Should you ever be so unfortunate as to get stuck with me on a long bus ride, and then make the mistake of letting me direct the conversation, things will inevitably turn to Story or food. Depending on the length of our journey and whether or not you change seats at the first stop, it’ll probably be both. Today, however, seems like a good time to combine the two.
Please remain seated. No smoking.
My favorite food investigative journalist is Mark Schatzker, and yes food investigative journalists are a thing. Recently I’ve been listening to The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth about Food and Flavor. Watch any cooking show and you’ll see an emphasis on sauces. Watch any toddler fix his lunch and you’ll see an emphasis on sauces. Heck, go to the back-alley bar to order chicken wings and you’ll be presented with a whole flight of sauces. If undressed food is so bland, how did people survive before the invention of ranch?
Food didn’t always taste this way.
Schatzker spends several chapters talking about two of the most tasteless foods in the kitchen: chicken and potatoes. Apparently, in the not so recent past, they didn’t require brines, marinades, sauces, and spices. The chicken our grandparents ate tasted rich and buttery. White potatoes tasted more, uh, potato-y, I guess. But in order to get more product out faster and cheaper, we tampered with our food. Things grow bigger and faster now, just at the expense of tasting good. Or tasting like anything.
So then the flavor scientists came on the scene.
They broke down what chemicals taste like what, and the next thing you know we’ve got faux-vanilla made from pine cones. The problem is, our bodies and brains are tuned to respond to flavors. And coincidentally, food stripped of flavor is lacking nutrients. The end result is that we’re always metabolically confused, which makes us feel bad, physically and mentally, and fat when our bodies could self-regulate. Food didn’t need fixing, but here we are.
Just imagine the consequences of tampering with human reproduction in similar ways. Oh wait, we’re seeing that. Birth control, anyone?
But I don’t know much about sex. I do know about Story and I see the parallels. The oldest piece of fiction we have is The Epic of Gilgamesh and it’s still remembered today. Homer and Shakespeare did a pretty good job too. They worked long before anyone was thinking about story beats, test screenings, market research, or any other sort of analysis. I’m not saying that knowing the elements of Story is a bad thing, unworthy of attention.
Breaking food down to chemicals and trying to reconstitute never works, though.
Right now opening Netflix is kind of like going to the grocery store. Everything we see is big, factory made, and bland. Chicken breasts are ginormous and taste like pillow stuffing. The latest movie on streaming is bloated and forgettable. What happened? It was probably constructed by a bunch Story scientists working from known elements that theoretically make a good movie. Our brains are wired to respond to it as one, yet a few hours later we’re about as satisfied as if we’d eaten a bag of Doritos for lunch.
They know this, so they season it with the artificial flavors of cynicism, snark, and stupidity.
Woke ideology is the equivalent of antibiotics that kill off culture.
What’s the answer? Well, older chickens make tastier soup. If, of course, they’ve been eating more bugs, getting more sunshine, living more life. Same goes for writers. The classroom to writers’ room pipeline has hurt our stories. Being curious and having real experiences will improve the quality of the work. But also, writing organically works. There’s nothing wrong with a recipe or a story outline, but a good cook knows when to adjust and follow intuition. We need to just let the truth be the truth, just like we should’ve let potatoes be potatoes.
Our stories, and our food, can be nourishing and flavorful again when we get back to basics.
