow?), eating even stranger food (lamb cooked in sour milk?) and meeting the strangest people (descendents of Stalin’s chefs?). I liked that he didn’t make me that hungry – I wanted to relish the next story as much as I wanted to savour the garlicky escargot and the foie gras terrine buried beneath a leaf-fall of summer truffle shavings.
Jay Rayner set out on a quest to see if those fabled Michelin-starred restaurants are really something to shout out about. And he tells us what we already know, and that is the perfect meal can’t be found anywhere with Baroque fittings or a €200 degustation menu. It just can’t be found.
Contributed by: D.C
