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By DWIGHT GARNER
ANYTHING THAT MOVES
Renegade Chefs, Fearless Eaters, and the Making of a New American Food Culture
By Dana Goodyear
262 pages. Riverhead Books. $27.95.
Dana Goodyear’s new book, about being a wallflower at the American food orgy, won me over on its second page. That’s where she admits that, as a kid in the back of the family station wagon, she used to nibble on Milk-Bone dog biscuits. I’m not sure why this image lit up my pleasure sensors. These Scooby snacks were, she writes, “tastier than you might expect.”
Beginnings and endings are important. The last page of Ms. Goodyear’s book — its title is “Anything That Moves: Renegade Chefs, Fearless Eaters, and the Making of a New American Food Culture” — is hard to forget, too. It’s an upchuck scene in slow motion, the start of a wet heave. It’s as if her psyche and stomach were rebelling, finally, after the onslaught of harrowing foods (bugs, guts, blood, ox penis) to which she has subjected them.
Ms. Goodyear is a staff writer for The New Yorker, and a poet, and the possessor of a gentle, almost demure prose style. Today’s best-known food writers tend to be noisy boys; her soothing sentences are a balm. Like the shy girl in the back of class whose occasional whispered utterances are masterpieces of marinated snark, she gets off a lot of vivid observations.
Being presented with a plate of food from one carnivorous outlaw chef feels to Ms. Goodyear, as if she were Little Red Riding Hood in a bib, “like stumbling upon a crime scene while running through the woods.” Espresso brewed with pig’s blood leaves behind “a metallic flavor familiar to anyone who’s ever been punched in the nose.” Now that’s a tasting note.
“Anything that Moves” is an eyes-wide-open exploration of the foodie avant-garde; Ms. Goodyear sets out to meet the people who are stretching our notions of what is edible. There’s a “Caligula”-like decadence to the proceedings. “To look at the food for sale in our best restaurants, you’d think that our civilization had peaked and collapsed; what we see on our plates is a post-apocalyptic free-for-all of crudity and refinement.”
The phrase the comprises this book’s title — anything that moves — used to be an insult when applied to another culture’s ostensibly filthy eating habits. “Now it is a foodie-to-foodie brag,” Ms. Goodyear notes, “used to celebrate unchecked appetite.”
At heart this book is a series of profiles, some of which originally appeared in The New Yorker. She hangs out with the scruffy Los Angeles food god Jonathan Gold, the first food critic to win a Pulitzer Prize, a Falstaffian biker type who almost single-handedly upended our notions of what tasty means. “He has a lot to do with people eating at restaurants with a C from the health department,” one avid eater tells her.
She meets raw-dairy dealers, who risk jail time for peddling their stuff. To their plight, she is sympathetic: “Appetites are hard to legislate, and people usually end up doing what they want to do.”
She attends a “Weed Dinner,” in which cannabis is employed in nearly all the dishes. “In 10 years,” she is told, “marijuana will be the new oregano.” She spends time with vegan activists. The book’s best chapter may be her profile of a culinary fixer, Brett Ottolenghi, who tracks down obscure foodstuffs for Las Vegas chefs.
“Ottolenghi specializes in the small run, the vaguely regulated, the hard to come by, and the about to be banned,” she writes. “He carries Utah clay, fresh Pennsylvania hops and squid ink from Spain. One of his newest products, which he has yet to place, is kopi luwak — coffee beans gathered from civet droppings.” This sells for up to $1,000 a pound.
Ms. Goodyear is a good-natured tour guide, and she possesses a (mostly) strong stomach. “My relationship to food is that of an acrophobe to a bridge,” she says. “Unease masks a desire to jump.”
About midway through “Anything That Moves,” she discovers she is pregnant. This puts a crimp on her nocturnal chowhound rampages. At the pot dinner, she reports, “I sat by the window so that I could breathe.” About the mercury-laden fish at one restaurant, she comments, “It all tasted like brain damage to me.”
Confronted with a certain type of preserved egg, she comments: “It reeked of a urinal. I moved it toward my mouth, but some force field repelled it, and I could not get it in. This was supposed to be the warm-up; I was glued to the bench. I secreted the egg in a napkin and put it in my pocket.”
I wish the author had a bit more to say about food and class, and about food and gender; gnarly food, like gnarly guitar solos, is an arena for macho posturing, a staging ground for omnivore bromance.
Anyone who writes about food in The New Yorker does so in the shadow of A. J. Liebling and Calvin Trillin. Ms. Goodyear may not be a trencherman (trencherwoman?) in their league, nor does her prose quite have their streaming ease. You get the sense that they’d warmly call her over, however, to their table.
Where are our appetites leading us? “After centuries of perfecting the ritual of ‘civilized’ dining, there is a furious backpedaling, a wilding,” Ms. Goodyear writes. We are becoming nerd-savages.
She quotes one big eater who sums up my conflicted avidity: “If this is the end of the world, give me a fork and a knife.”
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