Eat this Book

Weighed down with culinary tomes at the Walker Library, research for a project I call "You Need More Cookbooks: A Study in Excess Brought on by Built in Cookbook Storage Space", I spotted a fanciful little book hanging out by itself, not in line and spine exposed on the bottom shelf on top of such unappealing titles such as "Weight Watchers Butterless Baking" and "The Microwave Cookbook for Men". Everything I Ate, it said. Everything You Ate? says I? What an interesting idea. So I took it home. Put it in the backseat of my car, where it lay next to the Dove soap and the raisin bran while I became deeply involved with Starting With Ingredients by the splendid Aliza Green, sister Jew in the quest to make real and really good food. Today, exiting the car and halfheartedly perusing the amalgamation of stuff in my backseat, seeing what I could carry upstairs without it flying down the stairs, out the door, and onto P____ (you laugh, but it happens, often), I saw it lying there, cheerfully bright and looking like a light read, the kind I can handle while eating late breakfast and preparing myself for a night spent in an unbearably hot kitchen where I would dance an eight hour tango with a steam table. An iced coffee kind of book.

HOLY SHIT, this book is amazing! It's so self-gratifying, so self-interested, so boring and at the same time, so simply awesome. Tucker Shaw, who according to Google, also wrote the literary crisis Confessions of a Backup Dancer, has my total and unwavering attention. He is probably boring. He eats a lot of cereal. He eats like every New Yorker- he's hip enough to know how to cook, but eats out, all the time. I know nothing about him- how old he is, what he does, what part of New York he lives in (though my money is on Manhattan), if he's serious or goofy or artistic or what kind of music he likes, but I know the inside of his mouth like its my own. For people like me, who can read volumes into sammiches and sushi and carbonara and popsicles, this is like reading someone else's diary. For those of you similarly obsessed, you should read this book. And then do your own.

After reading through March, I went into my room. Put one knee on my desk chair. Toyed with the inexplicably sharp pull handle of my right hand, top most desk drawer. Took out the Nikon. Twitchy trigger finger on the flash. Picked it up. Put it down.

Would photographing everything I ate change what I ate? The whole point is to be brutally honest. But I'm human. We'll see.

Love,
Ani