Food Odysseys: Overstuffed?

Travel Blog • Julia Ross • 06.12.08 | 11:37 AM ET

Reading Fuchsia Dunlop’s description of “fish fragrant aubergines” in her recent China travel memoir, Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper, left me oddly dissatisfied. There’s no question the British food writer knows her stuff—she apprenticed at a Sichuanese culinary school and is the author of two Chinese cookbooks—but every couple chapters, after further meditations on the mouth feel of sea cucumbers, I was tempted to snap the book shut and push it away like a picked-over dinner plate. Enough, I thought.

I’m not the only one who feels I may have had enough of food odyssey books. Newsweek’s Jennie Yabroff, examining a recent spate of “global food pilgrimages,” including Dunlop’s, writes, “In a time when we are worrying about the global food supply, combating an obesity-fueled diabetes crisis and questioning the environmental impact of flying exotic foodstuffs around the world, one wonders if these books are merely another helping of an already overstuffed genre.”

It’s true: An air of dilettantism hangs over many of these narratives, but my larger complaint is that I’m always left wanting more. Tell me about the people behind the food: the peppercorn farmer, the tough-love culinary instructor, the guy who pulls flatbread out of an oven on a street corner in Kashgar. That I can dig into.

But the “frondy white flesh” of hairy crabs? Maybe I’m just not gourmand enough to revel in this kind of thing.

Photo by avlxyz via Flickr (Creative Commons).